The main reasons why most blogs fail.

 Part 3: The main reason why most blogs fail. Like I just said, there's a lot of hypearound content marketing these days. Every online business wants to have a successful blog, but the problem is, most companies haveabsolutely no clue how to run a blog. And this is why it is so common that you stumbleupon a company blog that is regularly updated with new articles every single month. But the number of comments and shares on thesearticles are in single digits at best. Which means that no one is actually readingthese articles. Which means that these articles aren't bringingnew customers.

 Which means that all the work invested inthese articles is wasted. And I've totally been there. Just a few years ago I had absolutely no cluehow to run a successful blog. So I just copied what other successful bloggerswere doing and tried to follow their advice. Other bloggers said that I should publish more oftenin order to get more traffic, so I published every day; They said list posts are the best,so I published list posts; Then everyone started writing expert roundupsand I followed; Then they said that posting your content to nichecommunities was a key to success, so let's do it; Then they said that the actual key to successis to regularly submit your content to Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and every other socialnetwork there is, no problem; I was doing everything that "guru" bloggerswere teaching. 

And I did indeed see some results. But did I get traction with my blog? No, I didn't. Actually, each individual tactic worked like a charm. My listicles generated quite a buzz on social media; My detailed guides got tons of engagementin comments; My guest articles were published at the mostpopular blogs in my niche. But all of that didn't translate into any traction withthe blogs that I was trying to grow at that time. The traffic was plateauing, the sales weren't coming in. I even purchased a bunch of quite expensiveblogging courses, thinking that I was missing something important that bloggers wereunwilling to share for free. And these courses were quite good actually,they taught me some new exciting strategies. But they didn't help me to get that tractionthat I was looking for. 

I was getting better and better in executingdifferent content marketing tactics, but I couldn't figure out how all these tactics come togetherinto a single strategy that would grow my blog and drive customers to our business. This is how traffic to every article thatI published on my blog looked like: Shortly after publishing an article you seethe so-called "spike of hope." This spike happens because you sendthis new article to your email list and share it with your Twitter followers. You may also post this article on Reddit andshare it with a bunch of relevant communities on Facebook or Slack. Other than that, you may send a bunch of outreach emails to famous people in your industry so that they would share your article with their audience. 

And if your article is truly worthy, the word of mouthwill multiply the outcome of all your efforts. So at times that "spike of hope" might get ratherbig, making you feel happy and accomplished. But then all this traffic quickly fades tonothing as soon as you pull the plug on your content promotion machine. And what you get as a result is the so-called"flatline of nope." By the way, the credit for these funny termsgoes to Rand Fishkin. So if you rely on such spikes of hope, here'show the total traffic to your blog will look like: As long as you invest your time and effort intopublishing new articles and promoting them in every way you can, your traffic seems to be growing. This is where the popular "you should publishnew content regularly" advice comes from. But as soon as you stop publishing new content,the results that you have achieved so far will start fading almost instantly. But it shouldn't be this way. Because this is not how growth looks like. 

I can only call this kind of performance "survival." Here's something very important that I wantyou to take away from this first lesson: If your content marketing efforts don'tadd up over time, you're doing it wrong. So here is how this graph should look, ifyou make your efforts add up. As you can see, the traffic to each newlypublished article doesn't fade to nothing. Even the opposite, it slowly grows over time,till it reaches a certain point. This way every single article that you publishadds up to the total traffic of your blog. So even if you stop publishing new articlesfor a while, all your progress won't immediately fade to nothing. It will stay exactly where you left it. Or maybe even grow a bit on it's own. This is called "the compound effect ofcontent marketing." It may sound super-simple, and in fact it is,but somehow I was overlooking that simple principle for quite a few years. And I see way too many bloggers overlooking it today. This is why I wanted to make sure that youunderstand this general concept, before we go deep into the actual blogging tactics and strategies. 

Because all of them will be focused on drivingpassive consistent traffic to every article that you have on your blog. As opposed to teaching you how to get an immediatespike of traffic to your newly published article, which will soon fade to nothing. So let's go back to the Ahrefs Blog, whichI will often use as an example for many tactics and strategies in this course. Two years ago, when I joined the team,they were publishing 2-3 articles per week, and the traffic didn't show any signs of growth. It was basically a flatline despite all the effort. Today we publish 2-3 new articles per month and our traffic is growing steadilyand consistently, as you can tell. But most importantly, our blog is driving thousandsof customers to our platform every single month, and the more we grow our blog traffic,the more customers we get from it. 

But we'll talk more about customer acquisitionwith content later in this course. For now I just want to stress on the importanceof making every article that you publish bring you consistent traffic every single month. Because growth happens when the trafficto your articles doesn't fade over time. Here's an example of such an article fromthe Ahrefs Blog. This article was published back in 2016, andas you can see from our Google Analytics, there was a "spike of hope" right after publishing,but then the traffic didn't fade to nothing. It was actually growing slowly from month to month. And near the end you can see that we havere-launched this article and generated an even bigger "spike of hope."

 But relaunching is something, that I'm goingto cover later in this course. So the main strategy behind growing Ahrefsblog from 15,000 to 150,000 visitors per month, is in making every single article we publishperform exactly like this one. Passive consistent traffic that doesn'tfade over time is the key. Again, it may sound super simple and superobvious, but somehow most people only focus on making their spike of hope bigger and wonderwhy their traffic isn't growing over time despite all the hard work. So the rest of this course will be focusedaround a single goal. How to create articles that bring consistenttargeted traffic that doesn't fade. And how to convert that traffic into leads and sales.

 If that sounds good, I'll see you in lesson #2. And If you want to dive deeper into the conceptsthat I just shared with you, I have a few cool resources for further reading, which can be foundat the very bottom of this lesson.