Blogs, May They R.I.P.?
I’ve been blogging on this site on a pretty-much regular basis for nearly three months now.
Other bloggers started roughly the same time I did, give or take a few weeks in either direction.
Already, now, I count three blogs I used to read nearly daily that haven’t had a post in over a month. Another is going on two weeks now.
Though I’d hate to see anyone give up on blogging so soon, especially since they were also hoping to make some extra income with their blogs, I hope it’s that rather than something unfortunate happening in their lives.
Assuming the former rather than the latter, three months really isn’t sufficient time (in my opinion) to assess whether a blog can generate a sufficient income. It takes a while to build traffic, and your initial focus should be on building traffic and then monetization. True, some recommend monetizing from the get-go, and there is nothing wrong with that. Still, your focus should be on building an audience.
Here I am three months into it, and I’ve gone from an audience of 1 to about half a dozen or so. At that rate, and assuming a 2% conversion rate and an average payout on pay per click ads in the neighborhood of 1 or 2 cents, I should be able to retire in 5,000,000 years. But, I’m not giving up. I know that with patience and hard work, I can cut that down to maybe 4,000,000 years or so.
At any rate, how many of the blogs that you used to read daily have now apparently withered on the vine? I’m only talking about blogs with no recent posts and not blogs you may have stopped reading because they no longer interest you.
[...] thing is, I don’t think any of those statistics* take into consideration the number of blogs that are abandoned each month. And, how would you account for such a blog, unless they were permanently deleted from their host? [...]