What am I doing, again?
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.
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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?
P.S. Cool editing thing you got here!
P.P.S. Can you talk about that article reprint blog? What does that mean?
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.