25 Common Blogging Problems & How to Overcome Them Easily

Blogging isn’t a challenge. It’s a set of multiple challenges and problems bloggers face at a different set of times. And not addressing these common blogging problems is why most bloggers fail. The journey is surely amusing, profitable, thrilling but never easy.

I am writing this post to help you put your journey to ease with overcoming some of these biggest blogging problems. I have asked people, researched in forums, spoke to my students and clients about their blogging challenges and common problems they faced. I will update this post regularly to address more challenges in future as I get asked.

So here we go!

1. Lack of motivation

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One of the main reasons behind the lack of motivation to write and maintain your blogging routine are wrong expectations. We presume big returns too fast. These returns may involve readers, comments, feedbacks, traffic and even money. When you don’t see your efforts converting into these returns, lack of motivation creeps in.

Another major reasons why bloggers fail because of lack of motivation to blog is the lack of clarity and the purpose of blogging.

Why do you actually want to blog? What can be one biggest drive to make you blog and wouldn’t make you quit easily?

Find that drive. If you’re clueless about that purpose, you’d face lack of motivation sooner or later.

How to stay motivated for blogging

Before you start blogging, do a self assessment of your purpose and expectations. Consult with a blogging coach, mentor or a veteran blogger to see if your first steps are right and realistic enough to keep you moving for some time until you start seeing some results. Even smaller rewards and milestones will keep you motivated for blogging.

More great reads on staying motivated

30 Blogging Motivation Tactics by Heidi Cohen

10 tips to stay motivated by Scott Paley

2. How to finish a thought. It doesn’t seem to end.

Unless you’re a blogger for hire who would never face any challenge finishing a limited wordcount gig she is paid for, you’d always be trapped in “still making it a little better”. Such bloggers are usually trapped in perfection and may have several drafts lying unattended. Interestingly, most of these drafts are already good and ready to be published.

Here are few tips to put an end to your wandering thoughts and post.

1. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Done is better than perfect. Finish it with a hard push to your mind.
2. The moment you feel it’s becoming too wordy, put an end. When you yourself feeling clueless, think of your readers.
3. If still helpless, give it a head and start another post with Part II
4. End with a quote, be it yours or someone else’s. Let it be.
5. End with a question. They act when they are told. You get when you ask. Simple!

3. Not being able to stick to my plan

We are not able to do as we planned in two situations.

(a) We had set unrealistic goals out of over-excitement

(b) The goals are not motivating and of high priority enough

There can be several other reasons of not sticking to your blogging routine but your will-power can beat most of those common blogging problems and reasons.

How to maintain your blogging consistency

Start with small goals.

For example, plan to do one blogpost a week and commit to publishing no matter what. Fix 30 minutes every day to write. Whether you write content for this planned post or you write other thoughts and even if you feel blank, spend these 30 minutes every day, thinking about your blog. Make it a habit.

This is what happens when even if you happen to sit idle writing nothing but keeping a blank screen or notepad – On the 4th or 5th day, you’d scribble something. You’re training your mind that you’re serious and blogging has taken a higher priority and time.

Pick up a blogging topic/subject you know well and your audience is always willing to hear about. Attach a readership goal to it. A basic keyword research and the search volume will motivate you to write it faster and better. It will be easier for you to pen down your best blogging ideas and thoughts on such topic. The More original you write, the more confident you would get.

4. Coming up with new blog post ideas

This is one of the most common yet easiest to crack blogging challenges. This one is mostly faced by new bloggers. They are looking for ultra-amazing post ideas to impress their audience. Whereas, the key lies elsewhere.

The best blogpost ideas are the most common and prevalent pains and problems of your chosen niche. Interestingly enough, most of the bloggers underestimate these ideas as potential blogpost topics.

How to think of new unique blog post ideas

  1. Begin with a FAQ of your industry. Turn them into short or long blogposts whichever is better.  Check this Blogging Questions and FAQ I created.
  2. Look into Quora, Reddit and Buzzsumo for the latest questions and posts ideas in your niche
  3. Refer to your Google search analytics and come up with new ideas from the queries that are bringing people to your site.

