We’ve all experienced it… Actually, many of us are struggling with it right now.

It’s the appropriately phrased “chicken and egg” problem of what came first — the chicken or the egg. This enigmatic conundrum is as as old as blogging itself, a dilemma between content creation and growing an audience.

Having said that, new blogs are the most susceptible because it’s hard to get an audience to stick around. This is especially true if blog content is sparse, and competition is fierce. In addition, there is a LOT of social media generated content out there and it’s all competing for attention.

As bloggers we work hard at pumping out new content, so it’s a challenge to stay motivated if our growth is stagnant. This is a vicious cycle that is frustrating and time consuming to overcome, and is the single most common reason for the eventual blogger burn-out and untimely demise of a blog.

So, what exactly lies at the core of the problem?

There are actually a number of reasons for what may be amplifying the severity of the “chicken and egg” problem. Many of them associated with new circumstances brought on by the advent of social media generated content. As a fellow blogger and developer, I spent the past 3 years closely working with other bloggers to understand the core issues that many face in their quest for blogging success.

So, in no particular order, I will list them below along with the solutions we made available:

1. Sparse Content

Writing blog content is time consuming. The vast majority of blogs can go weeks – even months between blog posts.

If that’s the case for you, it’s enough time for readers to completely forget about you! Hook them up with a concomitant community that will let them entertain themselves between blog posts with all sorts of community generated view points, opinions and discussions.

A custom snapzu blog community and embedded sidebar widget lets them do just that, in a world where content is king, it is engagement with community generated content that can make all the difference.

2. Social but not really social

As I mentioned before, social media is kicking your blog’s ass! The time to fight back is now. Our blog enhancement platform has several features that increase engagement within a blog community including up/down voting, XP levels, dynamic achievements, and reputation scores.

It’s finally time to level the playing field versus the social media giants that have significantly changed the blogging landscape while benefiting from it in the process.

3. Lost in the noise

If you’ve ever heard of the 80/20 blogging rule, you know that as a blogger, most of your time should be spent promoting your blog and its posts anywhere you can. This includes places such as Twitter, Facebook, Quora, Reddit, etc.

If you spend 2 hours writing a new blog post, you should spend 8 hours doing anything in your power to get people to read it. If you aren’t doing that, you’re already crippling your chances at success.

With the level of noise being what it is, it’s virtually impossible to be heard in today’s landscape without having significant influence, some serious luck, or having to produce a modern day literary masterpiece. Your contribution to your blog community counts towards that 80% while in the process creating a brand new avenue to build a growing audience from the hundreds of thousands of existing Snapzu members that may ultimately find you and your content.

4. Lack of automation

Like it or not, the web and the automation of today is here to stay. A thriving community can self-produce and curate incredible amounts of content that can be automatically posted to social media outlets like Twitter to build more audience, and can be used to create weekly or monthly “top list” blog posts and newsletters that increase SEO and get people to come back.

Your community and its automation tools do 95% of the work after a quick and easy initial setup! Note: Automation as a whole is a vast topic and I will revisit all its benefits to your blog in a future post!

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Tackling these four core issues isn’t as difficult as you may think. But if ignored, they can and most likely will severely hinder your chances of growth in this vicious and competitive social landscape. So don’t hesitate to utilize all the tools at your disposal, that’s what they’re here for!

Thank for reading!

Oh, one last thing! You can connect with me and hundreds of other fellow bloggers/influencers at our community / resource library over at Snapzu! 550+ awesome submissions to date and growing!