It happens all too easily: we’re just too close to our own shit. We thrash around in our own mud puddle like we’re drowning in a bottomless swamp. We get caught in endlessly repeating closed loops of thought we can’t break out of alone. We need an extra brain. Somone who’s “been there, done that.”

You are not alone. You are not the first person to ever have problems with your blog. Why on earth should you have to figure them out as if you were?

Asking for help is not a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of intelligence: smart people hire other smart people to help them because they know they can avoid mistakes and reach their goals faster.

But how do you know it’s the right time to seek that “extra brain?”

I’ve been a blog consultant for a few years, now, and I know when professional help will give you the biggest boost. There are five way to tell you need a blog consultant:

1. Your traffic is too low or has leveled off
2. You haven’t created your blog yet, but you know you want the best possible start for it
3. Your blog does not appear anywhere near the first page of results in search (for something other than your name or your blog’s name)
4. There is little or no response to your content
5. Although other things seem to be in place, you’re not making any money

If any of the above sound like your situation, please keep reading as I explain each one in depth. I am going to assume that you have also made an effort to find information online, but it hasn’t solved your problems.

1. Your Traffic is too Low or has Leveled Off

I realize that every blogger wants more traffic regardless, but what I mean here is that the traffic is too low compared to how long the blog has existed. If you’ve been blogging for six months and you don’t have at least 50 subscribers, regular comments, regular search traffic, and regular social media traffic, you have a serious problem. Or, if your traffic was growing, but now has plateaued, then whatever you were doing to get you to your current situation is no longer sufficient or you took a wrong turn without realizing it.

Certainly, there is plenty of information online (free and otherwise) about growing your traffic. However, you still have to identify the real problem.

Low or stagnant traffic is not the problem, it’s a symptom.

Unless you can identify the underlying problems which result in this symptom, you may spend a lot of time (and money) trying to fix the wrong problem, which won’t help anything at all and may even make things worse.

2. You haven’t Created Your Blog Yet, but You Know You Want the Best Possible Start for it

You’ve done some research, but you want to get your new blog off to the best possible start–you don’t want to leave anything to chance. You’re faced with an insane array of choices. How do you know you will make the best decisions? Without an experienced mentor to guide you, you don’t. Much of the available blog advice online is great stuff (some of it isn’t so great), but it’s not always obvious how that information pertains to your exact situation. This is exactly the kind of situation where a good blog consultant will cut through the fog with actionable advice specific to your situation.

When you’re getting started, you are especially vulnerable to committing the same mistakes everyone else does and regrets later. It doesn’t have to be that way. You can have a guide to walk you right past all that frustration, leaving other bloggers in the dust. You can speed up the learning time significantly–in many cases, twice as fast or faster than if you did it on your own. Anybody who’s ever said, “If I only knew then what I know now,” understands what I’m talking about.

3. Your Blog does not Appear Anywhere Near the First Page of Results in Search  (for something other than your name or your blog’s name)

If your blog can’t be found in search, well, that’s not good. Even though there are a million blogs on every subject, a constant and consistently implemented correct SEO strategy will move you closer to the number one position in search (provided the content is good). As with the traffic problem above (this problem is related to traffic), getting SEO (search engine optimization) information online can be a rough ride. And even though I’ve created a home study course on WordPress SEO, it’s often still necessary to get specific advice (or at least confirmation) regarding your SEO strategies and tactics.

What’s really important is how SEO ties in with everything else about your strategy. As with the traffic problem above, not ranking well in search is also not “the problem,” but rather a symptom of a misaligned content strategy and vague objectives, commonly. There’s nothing I know of you can read or study that will suggest to you exactly how to fix your  content strategy, because that requires specific knowledge about your blog and your goals.

4. There is Little or No Response to Your Content

Even a blog with very little traffic can compel what few readers it does have to comment or link back to the content. It all depends on the content. Blog content that connects with or provokes people is the fastest growth strategy for a blog. The “response problem” is also a symptom in disguise. Not only that, it may be a cause of problems 1 and 3 above. Poorly-written content can result in low traffic and an equally poor search ranking. This is because content that is perceived as low-quality does not receive links or other forms of activity which indicate to Google it has any authority.

This is a tough problem, because, other than just hiring a great writer, there is no external fix for it. There’s no magic bullet for substandard writing–you simply must improve your writing.

And even then, good writing is not enough, because it has to be good writing for a blog. Excellent blog writing isn’t the same as excellent article or book writing. Writing for a blog isn’t the same as writing direct sales copy (though you can borrow much from direct sales copywriting).

Typical advice for this problem suggests you engage in various tactics to get comments from readers, like simply asking them to comment or asking open-ended questions at the end of a post. There are a million ideas for how to get more backlinks to your posts.

Nothing wrong with that stuff, but if you do it in a suck-ass blog post, guess what? It’s not going to help. This is a multifaceted problem, because it touches on every aspect of a blog: it’s connected to your uniqueness, SEO, your goals–everything.

5. You’re Not Making any Money

It’s entirely possible for you to have decent traffic and search rankings and still not be making money with your blog or the business behind the blog, depending on whether you’re monetizing a blog or marketing a business. Monetization vs. marketing a business are two very different things, but from the point of view of a blogger in either position, the problem looks the same: no stash of cash piling up in the bank account. Monetization is tried far more often than running a real business, but a business is far more profitable.

What complicates this is that everyone has something to sell you in order for you to make more money, and your own greed too easily leads to damaging compromises. There are worthwhile products and services that will help you make more money. And just because you sold out, that doesn’t mean anyone’s buying.

Making money from your blog is full of paradoxes and traps. There are strategies and tactics which have proven to work most of the time for most of the people who try them. As the old saying goes, most people don’t recognize opportunity, because it’s dressed in overalls and looks like work.

The money problem is often related to the other problems listed above. If you have no traffic, can’t be found in search, and have low response rates to your content, well, don’t be shocked when you don’t make any money from your blog. But like I said, I’ve seen good blogs earn little to nothing because the wrong methods were being used. My advice in this area goes way beyond trite stuff like “advertise,” “try affiliate marketing,” or “become a freelancer.”

Treating Symptoms Doesn’t Fix the Problem

The big take-away here, the secret sauce that maybe you weren’t expecting, is that most of the above aren’t even the real problems–they’re symptoms. The real problems lie deeper. A lot of blogging advice online in other blog posts only treats the symptoms.

Engaging with a blog consultant one-on-one can root out the true problems and help you come up with a plan to address them and reach your goals. Having a conversation with another human being who knows how to work through this process gives you breakthroughs no post on any blog will ever match.

If you’re ready, I’m here.