Caution; some tough questions ahead. Would you call yourself a successful guest blogger? In other words, is guest blogging bringing you the results you’ve hoped for? Can you get your posts accepted on your first-choice target blogs? Do those blogs then bring satisfactory results?

If “no” is your answer to any of the above then, first of all, that’s okay. Guest blogging is much more difficult than some experts want us to believe.

And second of all, here’s a list of the common reasons why guest bloggers fail. I encourage you to read it from top to bottom and try evaluating your approach, looking for possible holes in your tactics.

1. Your guest posts aren’t getting enough readers

This is by far the #1 reason why guest bloggers fail.

Here’s what I mean. It’s not that you’re choosing the wrong sites. Or that your writing is poor. The real problem might be that the topics you’ve selected simply aren’t 100 percent in tune with the site’s audience.

It’s really easy to make this mistake. For instance, when I first began guest blogging, I was so excited about the possibility itself that I didn’t spend much time evaluating my topics. So when my posts finally went live, I was only happy for a short while. Soon after that, the excitement was gone and I was only wondering why I’m getting next to no traffic back to my site. I even started wondering if my links were broken. They weren’t.

Don’t make the same mistake. Always find the best possible topics based on the audience and the posts that are already popular on the site. Pay attention to things like comments, tweets, and other indicators of activity.

2. You’re getting distracted

This doesn’t seem like a big problem at first, but it’s a quiet killer.

The thing is that there’s just too much stuff we can do in any given day. The internet opens up way too many opportunities. It’s more than easy to spend an obscene number of hours chasing multiple sites at the same time and working on more than a handful of articles.

There were times when I got caught up in this as well. I had 10 or 15 articles in different stages of development, all waiting to be sent and, inevitably, all delayed.

This isn’t advisable. A much more effective approach is to work on (at most) three articles at the same time. In other words, I’d much rather succeed at getting three guest posts published than fail at getting 15 published.

The simplest strategy is to set a work schedule and stick to it every day.

3. You’re not seeing results

In the end, if you want to stick with guest blogging for the long term then you’ll obviously need to make some money out of it at some point.

Okay, there doesn’t have to be any direct income, but you need to start getting results for your business in one form or the other.

If you’re not making any money then you’ll naturally start looking for other opportunities and income streams.

Unfortunately, learning how to effectively utilize guest blogging for that purpose takes time.

So what’s the solution? Patience and relentless testing. Test different sites. Test different calls to action. Test different landing pages, and so on.

4. You’re lacking motivation

Only motivated people can find success in anything.

No matter what results you’re getting, you need to remain motivated to put in your everyday work.

So how to do this?

Motivation can be a really complex thing, and it seems like something we don’t have a complete control over. But even though that is somewhat true, we can still do a couple of things to help us remain motivated.

• First of all, set your environment right. You need to have a nice workspace, where there are no distractions and you can write a guest post uninterrupted.
• Secondly, make sure to blog about a topic that actually interests you. If you’re naturally interested in something then remaining motivated should be a lot easier.
• Thirdly, pay attention to what’s going on in your niche. When you can witness what others are doing, you will feel naturally convinced to make something similar happen yourself.

5. You’re struggling with technical challenges

Granted, writing itself doesn’t impose much technical difficulties, but the problems start when you want to enrich your content in some way, and then when you’re attempting to send it out.

Enriching content is something we discussed a while ago so feel free to check that article for more info.

When it comes to sending the post, based on the blog editor you’re pitching it to, they might require you to send an HTML version, a Word doc with images attached, a Google doc, or other possible combinations and variations.

Depending on how HTML savvy you are, this can mean some trouble. The way I handle this is to just send two versions of the article that are optimized for both viewing, as well as publishing the post on the site directly.

Here’s how:

1. Write your post in WordPress – do it on your own site. Then save it as a draft (for future reference).
2. Go to Google Docs and simply copy the Visual Editor view of your post into a new document. Then get a public link for that post. That way, you can share this link with the editor to give them a quick preview of your article.
3. Next, go back to your WordPress, switch to the Text Editor and copy and paste the whole post to a text file. This is a WordPress-HTML file that you can send directly to the editor.

So just to recap, doing the above, you will be able to send two optimized versions of your guest post – something every blog editor will surely appreciate.

6. You didn’t think guest blogging was going to be this much work

This all depends on your personal approach, but if you want to hope for any significant results, guest blogging is going to take a significant amount of time. This is just the way things are, and unfortunately there’s no way around this.

If you’re not ready to put this work in, you might have to face a really big challenge on your way.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that the main reason why you’re not experiencing the results you’ve hoped for might be that you’re simply not guest blogging enough, and not necessarily that you’re doing something wrong.

Okay, that’s it for the six reasons why guest bloggers fail. I hope this advice will come handy to guest bloggers on the struggle and that it will give you some awareness about the things that might happen, as well as how to fight them if they come.