More great reads on finding new blog post ideas

How to get 15+ new ideas every week by Alex Turnbull

24 untapped ways to find new blogpost ideas by Vanchito Tampon

5. Coming up with the original content

This blogging challenge appears similar to #3 but it is more of mental block than a blogging problem. We all want to write original content that has never been written or seen. It’s generally not possible for every blogging niche. Just because these ideas seem worn out or written already by many, many bloggers, you lose interest from writing.

Additionally, you’re either referring to textually original content or contextually unique. The only original content are your own thoughts and not all of them may be useful to your readers. Your readers would prefer to read more meaningful, useful and latest information instead of original stuff they have never heard of unless it’s way too amusing and entertaining.

You can make the content textually unique by presenting in your voice and unique style with additional valuable information and personal life experience.

You can’t reinvent the wheel and neither you have to.

What to do when you can’t think of original blogpost ideas & content

You don’t always have to come up with 100% original ideas or content. Write opinion posts instead. They are equally original since your thoughts, experience and inputs will be completely unique and yours. Moreover, readers look forward to reading such opinion posts since they give a different perspective to an idea.

6. Blogging every day

Some of the news blogs and review blogs work well with daily blogging. It’s a serious challenge to publish a blog everyday since it doesn’t just involve writing but publishing it properly and initiating to promotion as well. The whole process makes your daily blogging effective.

How to address this

You either got to be an avid writer to blog everyday or hire a team of bloggers to translate your ideas into posts. Whichever you choose, starting with a topics calender and scheduler helps. Create a list of 30 topics along with keyword research done. I call it a blogging ideas bank. This ideas bank will help you pick and write or assign topics to your writers. When you have an idea ready, sitting and writing becomes easier.

Secondly, fixing a time to daily blogging helps. No matter what, write something in that hour. Once you have the content written, publishing the same wouldn’t be a hassle.

More great reads in developing daily writing habit

How to blog consistently by Niklas Goeke

How Seth Godin manages to write everyday by Dave Gerhardt

7. Should I write what I love or what people would love

You want to stay outspoken. That’s the reason you chose to blog. You want to express yourself. You want to be heard. The challenge is – why people would like to read you? Should you write what they want see or what you want to say. This is one of the most frequent questions I receive in my blogging coaching sessions.

How to address this:

People would be interested in what you say for two reasons. Either you say something different or say the same general things differently. You’re heard when you seem to make a difference.

If your original thoughts are making even slight difference in your readers’ life, you’d be read and they will come back. This difference can be some value, shaking their mindsets and beliefs, provoking their thoughts and opinions – anything that brings a point of common interest between you and your reader.

Consider reading – 10 Blogging Challanges Bloggers Face & How to tackle Them

8. Getting high quality traffic

Getting traffic is a challenge but getting high quality traffic that converts is a twice big challenge. Many of the blogs end of failing because they manage to receive traffic but fail to build up a high quality traffic that converts into money.

How to address this

High quality traffic looks for highest quality information resource. A resource that provides accurate, innovative and well researched content consistently and in the simplest possible manner. Be selective about the topics. Stay focused on your niche and what your targeted audience is looking for.

More great reads on getting high quality blog traffic

How to get over 1 million people on your blog within 1 week by Ramit 

25 Tips to increase blog traffic

How to increase your blog traffic by 206% by Neil Patel

9. How to get more comments

Getting comments is one of the most lucrative rewards for your blog and it is the most challenging aspect at the same time. First, understand that your post worth and quality is not determined by the number of comments. Your readers may read, may not comment and still love your post for the value they have received.

However, here is what you can do to encourage readers leave comments.

Jon Morrow shares a 3 part formula for more comments
Traffic + Engagement + Emotion = Bunches of Comments

  1. To expect a decent number of comments, your blog needs to receive a good traffic.
  2. To have people share their opinion, you have to write the way they read most or whole of your post. Hold their attention.
  3. To make commenting inevitable for readers, you have to be even with them at emotional level. Excitement, sadness, anger or whatever it is, it has got to be strong enough to make them write back.

Lastly, they won’t comment until you ask. Never publish a blogpost without call to action at the end… and consider adding subtle calls to action in between the posts.

