My old blog was a success. I had ten faithful readers who commented on my every post, just as I commented on their every post. We would write things that were inspired by each other. We told jokes to each other and wished each other well on our various adventures. We were, in short, friends. It was a rare day when this blog had more than a dozen visitors. But I would get the occasional odd passerby that would pause before hitting the Next Blog button again. I didn’t get more than a handful of comments on any post, but it was a comment that was directly related to the post. I got spam once in a while, but not much. When you start a blog you really don’t know what to expect. Why bother if no one was reading what I was writing?
My new blog, still only a few months old, gets about a thousand hits a day now, but I am not sure how long that will last. I had one wildly successful post that has single handedly brought me tens of thousands of hits. That’s how to blog, right? This has also brought me a small trickle of income from my Adsense Ads and Amazon links. I get a few comments that I would consider normal related to the post comments. But by and large, my comments lend toward the odd. I get a bit of spam with links pointing who knows where. I get people talking to the subject of the post as if I have a direct line to them. I get wild profanity filled tirades that seem to have no direction and no purpose. I know how a radio talk show host or syndicated columnist must feel as I am called an idiot on a regular basis. Make a blog, be called an idiot.
So which of these two blogs was the more successful? I killed the old blog, and while it is possible for me to track down my old blog buddies and start commenting with them again, I have no real desire to do so. This is not that kind of blog. I could have kept the old one and started the new as well. There is nothing wrong with having a personal blog and a money making blog. But it takes so much of my time just working on the blog that I have. Well, I mean, it takes up most of my free time-and there is not enough blog money to retire yet. Blogging is still fun, for all the desires I have to make more than pocket change with it.
To me, a successful money earning blog will make me about three hundred dollars a day from blog ads and allow me to quit my dreaded boring ‘real’ job. The fantasy would involve a lot more than three hundred dollars a day from blog ads and retirement in The South of France-where I would write regular blog posts about Cheese and Wine. I am a bit far away from the three hundred a day and God alone knows how far from the South of France. I have moved up, for the time being anyway, on Alexa from 2,500,000 to 868,000 or so.
But is it a realistic idea at all? Are blogs meant to be a means to the South of France, or Maine, or Hawaii? How can I make three hundred dollars a day from blog ads? I need to look into that a bit more. Or if it is still fun, will wanting to make money ruin it? Create a blog and get rich sounds nice in theory.
Maybe I do need to find a few people to read and comment on. If I only had a few more hours in the day.
