The increased traffic and earnings that many Bloggers have had over the past few weeks in the lead up to Christmas yesterday and today has begun to slow for many bloggers. I’ve had a few emails and Instant Messaging conversations with concerned publishers asking if the slow down is ‘normal’.

While I won’t answer for every industry I know it’s normal for most sites to experience lulls in traffic at this time of the year and also in most cases to see decreases in both CTR and click values in contextual advertising programs.

I know of a number of AdWords advertisers who put their ad campaigns on hold between Christmas and mid January and suspect that the decreased demand for ads translates to lower click values. While I don’t know this for a fact I suspect that this might be the case for Chitika advertisers also.

Some industries will see things pick up sooner than others. Traditionally online (and offline) sales start in the new year (and sometimes even earlier in some countries) and this can see things pick up for bloggers in those niches. But for many the dead patch lasts through to the end of January. There is no hard and fast rule.

Similarly there is no real right or wrong in terms of what to do as a blogger over this period but most experienced bloggers change gears in some way or another. Heres a few ways that bloggers see this quiet patch as an opportunity rather than something to get down about:

1. Some take advantage of the quiet news patch and low traffic and go on vacation
2. Others use the next few weeks to do redesigns
3. Experience bloggers often use the end of the year to do reviews, look at stats and set direction and goals for the year ahead
4. Quite a few bloggers use the time to launch new blogs
5. Some bloggers use this time to start up other projects like writing books, recording podcasts etc
6. Others use the time to write posts and series that they’ll use later in the year
7. A few bloggers I know spend January going through their current blogs with a fine tooth comb to do SEO, delete dead links and basically get everything in ship shape order

I personally am going to rest and forget about blogging for a week or so and then come back to do some review, planning and to work on a couple of projects that I’ve had on hold for a while before getting back into the swing of my ‘normal’ routine.

Whatever you choose to do over the next few weeks it’s worth reminding yourself that if traffic and earnings do slump for you that it’s not the end of the world and it’s not worth getting too down in the dumps about. Things generally pick up I no more than a month. Rather than get down about it – see it as an opportunity to do some or all of the above on your blog.

What are you going to be focussing upon the next few weeks?

Robert Blum emailed me this morning to let me know of a post he’d just written titled Four Weeks Of Blogging where he took the idea of my 18 Lessons I Learnt Blogging and did his own version after 4 weeks of blogging. While Robert might not have been blogging seriously for long some of his lessons are great.

Of particular interest is his lesson of starting to track his blog’s stats more. The realization that he made when he did this was that 45% of his traffic was coming from one post.

My Story – I remember in my very early days of blogging having this same realization on a new blog I’d just set up at what was once a photolog where I was posting some pictures taken on an overseas trip. The blog was called ‘Visually Speaking’.

I had grand visions of the blog being followed by friends and family wanting to see my photography. I also posted a short review of the camera I was using at the time.

The interesting thing was that after a few weeks blogging there I checked my stats and found that my photos pages had had absolutely NO page views but the mini camera review had had quite a few people surf in from Google – around 20 people were coming to it every day.

A light went on in my head and I began an inner dialogue that went something like:

‘If 20 people come to 1 camera review – how many people would come to 100 camera reviews?’

At around the same time I discovered AdSense for the first time and I began to see the potential in blogging to pay for my ISP costs and maybe make a few extra dollars on the side.

It was then that I transitioned my photolog into a Digital Camera Reviews Blog – my first blog with an income stream and one of the largest one’s that I run today.

It’s a blog where I follow what is being written around the web by the many many digital camera sites and condense it into a different helpful form. The site is read by between 12,000 and 16,000 unique visitors per day and is well regarded by the sites that it links to and quotes from as a result of the high levels of traffic it sends to those sites.

The moral of the story is that if I’d not tracked my stats and had the realization that that one page on my site was generating most of the traffic I’d probably still have an unvisited photolog and would probably never have discovered how blogging could actually become a full time job.