10. How to get people’s response to posts on social media

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While question number 9 answers most of it, what you would need additionally to get more response to your posts on social media is

  1. The number of fans and friends who may find your posts relevant and of their use. More such readers, higher will be the response.
  2. Your description and call to action to present your blogpost. A curious and short description showing at least one of the best reasons to read the post encourages readers to click.
  3. Timing of your posting on social networks
  4. Use of right hashtags

11. Lack of time

Every blogger has same amount of time. Just be disciplined to have the following things and you’d never face the time challenge

  1. Own a blogging bank where you have all your blogpost ideas saved and briefed to be written as you get first free moments
  2. Make writing and blogging your priority. If it’s not one of your most important routine tasks, you would never want to spare time for this. For get the last of time challenge.
  3. Use a timer when you write and finish something. It’s easier to club several several short and make a big one then holding on one big perfect post and never be able to finish it. It only leads to disappointment and lack of motivation.
  4. You face time challenge when you think you need a lot of time for something. Build your blogpost templates to give it an easier and faster feel to finish. It makes a difference.
  5. Create a reasonable schedule and stick to it. Start with small that you keep up.
  6. Consider creating a trigger

12. How to beat the competition when I have just started

Competition has a acquired a good loyal audience but not all of it. You can still attract a good share of this audience with content that has newness and originality.

Secondly, the ultimate decision makers to choose a blog are your readers and viewers. And they always look for new blogs, new entrants, new information and even new style.

Just because there are several other contenders already, you can’t give up even before starting.

13. How to find a profitable niche

Your blogging success and failure depends upon your niche and focus. You would have two options for your blog

  • You write yourself
  • You get content written

If you belong to the first option, picking up a niche with competency and your interest can take you far without much struggle. You would be more independent of what to write and the accuracy of your content. Remember that, anything in blogging can make money as long as people are looking for that information. All you need to do is to offer that information better than others and implement the monetary tools to cash upon the audience.

Read 50 most successful blog in every imaginable niche

If you belong to the second niche, finding a niche with bigger audience and more searches is profitable. Niches such as a health, technology, news, reviews etc. have been and will always be in trends. This option can be extremely challenging and slow initially because of competition but you can crack through it if you manage to come up with brightest ideas and aggressive promotions to delight your readers.

More great reads on finding a profitable blog niche

Niche keyword research at CopyBlogger
Blogging niche research

How to choose a blogging niche

Detailed guide on finding a blog niche (and 100+ examples)

14. How to post perfect blogs

Writing perfect posts is half job done. The next half is publishing these great posts properly following all posting and SEO rules that makes it more readable for users, searchable in search engines and shareable on social networks.

Here are few minimal steps to post perfect blogs

  1. Proofread and edit your post one last time
  2. Use “post from ” option to remove html code from word or any other writing tool
  3. Break the post in short paragraphs of no more than 4 lines or 5 sentences
  4. Assign H2 to your subheadings and prefer having 2-3 subheadings for every 500 words
  5. Highlight the most striking and shocking phrases in text block, “TweetThis” plugin or block quotes.
  6. Interlink 2-3 of your old and related posts using appropriate keyword anchor text
  7. Link to 2-3 external and popular posts from other reputed blogs and bloggers related to the topic
  8. Add an unusually attractive and relevant featured picture. Write your post title or help text using Canva.com. Even consider adding your logo somewhere in the picture.
  9. Write a powerful call to action at the end that will encourage readers to leave comments, write their experience, share on their social networks or even join one of your upcoming webinars. Without this step, your awesomest post will go useless.
  10. Review your blog introductory paragraph. It should hold readers’ attention, short, look highly relevant to what they came looking for and easy enough to walk them through rest of the post.
  11. Add any funny or witty GIFs if you can find 
  12. Write a simple, keyword oriented and reasons-rich meta description to prompt readers from search engines and click your post. 
  13. Review everything again with this checklist and hit Publish button or schedule it for later publishing date.

Your perfect post is out to the readers!

