Number of Blogs

My aim is to have 20 blogs on the go at once. Monitor the progress and drop any that aren't working. If I have an idea I will kill a blog to make space for it. I don't know if 20 is the right number. I have a full time job and a big project outside work that absorbs a lot of time so I may be giving myself too much blogging to do and would do better to cut the number down. Twenty was pretty arbitrary. I listened to a podcast from Darren Rowse last night in which he said that he got to 30 before cutting down to 2. I will have to keep an eye on this. At the moment I have 8 blogs up on Blogger and plenty of ideas for more. All of them are currently getting the level of attention from me that I think they deserve. I won't be able to keep up the equal time for all of them for much longer, but that is okay because that is part of the learning experience. They are all quite different and my future ideas are all pretty distinct too. If I can reach twenty genuinely different blog ideas that is in itself a bit of an achievement, so I will stick at it for now.

I had thought it was all about traffic?

My blogging project is chugging along nicely so far and has sort of met my expectations so far. Modest traffic and some earnings, while learning a bit about how it all works and getting my brain around the ways of the web. So far so good I was thinking, and was also beginning to settle into that slightly smug feeling you get when everything is under control and going according to plan. Then yesterday something shook me out of that mind set. I had thought, its all about traffic isn't it. Spot the niches that generate traffic, optimise to pull in eyeballs then work out how to turn that traffic into income. Well over June I was pulling in steady adsense revenue, 10-30p a day and with an upward trend. Just what I was expecting basically. But yesterday I had a quite normal day in terms of traffic and number of people clicking. But for some reason adsense rewarded me out of all proportion. I pulled in a well over £1. If anything, yesterday was one of my lower days traffic-wise. This has really got me thinking. If I can get the return per click up by 250% just like that, maybe I should give more attention to what adverts I am attracting than I have. It might be much more valuable than chasing that which simply generates a lot of visits to my sites. I need to go back to Google Analytics and see what analysis tools are available to work out not just where my visitors are coming from, but what is the most lucrative thing I can do with them once I get them. Having said that, I mustn't lose sight of the goal of having other income sources than Adsense. I love the ease with which Adsense allows you to make money from a blog but especially for the locally orientated blogs I really need to sell direct advertising space to businesses. Quite apart from the financial considerations, I think if I am to be able to look myself in the eye and think that I am a professional blogger, albeit a part-time one, I have to have proper customers who pay me via an invoice because they value the service I am offering them.

Review of June

Well June was a solid start to my blogging career. I now have 5 blogs on the go on Blogger. I have ideas for another 5 to start in July. My 15 minute burst technique is working well so far, though I am doing 2 or even 3 bursts on some longer and more intricate posts. I am learning a lot as I go along. For instance I now realise that by having adsense on all my blogs I am reducing my earnings per click due to the formula that Google uses. So be it. I don't actually need the money but I do want the information I get from who clicks where. I can work on maximising my income from my traffic when I have more. On the subject of traffic, my main (non-Blogger) blog pulled in 1,692 visits and 3,163 page views. I was very happy with those figures. There was enough to do a detailed analysis of what drew people into the blog and what kept them there giving me some good pointers as to how to develop it. Traffic on my Blogger blogs was derisory. But even there, I think I can begin to pick out a winner. What I need to do is keep my efforts on these blogs even, despite the temptation to concentrate on the one that seems to be the winner so far. The evidence is that nobody else is reading this blog, but if it is ever read I am sure you will be interested in how much money I actually made. Prepare to be underwhelmed. All this activity has only netted me less than £7 of actual earnings. My target is about £1,000 per month. I have a long way to go yet. But I still think it is achievable in maybe 18 months. What happens in July will be interesting but I really want to be netting so decent cash by next January.