Wednesday, January 14, 2015

The Top 9 Reasons Blogs are a Stupid Idea

We all can relate to that familiar feeling...the one where you think your blog is doing well and you are contemplating just quitting your job and diving head first into the world of blogging full time. We dream of vacations and working from a beach somewhere in the Carribean but let's take a moment here to go over the list of reasons why you shouldn't quit your job just yet.  Don't worry you can thank me later when you are enjoying your free time off instead of working on a pipedream that is nothing but smoke in mirrors.

9 Reasons Blogs are a Stupid Idea
9 Reasons Blogs are a Stupid Idea (Vacation? Ha yea right!)
Photos By:
Creative Commons Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic License   by  faungg's photo 

#9 Your Blog Stinks 

Well I hate to put it to you that way, but the truth is your blog probably stinks. You may have some pages indexed in Google, and heck you may even have some #1 spots for a series of well-thought out keywords, but the real truth of the matter is that you don't have a fraction of the traffic you would need to get a serious payday going. So let's read on and see what other reasons there are to be very careful about quitting your day job.

 #8 You Can't Afford to Lose the Money

You can't afford to lose the money that your job provides you in order to  work on your blog full time.  It's hard to admit this.  If you don't have a large safety net of money saved up to support yourself for 6-12 months while your blog gets rolling, you could find yourself out on the street with no where to hang your hat.  Girlfriends and wives will be understanding and even excited to a point, but once they realize that your adSense account has made exactly $0.03 over the past month, they will change their song on you rapidly. Girlfriends and wives will become x-girlfriends and x-wives so fast that you head will spin right off your shoulders if you aren't careful.

#7 You Don't Have a Product

This is a huge factor that people often overlook when starting a blog. There comes a point where you will realize that you have no products! Some people do monetize their sites strictly with PPC-advertising or by placing banners for specific businesses, but most of your real income will come from a product that you have created.  If the whole purpose of your website is to gather email addresses, that's fantastic, because it will offer you a highly targeted list of people to sell your products to. However gaining that list is only half of the battle. Once you have the list you need to open up the doors and use that list to sell a product you have created. That's where the real money is.

#6 You Aren't a "Jack of all Trades"

If blogging, hosting a podcast, running an e-commerce website, or walking your dog all at the same time doesn't sound appealing to you then you should be aware that getting started in this business requires you to put up with all the job requirements  that exist for you to even come close to having success with this business model. It's going to involve you doing so many different things at the same time, that you are going to really want to throw in the towel at any given moment.  This is not a passive job, though certain internet guru's would like you to believe it is.



#5 You Don't Want to Work REALLY , REALLY hard. 

Imagine, if you will, a place where you work yourself from sun up to sun down, and usually way past that as well, late into the night, burning the midnight oil. You have to be prepared for some really long working days and nights where you will feel like you have accomplished absolutely nothing and you will wonder on a regular basis if all this hard work is going to pay off.  Just because one set of circumstances paid off for someone else, don't mean that they didn't spend thousands of hours working on something they would like you to believe they did in 10 minutes.


Pat Flynn Amy Porterfield Wes Schaeffer by The Sales Whisperer, on Flickr
Photos By:
Creative Commons Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License   by  The Sales Whisperer 
 

#4 Passive Income and Pat Flynn Are Real

If you think Pat Flynn and his blogs are real life success stories, that you are perfectly capable of obtaining, prepare to be ridiculously disappointed when you finally find out that more than half of the information on Pat Flynn has up on his website is outdated. Many of those strategies and tips simply don't work anymore. Next, you are going to put together an exact match domain name, get penalized, then you will try to back link a bunch of 2.0 sites, and get penalized yet again, and then when you are morally crushed and emotionally bankrupt you reach out to Pat for help, he's going to pull a "Cake - Never There" on you....

#3 You Aren't Prepared to Wait up to Three Months

Just to see where you initially stand.  It's called the Google Sandbox, and since NO ONE seems to explain this part in any of the online help with "niche marketing" or "WordPress" starter sites I will attempt to explain this phenomenon myself. Google will take up to 3 months just to index your site. No one cares about your site, especially Google. If you do get lucky and your site gets crawled, your site, you will then be shocked at where you land in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Position) for a specific keyword.  No one is going to tell you that you have to work constantly if you plan to maintain that rank. All this "set it and forget it" nonsense is exactly that, nonsense.

#2 You are Impatient

Your going to have to wait a long while to get into the Google results, if you make it there at all.  The worst thing about it is that your site is going to be sand-boxed and delayed for several weeks to months, so when you do see your site move up, your going to have a heck of a time trying to isolate which actions made you climb the ranks. It doesn't tell you what actions benefited you and which ones didn't so you are left playing a reactionary "guessing" game.


#1 You are Flat Broke

and you are trying to promote and market your site completely by yourself using free tools. - This is a major no-no and the odds of you hitting all the things you need to get your site to #1 in Google just isn't a realistic goal for someone who is just starting out in this business.  You want to know the absolute fail-safe way to get to #1 in record time?  I will tell you...it's very simple.

Create an adWords account, you fund it, and you pay a little money to get some clicks, and viola, you are on the first page of Google. Stop worrying about organic search results, and worry about creating a real landing page that will convert when people that are specifically selected to come to your site. You don't need organic search results. You need a page that you can convert users to sales and you will stop giving yourself the biggest headache / heartache known to man.


For more information read my blog here at the blogspot, or you can check out fertilizernumbers.net or the one and only dog biscuit blog,  or contact me via email at voicesmicro@gmail.com.  Put something catchy in the subject line, and let's get something started!

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