Do you have a lucrative blog? Does your blog have the potential to be lucrative?

I know, those are some scary questions. Not all bloggers like to talk about money. But it’s time to get real! (What is a lucrative blog, anyway?)

Now that I’ve just had my first “blogiversary,” I can really look back at my own weaknesses and experiences as a blogger and examine my current efforts and tactics. (Is that something you’ve done yet?)

Note: This post was written for my last blog last winter but I think it’s still relevant to a lot of us.

I’m defining a lucrative blog as one that has the potential to earn me a “full time, livable” wage.  You know, something that keeps me above the poverty line.

But basically, I’m pretty sure that I have been sucking at blogging thus far.

No seriously. My blog hasn’t been lucrative. (Unless you call $500 or less monthly livable.) In fact, I’ve been really bad at blogging, but I’m okay with it. I’m new at it and I’m learning CONSTANTLY.  

But I have had all of these “a-ha” moments lately. In the time that I’ve spent away from my blog, I’ve realized a lot about what’s working and what isn’t.  Everything that I’ve done has been very experimental. I’ve shared a lot of my successes (mostly small) with you, but I also want to share my experiences that haven’t gone so well.

If you ever visited my first blog, you know that I was constantly changing the site.  I was always changing my mind, which then changed my logos, my headers, my menus, what I wrote about, and more.  

I tried a lot of different ways to monetize the blog, and I’ve written about a wide variety of things.

Actually, I should have titled this post, “How NOT to have a lucrative blog.” 🙂 But really, I’m okay with the fact that I’ve just been experimenting with things. I have learned a lot, and one of the biggest things that I’ve realized lately is that my old blog could have never been lucrative.

That sounds a bit downer – but I think that any professional bloggers would agree with me if they visited my old site.  Nothing on the blog had been done professionally, and in my personal opinion that’s pretty obvious. I’m actually entirely okay with that.

I didn’t start blogging to be rich, but I’d be lying if I said I don’t want to make money off of it somehow. (Can we just all be honest and raise our hands in agreement?) I want this blog to allow me to earn a living from home so that I can be a present parent and so that I can use my love for writing freely.  But here’s the problem: I had limited myself.

I’ve identified a few things that I think had been keeping my blog from “taking off” the way that I’d like them to.  I think that a lot of bloggers can probably relate if they look at their own blogs honestly.
 

After examining my own site and work, here are the 5 things that are keeping me from having a lucrative blog.

• The niche lacks virality.

  (That’s not a word according to my spellchecker, but I’m making it a word.) Posts about blogging just aren’t going to go viral, because they’re rarely (if ever) emotional or controversial.

• My audience was super limited.

  Even though I wanted to write about family and mom stuff originally, somehow I ended up writing about my journey as a new blogger.  Now I know that there are a lot of bloggers out there, but writing ONLY about blogging really limits my potential audience.

• I’m super inconsistent.  

  I kind of love that I can be inconsistent with blogging if I want to, but I have seen how it affects my blog growth in a big way.  In January of this year, I had over 68,000 page views on the blog. In February, I was away from my blog a lot and saw only about 12,000 page views. Totally my fault. But blogging is unforgiving of inconsistency.

• I only sometimes approach blogging like a business. 

  This kind of falls into the category of inconsistency. But the truth is that some days I treat my blog like my own little venting space, and other times I use it in order to chase financial freedom. My perspective and my goals change and I’m not always approaching things with a marketing perspective. This is hindering to my blog, too.

• I don’t always plan for success.

  My blog isn’t my livelihood.  It is definitely NOT my main source of income and it may or may not ever be.  But it is that exact attitude that keeps me from being successful.  I haven’t written down every little thing that I need to do to make myself successful.  I’ve done a lot of work behind the scenes, but I sometimes take short cuts and allow myself to be okay with failure.  I’m not relying on blogging to keep me afloat financially or in any other way, so I’m not always too concerned with action steps.

Do any of these sound like you as a blogger? 

You might never have a lucrative blog if you’re doing what I have been!

I have had so much time to contemplate and I’m ready to change all of these things, because of course I want to be successful as a blogger!

I’ve opened up my niche to lean a bit more into the “lifestyle” or “Mom blog” categories so that I can write about more things. I don’t want to limit myself (it gets hard to talk about blogging all the dang time.) This will alter my target audience quite a bit. I’m also planning on getting serious about blogging by making and keeping track of more goals (like I did in the beginning) and treating this thing like IT IS my livelihood.

We’ll see how it goes 🙂

What can you do to make having a lucrative blogging business possible?

Firstly, you can take a step back and identify what’s working and what isn’t.  

You can also be honest with yourself about your goals, motivation, and the actual steps you are taking to make your blog what you want it to be.

You can refocus by taking a break, you can adjust your niche, and get serious. Of course, these are all just suggestions and things that I have done. 🙂

I want to know all about your blogging journey. Are you struggling? Are you finding that any of these things are holding you back like they have been for me?

Let me know how your blogging adventure is going! Then be sure to follow me on Facebook–I’ll be sure to keep you posted on how making these changes have changed my own blog.