This article is guest posted by Shaun Connell.
You glance over your blog, and a long sigh comes out. Maybe this wasn’t a good idea. You’ve spent a few months writing about the same topic, with dreams of making a fortune with your own little piece of real estate. You make a decision: I’m not going to end this blog.
Believe it or not, coming out and actually saying it can be one of the best decisions you’ll make in your “make money online” career. The average blog dies a slow death of inactivity, and without being updated, wastes the traffic that shows up after the blog was “put to sleep.” The average blogger never decides “I’m done!”, but instead just keeps putting it off until the blog gets no traffic, no money, nothing. Then it becomes a waste of money to even keep repurchasing the domain, and the blog disappears of the Internet. Forgive me for being melodramatic, but I find this widespread story to be a bit of a sad story. Mostly because it doesn’t have to happen.
Let’s take a realistic approach towards the goal of make money blogging, and an even more realistic approach to a topic which is almost never discussed: how to stop blogging. Yes, that’s right: how to make the best decisions when you’ve decided to stop a certain blog. There are two very fundamental concepts worth remembering:
1. You Should Try Again
The first blog is much more likely to fail than your second. The first try at anything is usually seen as a trial run. You’ve made the mistakes, and looking back, you should be able to figure out where you went wrong. With this new-found knowledge, you should start again. No. Seriously. Start again. I failed with nearly 10 blogs before I finally figured out what on earth I was doing.
Of course, blogging might not be your thing. In that case, you should seriously consider establishing a static website instead. We’ll talk about how to create a website out of the remains of a blog.
2. You Haven’t “Failed”
You haven’t dramatically “failed”, and even if you didn’t turn a profit. Worst case scenario, you got a great course on working hard, setting goals, or if I might be so dramatic, you had a limited experience with limited-failure. If you keep an open mind, failing a website could be the most important lesson you’ll learn in your journey to make money online.
My first failures did nothing but drive home the five pillars of website success. It’s these five pillars that we’ll utilize to “end” your blog. These five pillars are the only aspects of blogging or webmastering that bring home the bacon. Unfortunately, we often get caught up in the details to the extent that we forget the general idea of what it is on earth that we’re doing.
In second part of this mini-series on how to stop blogging, we’ll cover how you can convert your website into an income generating static website. Make sure to check back for the update.
Shaun Connell is the webmaster of Make Money, a free resource for individuals who want to learn how to make money online with a website.
Hi,
Yes, blogging must be done consistently. Also you must post at least one short article per day to you blog, so it could stay fresh. This will also help you to get more repeat visitors using RSS Feeds.
Yes i even don’t know when to stop blogging as long as i can write and still can using internets i hope i can keep always bloggings thanks for this interesting post :)
This is one of the best posts for those who want to throw away their blog. Waiting for the second part.
Thanks for this great post. Yes, it is true that in order to become successful in blogging, we need to post something daily to our blog. This will bring in returning visitors to our blogs.
I have two blogs where I don’t post anymore but I am still keeping them since they still generate income from advertisements.