15. How do I make my blog look great

A blog’s job is primarily to provide great content and information to its readers. They come for content they are looking for. Design is secondary. So focusing on a great blog instead of great looking blog delivers better results.

A simple looking theme or template can serve well to create a great looking blog. Just ensure you have every element of your blog placed right. A great blog will have all the must have pages to refer to in case the readers want to know more about the blog or blogger, calls to actions at right places, a functional contact page, responsive/mobile-friendly theme, subtle colors that help the main content stand out, catchy and easy to remember name and logo to start with.

Ultimately, remember that your content quality and presentation will make your blog look great, not just design.

16. How to find great data for your blogposts

Data makes a post rich when it is latest. The best way to find data is to create it. You can conduct surveys, quizzes and polls. I love Twitter and Facebook polls to generate data at a smaller level.

For a larger scale data, there are sites that publish such latest data either for free for a minimal paid subscription at one-time fee. For example, digital marketing (and other industries) statistics are published at Statista.

Niche Forums are another brilliant ways to ask people questions and help regarding data. You will always end up finding more than you required.

Using keyword combinations such as “Latest+stats+industry+Year” can help you dig some decent data.

17. How to find great topics

Topics are in the air. If you’re really serious about blogging and keep your ear and eye open, you can find 100 topics every day around you. Here is how

  1. Think of your niche and list down all the problems that you yourself are facing
  2. Ask your friends at least one issue related to your niche. Be specific in your ask to help them share one challenge. Use that challenge as a blogpost topic. You will have a huge list of topics this way
  3. Go to quora.com and search with a few common and some uncommon keywords. Pick up the topics and see if you can come up with some great posts on these topics
  4. Search with keywords on Reddit.com, BuzzSumo.com, Rebelmouse, Scoop.it and Digg. These are some of the most popular content curation and bookmarking sites to refer good post ideas. These will give you prompts to think of related topics.
  5. When mind is totally blocked, use prompt blog post topic generators – Hubspot and Portent blog topics idea generator

18. How to stay disciplined to blog regularly

Question number 3 answers this challenge. To stay disciplined with blogging, it must connect to one of your biggest life goals you can’t be without. It must be one of your highest priorities to make a big difference in your professional or personal life. Unless it’s consequence is scary enough, you wouldn’t be motivated to stay disciplined with blogging regularly.

19. How to make money from blogging

stoke

Making money from blogging is a much hyped concept. True that some bloggers are making 6-7 figures income per month. True that a lot of them own their time and still make money in bed. However, the way bloggers are born everyday or we see born bloggers around, it sounds like a money minting profession.

Realty check – it’s not as easy as it looks. It’s neither as glamourous as the bloggers show up on Facebook and Instagram. That’s the post-money effect. It’s not a short cut to be a millionaire on vacation. Money from blogging has its own long journey but you can make it fun and blast with your own attitude.

Here are the ways you can make money blogging.

  • Affiliate marketing
  • Direct advertising
  • Selling banners and ad spots
  • Sponsored posts and reviews
  • Adsense and similar ad programs like infolinks, chitika etc
  • Consulting an coaching services

Money making from blogs comes with five steps

  1. Create content that pulls targetd traffic – from every possible place
  2. Convert this trafic into regular readers and subscribers
  3. Build trust, credibility and authority among your subscribers with publishing higher quality content
  4. Suggest, recommend and sell products to your lists with email marketing
  5. Create such multiple virtual assets and repeat

What will actually push sales and money to you

  • Start with affiliate marketing
  • Don’t quit even if your initial posts seem to be failing. Use them as base to improve.
  • Recommnd products and services you have either used yourself or highly trusted ones
  • Don’t hesitate to recommend high priced products as long as they have an equally high promise and results
  • Take help from free tutorials, courses and even paid coaching
  • Have patience. It takes time to make millions from blogging and it is POSSIBLE

More great reads in making money with blogging

How to make over a million by blogging by Jon Morrow

How to make money by blogging by Jessica Knapp

How to make money by blogging – Problogger

How to make money with blogging by Amy Lynn Andrews

20. How to I reach a larger audience

You can reach a larger audience by 1. targeting a subject or keywords with huge search and 2. by marketing it aggressively using maximum ways and channels of promotion.

