5 Reasons Why Good Writers May Not Become Successful Bloggers

There are different types of blogs. There are photoblogs, video blogs, art blogs, and music blogs. But the most common blogs out there are publishing pieces of writings rather than focusing on publishing images, videos, art and music. That is why when a person possesses good writing skills, it is said that he or she has a big potential in becoming a successful blogger. Although this can be true as there are indeed prolific bloggers who are great writers by profession, this is not always happening. There are still many excellent writers or even experienced journalists, who experience failure in their attempt to dominate the blogging industry. So what’s wrong?

If you are an excellent writer and you want to leverage your writing skill for blogging, you’ve got to realize the following 5 reasons why good writers may not become successful bloggers.


1. They write for themselves, not for their audience

The number of traffic, visitors or readers of a blog is one of the most important factors that measure its success. A blog without visitors is like a business without customers. Of course, except when you just build it to be read by yourself or by a few private people. But that is not always the case. We create blogs to be read. We build blogs to attract audience. Thus, we do everything to attract people to read our blog posts, articles or stories. But convincing people to visit your blog is not easy as writing your masterpiece. We’ve got to ensure that our writings will be useful and valuable to our targeted audience.

There are many good writers who fail in blogging because they just want to showcase how good they are in writing. There are also writers who just write to express themselves instead of helping their audience. On the other hand, there are bloggers who are not so good in writing, but succeed in blogging because they are sharing posts that are useful and helpful to their readers.

To succeed in blogging, writers have to focus on the impact of their blog posts to their audience rather than the impact to themselves. They should write what people want. They should provide the content that answers people’s questions and solve their problems. Every writer or blogger should always remember that blogging is not only a practice of expressing our talent, but it is a practice of ensuring that our talent will be beneficial to our blog’s users.


2. They don’t focus on a certain topic or niche

The blogosphere is already a very crowded place. That is why bloggers should learn how to determine and target their market. They should know how to narrow their market and establish it to bring the right content to the right users.

Many writers fail because they don’t focus on writing the topics, in which they are expert. Some writers attempt to write on topics they don’t really know, thinking that they can cover it up with eloquent words and sentences with perfect grammars. But blogging is not just about bringing flowers that bring aroma to readers. Blogging is about bringing power to touch and change people’s lives. Hence, every writer who wants to succeed in blogging should learn how to combine their writing skill with something that they can do best.

Writers should think of a topic where they can be competitive and where they can stand out from the crowd. For example, excellent writers can blog about writing tips, where they are generally great at. Alternatively, they can hone their other special talent or expertise to start blogging on it.


3. They don’t write for search engine users

Visibility on the search engines, such as Google, Yahoo and Bing is vital to blogging success. Billions of people are using search engines to find the information they need. Hence, if you don’t know how to bring your blog on the search engine results page, your good content might just become like hidden treasures in the jungle which are still waiting to be discovered. Thus, every writer who wants to succeed in blogging should also learn how to do SEO or search engine optimization. SEO is the process of optimizing your site to rank higher in the search engine results page (SERP), and consequently drive traffic or visitors from that search engine. Check out the following simple and easy-to-understand SEO tips to get more traffic to your blog.


4. They don’t share their posts to social media users

We are already in the social media era. That is why every blogger must learn how to utilize social media for marketing or promoting their blogs on the Internet. Social media marketing should be a vital part of our online marketing campaign. And since social media like, Facebook, Twitter and Google+ involves creating good relationships in the online community, writers and bloggers have to learn how to develop good interpersonal or relational skills.

Many bloggers, even those who are talented writers, fail because there blog posts are not heard in the social media realm. There are social media plugins or buttons that we can put on our blog to encourage our visitors to share our pages on social media. For example, we can install different Facebook social plugins to encourage our visitors to share our blog posts to their friends through their wall or timeline. If you are using WordPress, you may install DiggDigg plugin to show various social media buttons on the bottom of your blog posts to let your visitors share your content to social sites.

Our blog posts and the blog itself should be visible on the social media, like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Linkedin, Youtube, StumbleUpon, Pinterest, and many other social media networking sites on the Internet. Furthermore, our blogs should also be visible in other relevant blogs since blogs are also considered social media. Thus, every blogger should extend their effort on creating pages or profiles on different social sites to strengthen their presence online. Moreover, they should also learn how to connect with other bloggers by visiting and leaving valuable comments on other blogs. Bloggers should also connect with other bloggers by joining online communities online, such as relevant Facebook groups and Google+ circles.


5. They don’t take the blogging profession seriously

Lastly, the main reason why some talented writers fail in blogging is because they don’t take this profession with full passion. Blogging is not only a one-step process. It involves a lot of steps to come up with a single successful blog post. Writing is only one of those steps. And when a writer doesn’t get out of his or her comfort zone (that is writing), he or she is likely to face failure. Writers and bloggers, to be successful, should at least take the following steps to increase their chance to achieving blogging success:

a. Topic research (keyword or search term analysis) – determine what people wants to know or read.
b. Writing quality content based on the topic researched – this goes your writing skills.
c. Choosing the right categories, tags or keywords – this goes your on-page search engine optimization techniques.
d. Optimizing content with images – photos and other rich media (videos, infographics, etc.,) add value to your blog posts.
e. Publishing – the step to launching your blog posts, articles or stories online.
f. Sharing to social media – the step where you share your content to various social media places, like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, et cetera.
g. Evaluation – the step where you track your blogging process to ensure that you are achieving your targets.


Final thoughts

Writers have already the edge over other aspiring bloggers. But if good writers won’t pay serious attention in their quest to blogging success, bloggers who are not even good writers can even dominate them. Have you heard of bloggers who became employers and bosses of writers? Well, there are a lot of them. I am not telling that the blogging profession is greater than writing or journalism profession. I am once a writer and an income dependent to a certain blogger before, writing finance articles for his blog. But I am glad that I decided to take blogging seriously. And now I already become the boss of my own. I hope that this story will encourage writers, who want to become bloggers, to take blogging to the next level.