15 Mindset Hacks to Avoid Blogging Failure

You are worried, aren’t you? Worried that you’re wasting your time, worried that your blog won’t take off. Even though you studied and worked hard, you are not seeing the results you were hoping for.

The worst part? You have no clue why this is happening. After all, you did many of the things that experts were preaching. What’s the matter then?

Let me tell you a secret…

Knowing the strategy alone isn’t enough to succeed. To avoid blogging failures you have to adopt the right mindset. A mindset that will empower your strategies, not harm them.

Related: Blogging for Dummies (2019 Edition)

Here are 15 mindset hacks that will supercharge both you and your blog – thus helping you grow a successful blog.

1. Find Your Why

First of all, you have to find your why. Why are you trying to build a successful blog? Money? Fame? To leave a job you hate? To give your family a better future? Whatever it is, visualize it. Imagine vividly the impact that having a successful blog will have on your life.

This will give you motivation – and will help you keep going in spite of difficulties.

2. Commit Yourself

Decide that you’ll succeed, no matter what. Decide that you won’t take failure as an option. When you do this, the focus of your mind will totally shift: instead of thinking about what could go wrong, you’ll focus on what to do to succeed. When others won’t see a way out of a problem, you’ll find solutions.

3. Lay the Brick

If you think about building a house, you feel overwhelmed. It is so complex, so difficult and so scary. What happens, instead, if you just want to lay brick? That’s easy, you can do it – in less than 5 minutes.

It’s the same when it comes to blogging. If you look at the whole picture, you’ll feel overwhelmed: you have to write great content, promote your production, build an email list, create a sales funnel, etc…

It’s too much!

But if you focus on a single task, it’s easy. Can you write 200 words per day?  You bet! From this perspective, blogging doesn’t seem so hard, right? 

4. Keep Going

Look at this:

It’s the traffic chart for one of my blogs. It’s an impressive growth, isn’t it? I want to direct your attention to the beginning of the chart. Do you notice anything interesting? It’s flat.

It is not flat because I was doing something wrong – I kept doing the same thing for the entire time frame of the chart. It is flat because that’s how things go when you grow organically (it’s a compound growth).

At first, your traffic growth is so small that you won’t even notice it… but as time goes on, it starts to snowball – the end result is a massive traffic increase. You have to go through the “flat phase” to witness the big results after. Don’t give away in that phase.

5. First Things First

How are you spending your time when it comes to blogging? Let me clarify an important concept: being busy is different than being productive. In other words, you don’t want to waste your time on small tasks that won’t impact on your blog – and on your blogging success chance.

On the other hand, you want to spend as much time as you can on your most important tasks – the ones that have the biggest impact on your results. For example, if you need to convert your blog visitors into email subscribers, focus on creating an enticing lead magnet – don’t spend hours on Twitter.

6. There’s No Failure

There’s no failure, just feedback.

When you think about it, you realize that a failure is just a feedback: it tells you that what you were doing doesn’t work. From this point of view, each failure is an important lesson – one that gets you closer to your goals.

Actually, when you think about failures as feedbacks, you end up desiring to fail! The faster you fail, the faster you learn. And the faster you learn, the faster you succeed.

7. Investing Is Necessary

Lots of people think of blogging as a way to earn money for free… that couldn’t be farther from the truth! If you want to make money blogging, you have to think about it as a business. Investing is necessary for business. 

Be it buying a useful plugin, getting a design on Fiverr or hiring an expert – there will be times when you won’t be able to grow your blog without investing. The good news is that good investments repay themselves.

Here’s an example… Years ago I couldn’t find a way to further grow my old blog. So I looked for someone who could tell me how to do it… and then I found him! He was asking $3,000 for a 1-day consultation – a huge price for me. I reflected for a while and then I decided to risk. It was necessary to grow my business. We did the 1-day consultation and then I immediately started following the expert’s advice. About three months later the investment repaid itself and my business was thriving as never before.

8. Learn, learn, learn

We are in a world where a small difference in skills leads to a huge difference in income. For example, do you know what’s the scoring average difference between Tiger Woods and many other world-class golf players? It’s about 1%. Yet, Tiger Woods earns AT LEAST twice as much as them.

You want to improve your skills so that you can be (and stay) ahead of the competition. Make learning in your field a habit. Luckily, nowadays, you have countless ways to learn – other than a huge amount of useful books, there’s plenty of online courses, interesting blog posts and awesome podcasts.

9. Don’t Be a Jack of All Trades

Maybe you heard somewhere the advice “be everywhere”. It’s ok… if you have a team. But when you are alone, don’t make this mistake. You don’t want to find yourself managing YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, your blog, etc…

You don’t want to be a jack of all trades. You want to be great at a few things – remember the previous point. When you need to do something that is not relevant to your crucial skills improvement, simply outsource.

10. It’s Not About You

Having a blog doesn’t mean talking about the stuff that you like. It means talking about what the market likes. Luckily, you can find an overlap between the two and talk about what both you and the market like. 

But never forget the importance of the market. Give the market what it wants and you’ll get what you want in return.

11. Care About Your Audience

Your audience is very important, treat it well. Sure, you want to respond to comments on your blog and thank people for sharing your content. But that’s just the basis…

You want to listen to your audience – if you see an interesting question in the comments, write a blog post to answer it. Sometimes you want to share a reader’s post – this will me him/her feel special. Also, speak in your audience’s language, so that you’ll make it easy for them to understand you. The point is: do your best to bond with your audience.

12. There’s No Self-Made Blogger

There is this myth of the self-made man that is… well, a myth. Especially in the blogosphere.

How can you be self-made in a world where, to succeed, you need to get:

• links (by others)
• shares (by others)
• interview request (by others)
• guest post opportunities (by others)
• etc. (by others)

It’s impossible.

13. Think Outside the Box

Understand that to reach blogging success you need to work (a lot) with others and for others.

You can decide to be the same as many other bloggers or… be different. Imitating others is easy, but it brings little rewards. Being different is hard, but has huge benefits.

If you seriously want your blog to succeed, try to be different. Be creative. Sure, you’ll have to brainstorm ideas and think a lot… but it’s totally doable. By the way, don’t think that you have to reinvent the wheel: most of the times, the slightest creative difference will make a big impact.

14. Quitting Is the Only Way to Fail

There is only one way to fail: quitting. If you keep going, soon or later you’ll find a way to succeed. It’s a matter of fact: any time you fail, you learn; keep going long enough and you’ll have learned so much that you’ll be bound to succeed.

15. Prove Them Wrong

Every time you try to do something outside the norm, people will tell you that you can’t do that. Blogging is no exception. Your friends, your family, your colleagues may tell you that blogging is a stupid idea and a waste of time.

I had to verbally fight with my mother till she saw me on national television – she started accepting this “thing” that I was doing. I had to start earning more than my father to gain my family’s respect for my work.

So, be prepared: people will say that you can’t do it. Do you know what’s the best part? Realize your goals to prove them wrong.

Final Words

Now, you have a renewed knowledge – the knowledge to avoid blogging failure and make your blog thrive instead.

Imagine the difference that this new mindset can have on both you and your blog. It feels good, doesn’t it? Take action, now. Don’t waste your time.

As the very first step, leave a comment talking about the points that you liked the most about this post and how they helped you. This will consolidate the mindset hacks in your brain.

Andrew Morrison is a digital marketing strategist who helps bloggers, marketers, and entrepreneurs turn their websites into fine-tuned businesses. He has been an online business owner since 2011, but he didn’t get to work on a tropical beach yet because his girlfriend loves winter! Follow his blog for practical digital marketing tips.null