My Surprising Lesson About Making Money Blogging

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On the surface it makes sense that blogging more frequently brings more traffic, and more traffic means making more money blogging, right? That is, after all, what the big guys like Darren Rouse seem to think when they write that infrequent blog updates ruin Adsense earnings.

Until this past week, I’d bought that hook, line and sinker. Maybe you have, too.

Unfortunately in this past week I’ve also been swamped with offline responsibilities. (Being a homeschooling parent often means having no time to do anything else but homeschool.) Rather than update each of my five blogs two or three times per day, I felt fortunate if I had time to update two while letting the other three grow somewhat stale.

Know what happened? Ad-revenue doubled at the blogs that I did update and tripled at the ones I pretty much ignored all week. In other words, I unintentionally did the opposite of what common sense dictates and it paid off. Which got me to wondering why.

Now, I’m no AdSense guru like Joel Comm, whose book about AdSense sits in a prominent place on my desk (and ought to be on yours, too!). But after thinking about the whole experience I find it makes a little bit of sense after all.

Apparently, my regular readers continued to visit even though I hadn’t been updating each blog several times per day like I usually try to do. Since they didn’t find any fresh content, they explored some of the other links and features on my sites. That, in turn, led to more clicks and page views, which meant that I made more money blogging by blogging less.

So do I plan on making such haphazard blogging a more regular practice? Nah. I’ve always blogged for the sheer fun of it, with making money by blogging being like icing on a yummy cake. Still, it’s nice to know that I need not worry about losing income simply because my obligations in meatspace keeps me away from my commitments in cyberspace.

Considering how stressed I’ve been over the past couple of weeks, that’s a lesson I’m glad to have learned!

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This entry was posted on Friday, February 29th, 2008 at 1:49 pm and is filed under Make Money Blogging. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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4 Comments

Comment by Lincoln

2008-02-29 17:56:18

I actually knew this for some time, ever since I’ve been following a blogger or two who posted their surprise on how their stats actually went up when they came back from a hiatus of a week or longer.

I’ve barely had time to blog myself the past week, and yet about 25 more people subscribed to my feed in the past few days, the highest jump I’ve ever seen since I started my blog. Whah?!?!

That’s what really frosts my cookies about these know it all blogfartknockers who think they hold all the keys to success. It’s not true that you have to blog at least one post every single day. For some of us who are more right brained than left, we tend to blog when the muse hits us. I try to build up a queue to maintain consistency, but sometimes my dry spells are just too long to manage that. But trying to force myself to blog because of a self inflicted quota ruins my writing energy and it shows. Screw the experts. You should do what ultimately works best for you.