Are you stressing over your blog, are you endlessly tweaking your ads or searching for that one killer secret that will bring the cash flooding in? Do you worry you are wasting your time .. Are you chasing pennies?
I have lived in two different worlds many of you will be familiar with. One world slices the day into chunks with a pound/dollar value (WorkWorld), success is tasks done, money in the bank. The other, BlogWorld, seems to not have the same rigid concept of time as the rest of humanity. If it wasn’t for my daughter going to school five days a week I wouldn’t know what day it was let alone what time it is. Bloggers live on a continuum and measure the passage of time mostly as “how long is it since my last post”. If it’s not possible to value our hours, how do we bloggers put a value on what we do?
To further compound the problem much of what we do doesn’t seem that productive. I just spent an hour catching up on my subscribed blogs, commenting here, checking another blog hasn’t been defaced in the last ten minutes.. can you put a value on that time? Am I pouring pennies down the toilet?
Some posts can provide the main source of revenue for a whole blog. It is particularly gratifying when you see a post lovingly crafted bring in thousands of visitors, especially when you see the adsense stats ratcheting up higher and higher. A killer post too can have a knock-on effect for the rest of the blog, bringing in whole new rafts of visitors who become subscribers. How many of you remember the post that put you over your blog tipping point? But these successful posts can raise your own expectations and actually cause you more stress as you try to recapture whatever it was you got right.
The thing is you do not know at the time of writing if this work in progress is going to become your new darling. Every post starts out with the potential to be your new flagship.
Every post can’t beat the last, you can only make them the best you can. You must go into each post with a winners mentality and do not worry about if this post will not be as good as your last. While performancing is about achieving revenue from your blog you shouldn’t necessarily have money on your mind all the time.
Rather than trying to force each post to be a killer cash generator, just do the right things and the rewards will follow. Instead of chasing a big payday post, create a good blog.
My inspiration for this post came from the comment here from Elvira.
Another thing I do is virtually always respond to all comments individually. I dislike sites that never respond to any comments or don’t allow comments
This got me thinking, why isn’t answering comments commonplace? All I can think is many bloggers are of the opinion they are “too busy” for these simple courtesies. Got to get another post out. Got to start another blog. Got to tweak my ads. My thought is, who can afford not to be courteous? It could be the “little things” that make all the difference.
Your visitors are your lifeblood! Loyalty is so important, you need to care for your members! This means you need to spare some time tending your blog like a good gardner if you want to have a good cash crop come next year. It comes back to the point Andy made – do sweat the details.
Which brings me neatly to my point. Yes we have to think about money but if you think about cash to the exclusion of all else you will not create something of real value. See your blog as a whole. Don’t rush, don’t force it, don’t chase pennies. Do give your blog the care and attention it deserves, the rewards will be all the greater for it.