The last month has been both an exciting and difficult time for my blogging business. Whilst I’ve started numerous news blogs and seen good growth in traffic in them my more established and larger blogs have suffered from Google’s latest update and are yet to show any signs at all of recovering. As a result my daily income from blogging has plummeted to 30% of what it was sitting at for this time last month.
Despite the massive drop in traffic every one of my blogs (except the newest few which are yet to be indexed) jumped in page ranking and now sits between 4-7. So the news is mixed and to be honest the roller coaster ride is taking its toll somewhat on me.
Somedays I find myself with high energy levels – working hard on writing quality content, developing partner relationships with other bloggers, coming up with ways to diversify my blogging and other days I wonder if its worth the long hours for the benefits gained. I’m still earning a full time wage (around the average Aussie wage) for my efforts, but while the next google update could see things return to the heights that they were they could also see another fall in traffic. I’m not complaining…. really I’m not (although it sounds like it doesn’t it!) – I’ve always taken the attitude that I’ll surf the blogging wave for as long as I can – each day is a day more than I ever expected it to last!
Having said that – this type of existence is not always easy – it makes planning for the future difficult – like any small business owner would find. The highs are high and the lows are low – the life of a problogger.
Yesterday whilst feeling pretty gloomy about my blogging and trying to motivate myself to reach my 25 posts per day goal (I made it, but only just) a friend emailed me to tell me that he’d spotted a mention of my sites in an Aussie computer magazine. In the front they have a column where they track the highest traffic sites in Australia and my livingroom.org.au domain (which hosts a number of my blogs including this one) came in at number 1 for one of the ‘personal sites’ category. The stats came from HitWise who measured our traffic as accounting for 16.18% of the whole ‘personal sites’ category. Whilst I felt a little guilty about topping the category because technically my domain hosts a few different sites I then looked at number two on the list and realized that they host over 2200 sites and number three is the blog of one of Australia’s biggest Newspapers.
I don’t know how they measure their traffic and I’m not sure if my blogs truly deserve to fit into the ‘personal’ category (apart from them all being written by one person…) but the news gave me a spark of hope that perhaps what I’ve been building is a little more significant than I’d been thinking. Of course the Australian market isn’t huge, but I’ll take any glimmer of hope at the moment.
So we soldier on!
25 posts per day goal?
Wow. Here I was agonizing about meeting my 3 posts per day goal (soon increasing to 4 when I open the next weblog).
Truly impressive. If you can write that much quality content a day, I guarantee you’re going to be a success. (and congrats on the #1!)
this is the danger of relying on free traffic to get visitors. Big Money Tips says you have to have a mix.
Like any other business, maybe you should set aside money for advertising
Hi
With this much content being generated would you ever consider producing a ‘best of’ style report to sell through your site?
If it was a compilation of 200/300 pieces, with some additions for topicality, then sold through the site in digital format for let’s say USD15, it is at least another income stream.
And you could market it as a way of showing support for keeping the site up and running.
It is clear that re-packaging content in a variety of formats could produce a useful income stream – just look at the number of Greatest Hits CDs that are released!!!
Regards
Craig