How Did My Blogs Fare While I Was Away

I was asked in a comment to discuss what happened with traffic to my blogs and income while I was away hiking. I was away from blogging for the entire month of August Each blog had a message that stated that I was away and suggested that people play the scavenger hunt I had running on My Quality Day.

The results are actually quite mixed, so I'll discuss each one separately.

The blog Get Off The Couch News lost about half of its traffic. It is a long-established blog, with posts going back to June 2007. Quite a few of the hits there are on older posts coming from searches for specific topics.

The blog North Country Trail News dropped from an average of about 500 views per day down to about 200 per day. I was kind of disappointed about this. I did some promotion among trail people, and thought that would show up as a spike, but it didn't. This blog has been running since November 2008, not even a year yet, and its readership has tripled, but being gone for a month really hurt. I did manage to put up a couple of posts from the trail. It's coming back up, but I know I'll have to demonstrate a commitment to good articles. It's something of a niche blog anyway, so I don't expect it will ever have a huge readership.

The blog My Quality Day suffered the least. Of course, this is because I had posts scheduled that went up every other day with the scavenger hunt clues, and I managed to add a few "live" posts from my hike. Nevertheless, my Alexa rank there had risen to 81,xxx, and now it has fallen to 91,xxx. Still, that's under 100,000, so I can't complain! Views had been averaging about 1000 a day, and dropped to about 500.

This blog, Just Throw Money, suffered the most. It is the newest, and the traffic dropped off to almost nothing. I can understand that, but I'm trying to build a readership here too. The premise here is, can a blogger make money without signing up for thousands of sleazy offers, schemes, and time wasters. The verdict is still out on that.

So what happened to the income? It pretty much dried up. All the sites where I need to do something to generate income were unattended. Even on Adgitize, I only managed to click ads a few days. I made $6.94 in August, not enough to offset the $14.00 I paid to continue my ad. AdSense trudged along bringing in its two to five cents a day. I returned home in time to do what I could to gain income at Shared Reviews, but our earnings from SR for August haven't been posted yet. I expect to know that in the next couple of days, and am anticipating something in the $20 range. There isn't much of any way to compare this with a "normal" month there because they just came back to paying after a long hiatus. I did make $31.57 there in July, and it was just paid to me today. (But it's a lot of work for that money... yet most of these online earning deals take way too much time for what you get.)

My conclusion is that leaving a blog pretty much unattended for a month is really a serious wound. Not a death blow, but it can cause a lot of damage to whatever reputation one has built up. I wish I could have scheduled more posts ahead of time, but I'm right out on the edge of what I can keep up with to maintain four blogs, so it just didn't happen. I continue to try to maintain fresh content, without participating in weekly memes. I enjoy things like "Looking at the Sky Friday," and others, but my ego is large enough that I just want original content. We'll see if I can continue to deliver.

web ad income Sept 6 (4 blogs, 2 web sites, writing): Adsense $.04 Adgitize $.54 Project Wonderful $.05 Shareapic $.01 Clixsense $.07 Microworkers $.07 Textbroker $39.40 ______________________ Total: $40.19