Ever since I put out my hat as a professional blogger last summer, I’ve been more fatigued on a regular basis than with any other career. Problogging is hard work. This no doubt also comes from poor eating and sleeping habits while I surf the net researching for future posts. Well things came to a head when, just over a week ago, I got hit hard with flu. I was so sick that I slept from the Sunday night that I got sick to Tuesday morning. All my plans for writing blog entries and boosting my traffic were delayed more than a week. But what I found was that my break from blogging didn’t affect my traffic all that much, or so my forecasting charts seem to prove.
Now how is this possible? While my traffic is still steadily climbing, it’s low enough that any sharp spikes will be noticeable and significant. But it appears that I’ve reached a high enough level of regular daily traffic that my collection of articles can sustain itself. In fact, while my traffic during last week didn’t set any new records, it stayed close to my current watermark. What’s more, my 7-day rolling total ad clicks did fairly well, almost hitting previous highs. This was also reflected in my 7-day rolling total revenue.
Because I am an informational blogger for the most part, much of my traffic is search engine-based. I don’t yet have a lot of regular readers, mainly because I don’t spend enough time daily on a single blog to cultivate regulars. Eventually, I’ll need to do something about this, because repeat visitors are a primary source of high daily traffic, and thus advertising income. The key will be to focus on a small handful of blogs, then write for them daily/ regularly, instead of spreading my efforts all over the place and only posting new content weekly on any given blog.
But in the interim, I’ve managed to build up traffic with a small collection of several hundred informational posts covering several topics. It’s hard work, but it can be done. Had I stuck with a single topic, I’d probably not have achieved current traffic levels – some of my topics are obscure. I’ve managed to stay diversified, however.
It means a lot more work and a lot of research to write clearly about several topics instead of just one. This diversification is probably a longer-term way to becoming a successful blogger. But traffic growth is organic and thus likely more stable. Income growth is slow but steady. This just means that you can take some time off without seriously affecting your current levels of traffic or income.
I’m interested in knowing what contingency plans other bloggers have in place. Do you still blog daily? Or have you realized that blogging, like any career, requires you to take some time for yourself? Maybe you’re a machine, and you can blog daily without fail. What do you plan to do when you get sick? Do you see blogging as only a short-term venture, something you’ll stop doing after a few years? Or do you think of it as a long-term career?
If you’re wondering whether blogging is worth the effort, I might be able to help. I can’t always tell you if your topic is lucrative. However, as I’ll discuss in a later post here soon, you can use a few simple mathematical formulas and some graphs to forecast your blog traffic and income, both short-term and long-term. Once you see the forecasts, it’s easier to tell yourself that you’re achieving some successes, however small.