Why 96% of WordPress.com Bloggers Aren't Making It
I was having a conversation today with Thorsten, a good friend of mine, about Blogging. I’ve been mentoring Thorsten on getting his Blog launched over at www.SelfImprovedLife.com and he’s been learning the ins and outs of Blogging. He just launched his Blog a few days ago.
I believe that one of the most important aspects to successful Blogging is getting your Blogging Philosophy right so we’ve been talking about that in great length lately. One of the initial things I was talking to him about and teaching him relates to picking your niche and also understanding what the competition is like out there.
When it comes to Blogging, I truly believe that the only real competition you ever have is yourself. Meaning, it is really your own lack of self-discipline that you are competing against not anyone else. When Thorsten decided to get into the Blogging game and I got him to start doing some market research I could tell that he immediately felt intimidated and overwhelmed by the number of Blogs out there.
Technorati is tracking well over 112 million Blogs out there. That’s enough to make your head spin and it sounds really discouraging to someone who’s just getting into Blogging right now.
However, if you understand the real story behind those numbers, the odds improve significantly.
To illustrate my point I asked Thorsten to start looking at some Blogs out there in similar niches he was contemplating. One of the criteria he looked for was Blogs that (1) have been around for more than 6 months and (2) are posting regularly at least 3-5 times a week. The results are staggering. It was difficult to find very many. There really is almost no competition out there. At least not for someone who’s willing to put in the work.
This brings me to the point about WordPress.com Bloggers. I’m not picking on WordPress.com Blogs or anything, but I just wanted to show this example that Thorsten brought to my attention as I think it illustrates exactly what’s going on out there. WordPress.com just happens to show the numbers, but I’m pretty sure these numbers are standard across the whole Blogosphere.
This is a screenshot from the WordPress.com home page. Take a look:
This shows that WordPress.com is currently hosting almost 3.5 million Blogs. However, look at the number of posts today. Only 150 thousand. That means only around 4% of Bloggers on WordPress.com wrote a post today.
Now I know that not every Blogger has a posting frequency of once a day, but my point is that if you do discipline yourself to write one quality post every day, you pretty much beat out 96% of the competition out there just by doing that. Stick to it for more than 3 months and you’re in the top 1%.
If you’re a new Blogger or even someone just contemplating starting a Blog, this may be something to think about. 
- 6/28/2008 - 27 Posts are on Today’s Gratitude List « Fruitful Words...
Comments:
Leave a Reply
Search
Lijit SearchServices
Fitness
Warhammer 40k
Blog Sponsors
Top Commentators
Categories
- Affiliate Marketing (40)
- Announcements (28)
- Better Blog Tips (6)
- Blog (402)
- Blogging (73)
- Contests and Competitions (27)
- Featured (27)
- Fitness Articles (7)
- Fun & Relaxation (15)
- Health & Fitness (17)
- Healthy Recipes (11)
- Intention & Manifestation (47)
- Intuition (10)
- Make Money Online (144)
- Maqui Berry (1)
- meditation (4)
- Mindset (38)
- p90x (60)
- Personal Development (159)
- Progress (31)
- Progress Reports (20)
- Psychic Development (5)
- Psychic Protection (2)
- Reiki (1)
- Reviews (28)
- Spirit Guides (3)
- Spirituality (8)
- the paulymath show (4)
- Videos (5)
- Warhammer 40k (1)
- Wealth & Money (81)
Paul Piotrowski is a highly ambitious and passionate self-improvement fanatic who has spent over 13 years relentlessly pursuing and studying personal development wisdom in almost every area of life. His highly intuitive drive to seek wisdom and truth in life has led him through very diverse areas of experience ranging from entrepreneurship and business, natural [...]
Copyright 2007-2010 Paulymath.com - All Rights Reserved - [ Home | Disclaimer | Privacy Policy ]
I usually don’t go for “I don’t have any competition” arguments, but those stats are pretty compelling.
Those stats are staggering. Maybe though the category of ‘blog’ is not granular enough. You see my mom has a blog. She posts about twice a month telling me and my brothers what she and my dad are doing. It’s great for that. It’s the equivalent of a monthly newsletter in a very small community. Now there’s blogs like yours and the uber-bloggers. They are the equivalent of the Wall Street Journal newspapers at the news stand, each having fresh content daily. BUT, those stats put everyone together. No wonder it is staggering!
