The dark days of building blog traffic
January 27th 2009 00:43
I know the frustration of waiting for blog stats to grow. Unless you're Hugh Jackman announcing a new personal blog featuring daily shots of your underwear collection, there is no escaping a slow build-up of blog traffic. That is because it is all about search engine visibility, and that takes time.
Think 18 months.
Spike, the author of the blog wordophilia.com, knows the frustration too. He has just written a post about it here. In the post he laments the lack of AdSense clicks despite seeing a big jump in hits on his blog in one 24-hour period. Spike wonders whether AdSense works, and queries if people are just getting turned off advertising.
AdSense does work - if it didn't, we wouldn't see competitors piling into the field. The problem in Spike's case was not AdSense but the fact that the jump he noticed in hits, from 30 to 90, still resulted in too small a number to be meaningful.
It's a matter of mathematics. With 90 hits, a page will occasionally get a click; most times it will not. From experience, with 900 hits a day, a page will still often get no clicks.
As I said, it's a matter of building; it's a matter of time.
One good guide to this is here, one of Orble's guide posts. It says that Zcars, by far Orble's best-read blog with just over 20,000 individual readers (readers, not hits) a day, makes about US$40 a day.
That is AdSense earnings, so it's reasonable to extrapolate backwards. For example, 100 individual readers a day will earn about 20 cents a day (Orble bloggers should not forget that this is split 50:50 with Orble). The good news is that, according to Orble, traffic of 20,000 readers a day is getting close to the critical mass where Zcars can start negotiating paid display ads, getting away from the vagaries of AdSense and into the realm of steady income.
May we all reach that day.
It would be appropriate to repeat here that traffic will grow automatically only up to a point - a point that is far short of a decent income. To build a serious readership, you need tightly-focused blog subject matter, and content that informs and educates, or which makes readers think. It also helps if you know how to write well.
Spike has all those ingredients at wordophilia.com. Now he just needs patience
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