What am I doing, again?
by Sapphire (October 22, 2007)
Something’s been nagging at me for a while now, and I finally realized today what it is. My current business model seems to be:
- Blog,
- blog,
- blog.
The idea being if I post often enough, I’ll eventually have enough traffic and my ad space will eventually be worth… what? A few hundred? Right now I have four sites I push myself to post on regularly. They get a combined total of about 23,700 visitors per month. They bring in around $255 per month. That’s what I spend hours a day writing to earn.
Then I have that article reprint blog I almost never touch, which has brought in a steady $80/month for over a year now. That’s what I spent about two weeks a couple of years ago to earn. Of course, I have another article reprint blog I built around the same time, and it only earns $10/month, so it’s all in stumbling onto the right niche. But still: two weeks of work to find out, “Oh, this niche totally blows” is a lot less painful than several years of work, only to find $200 is the limit.
To my shock, I logged into stats on a site I rarely update, and found StumbleUpon had sent me 8,000 views in four days. The site’s uniques jumped from 400 last month to over 4k so far this month. Why am I not thrilled? The site is absolutely not monetizeable. There’s just no way. It’s a very socio-political sort of thing that I just felt like writing about, and I only update it when I have something to say - which is maybe once a month. CPM won’t want it; there’s no aff product that would target its audience; there’s just nothing.
And yet I think there’s a lesson here. I like producing original content, but I am sick to death of mass-producing it. I’m sick of writing when I have nothing to say, spending hours looking for things to write about. I hate going through my RSS reader to find other people’s posts to write about, which I then call “original content”.
Remember that ebook I said I was going to write a few months ago? I gave up on it because Google’s attack on paid links made me uncertain about how much money my idea could actually bring in to a reader who implements it. Now I know; and I’m going to start working on that ebook again today.
Posted in Staying on Track
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October 31st, 2007 at 8:03 am
I like the honesty in this post.
I can feel your frustration! lol
“I like producing original content, but I am sick to death of mass-producing it. I’m sick of writing when I have nothing to say, spending hours looking for things to write about. I hate going through my RSS reader to find other people’s posts to write about, which I then call “original content”.”
So what’s your plan now then?
October 31st, 2007 at 8:05 am
P.S. Cool editing thing you got here!
P.P.S. Can you talk about that article reprint blog? What does that mean?
October 31st, 2007 at 9:02 am
Mike, I do actually have a plan, and I’m going to reveal it over the next few months.
Law Student, if you do a search for “free reprint articles” you’ll find sites that offer articles you can post on a blog for free, as long as you leave links to the author’s site intact (there may be other rules; always check the ToS). It’s a quick way to build free content without writing it.