Wow. Those are some amazing stats. Seems that if you apply the approach you wrote about in your post yesterday (making 1% improvements), you set yourself up for a good chance at succeeding in blogging.
The trend of people giving up too quickly is something I’ve found in many areas of life. For example, I train in MMA for fun and fitness. Every month, there are bunch of a new guys coming in because they want to make it into the UFC. They usually give up in a few weeks. The guys at my gym that do fight professionally are the ones that have been training conistently for years.
@Anand: The stats in Blogging are typical of what happens in the world at large.
In business typically 20% of people produce 80% of your results, and the other 80% produce the other 20%. Meaning, at any time if you had 10 employees, 2 of those are producing about 80% of the results in your business. The 80/20 rule is very common in business.
Also, there is something called the “5 Percenters” and the “2 Percenters”. You could think of it this way:
95% of the population = Poor or Middle Class
5% of the population = Considered Wealthy
Also, in that 5% it’s further broken down to 3% and 2%. The top 2% are the ultra wealthy.
Very simply stated, only 2% of the population is willing to do what’s necessary to be ultra successful. 5% are willing to do a bit less then that just to be well off, and 95% are doing just enough to get by.
You can see these stats in business, martial arts, Blogging, professional sports, everything.
The “secret” is to always be in the 2%.
Good points Paul. As with anything, persistence and discipline will set you apart.
Now I gotta go kick my butt about getting more posts done per week.
It’s funny Paul, I was just reading your blog on self Discipline and how you mentioned moving the 7 stones back and fourth each morning. Hey, I think Blogging something each day is MUCH more fun than Rocks. So I’ve been kicking my blog http://www.aceandres.blogspot.com/
lilke a goverment Mule.
Go article. And unbelievable stats.
Ace
There are 1000′s of new blogs being created everyday, and 1000′s ending. The people who succeed are the ones that stick at it.
The first 6 months are the hardest. Get past that point and things begin to get a little easier.
http://www.selfimprovedlife.com = = Showing fake Feedburner stats?
@David Shaw: He’s experimenting and trying to find a good WordPress Theme to use. That particular one happens to contain a graphic of where your Feedburner chiclet should go, and he hasn’t gone in and installed that yet. As soon as you activate the theme it shows that graphic there with an “example” feedburner count.
I’ll let him know to get that fixed asap.
Thanks.
Thank you for sharing these detailed tips on making money blogging.
When I began my first blog years ago it was definitely fueled by my passion. At first I didn’t even know you could make money blogging. I blogged every single day for months and it was great fun. By the time I started my third blog, however, I found it challenging to post on all three of them daily.
Fortunately, all three blogs are in areas that I’m passionate about, and therefore I don’t having money-making as my first goal. It does feel great, however, to earn the income from Adsense, Kontera, Chitika and some from my own products. So I have started to take a harder look at turning my blogs into moneymakers as well.
In my efforts to draw targeted visitors to my blog who will comment, I have begun to take the advice you give about getting acquainted with other blogs in your niche. By subscribing to the feeds of many of those blogs, I have gotten to know some wonderful bloggers and formed valuable relationships.
I also value your advice about learning from the expertise of others. I, too, benefitted from Joel’s e-book on Adsense and at BlogWorld last year got to meet him and the young men who started Unique Blog Designs. Getting more involved in the community of bloggers is very beneficial because there is a wealth of information there.
@Ace Andres: That’s what I’ve been doing too.
I really enjoyed your post. I am a new blogger..actually as of today! I have committed to seeing it through and hope that I can offer great content for my readers. It is amazing when you are on the outside like I was that you think that starting a blog is too saturated and too many people are doing it to actually be successful at it, but your post really puts that into perspective for me.
Thanks again!
@XMAN: You have no competition because there is nobody else exactly like you.
Even if there was, you could be the “second opinion” guy.
@Paul: Just checked the WordPress.com site again today and now they’re reporting different figures. I guess they became aware of all the dead blogs too
“210,751 bloggers, 182,539 new posts, 56,295,477 words today.”
So if you’re not actually blogging on your blog it won’t count. But your main point is still true.