  1. Optimize every post with most relevant and researched keywords to make your post searchable in search engines.
  2. Once you publish, use all or most of these 15 ways to promote your post.
  3. Your blogging effort will bring maximum returns if you spend 30% of your time in creating brilliant content and 70% of your time, money and effort in promoting the same.
  4. Serving newer information to your loyal readers helps making your audience larger when they love to recommend and share your posts on their networks.

21. What should be my first blog topic?

First blog post comes with much pressure and more expectations from yourself than any your prospective readers.

When it comes to the topic, for a personal blog, you can choose from the topics such as “X things you can expect from my blog over an year”, “This life changing insight made me start the blog”, What really kicked me to begin blogging”, “X reasons you would hate my blog”. Anything personal that will make people curious.

For a niche blog focused purely at money making, posts like “X answers my blog will target about +keyword/industry”

Whichever type of blog you’re starting, here are some handy tips to keep in mind for the first near perfect post.

  1.  Remember your target audience with every word & know that they’re picky readers
  2.  Write only latest information your readers are looking for
  3.  Write as much as you feel like. Pour your thoughts, feeling and heart. But be brutal when you edit it. Edit it twice, thrice until it’s an absolute delight to you and the readers.
  4.  Ensure that you follow the publishing checklist before you hit Publish.

22. How to create buzz from a topic that’s being written already

Give an irresistible title and provoking meta details. They appear both on social networks and search engines. Write an equally thought-provoking description when you share it on various social networks.

Add humour to the read.

To add, provide more and latest information that’s not available on the existing blogs. Keep it shorter than other blogs.

You can create a buzz with this post using as many marketing channels and tactics as possible. Be it asking your friends to share it if they find it useful or boosting the post on facebook and twitter, mentioning some good names in the posts as references and asking them to share on their social networks (they do), use email marketing and more.

Great marketing brings in the buzz even for the most boring topics. Focus on that when you’re confident about the content quality inside.

23. How to stand out with a topic when you’re not an expert at it

You can’t beat the experts. So bring the experts on board when you’re not one. Approach the industry experts with one brilliant question and ask for their short answer or opinion. Feature them and your post will stand out with multiple experts at the same time. More interestingly, they would even help you with marketing this post by sharing on their social networks.

24. How to meeting the rising expectations of your audience

Even before you think of your audience’s expectation, you need to rise above your own standards after every good post. These are some suggestions on how you can stay at excellence with every new post.

1. Review your post engagement on blog and social networks.
2. Review the views vs. engagement
3. Review how well it has managed to ranked in search engines
4. Review if it could make people question you or leave comments
5. How did you feel contented if you read your own post after few days?
6. Search similar topics and compare your own post. Edit and update if required for more value.
7. Stick to a posting frequency and schedule. Even if it once a month, stick to it.
8. Stay consistent with your voice, tone and style except a few modulation to justify the subject. They are coming because of your persona.
9. Research and be serious about your homework before you’re confronting your audience with your expressions and opinions
10. Enjoy and have fun in what you’re saying. People fall in with the confidence even if the opinions are ugly. It’s a different kind of amusement
11. If something doesn’t seem to work, change it immediately.
12. Readers feel more enthusiastic seeing other readers’ presence. Get some action done on your blog.

25. Start and write the introduction

A powerful introduction works like a hook and it works just once. If you lost the reader, you just lost her. Here are 5 easiest ways to start your post

1. Begin with an interesting/unbelievable and uncommon fact.
2. Consider giving an idea of the climax of this post even disclosing the whole surprise
3. Ask a question
4. Begin with provoking (Be careful about this one)
5. Start with your own experience or story (Don’t stretch it)

More great reads on writing great blog post introductions

How to write strong blog introductions – Hubspot
Ultimate guide to writing great post introductions by Neil Patel

10 Failproof Blogpost Introduction Ideas by Sunita Biddu

More blogging challenges?

Share them in comments and we will address in the post with an update. If you liked this post, please pass it on to your friends and networks to help more.

Cheers!

1 thought on “25 Common Blogging Problems & How to Overcome Them Easily”

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