To Blog Or Not To Blog
Well as most people in the blogging world know content is king and without content people won’t read your blog. Now what happens if you’ve run out of things to talk about?
Well in the past few days not too much has happened in my world. Sure CES is over and a lot of other blogs and techie sites have been posting like crazy about all the happenings with that, but I did not go and I haven’t really looking into it much. Yes Apple has released the name of their cell phone the iPhone, but Cisco is now suing them because they have a VoIP phone with the same name. Sony revealed their 70 inch LCD display which I have read and heard that it is quite impressive.
In my previous posts, Vancouver was hit by a lovely dump of snow, and with temperatures still hovering around -10 degrees Celsius, nothing is melting away. There are still plenty of car accidents due to the compressed snow. We’re expected to get more snow this Saturday and Sunday.
There is some debate about what Vancouver will do with the collapse of BC Place Stadium’s roof. Do they rebuild the roof or do they construct a new venue for the opening and closing ceremonies for the 2010 Winter Olympics? They are already over budget so let’s hope they decided to repair.
Google’s AdSense: Now I’ve only made a total of $4.88 since I started using it a few months ago, my CLR (click through rate) is under 1%. What is the trick? I’ve seen where people get $10-$15 a month and then there are those with $3000+ a month. I’d be happy with just a couple hundred a month to help pay some of my bills. I guess if I get more traffic I will have a better chance of someone clicking on those lovely links. Or do I just scrap the AdSense and wait until I get the traffic to make it worthwhile. Google won’t pay out until you have at least $100 anyway.
I’ve had a couple more offers to helping people fix/modify their web page scripts. I will eventually look at perhaps doing full web pages but for now fixing small issues is fun and helps me build a small portfolio and gain some more experience. Reminds me, I need to clean up the code for this custom blog of mine and let one of my buddies use it for his site.
So when you have want to blog, but you don’t have anything to blog about, what do you do? I guess this isn’t too bad of a post, a little bit about things I’ve talked in previous posts kind of like a summary.
I usually blog about my day at school, work, or whatever else is going on with me. Perhaps you could post about what you did that day at work, or one of your hobbies.
I need to work on my blog a bit too, I’m running Wordpress, and I need to apply the security update, as well as apply a new theme.
This wasn’t too bad of a post - but for AdSense to display relevant ads it might be a good idea to stick to one subject per post.
Then to get ideas on what to post about… if your niche is tech then you should frequently watch the news and other blogs to look for tech news that you can blog about - Blogging about something that recently happened can bring you some nice traffic.
Does your custom blog system ping Technorati and other services? If not then you should do it manually after each post.
Also, I would definitely try adding revenue sources. Like John Chow says - you shouldn’t put all your eggs in the AdSense basket
Try affiliate programs, selling text link ads, etc…
Hey thanks for the comments.
Work wouldnt be all that much fun to blog about. Perhaps ones day it could be.
I try to remember to ping Technorati when I finish a post, I at least remember to update my feed. I’ll have to look into seeing how to ping Technorati via a script or such.
I will be looking into more techy type things this weekend as well as a bit of digital photography.
I’ve tried to sign up for Text Ad Links but my PR was not high enough. I have AdBrite ads, but they don’t seem to be set up quite right yet.
I try to keep an ear open to recent events. That does seem to be decent traffic. Just so many things I could blog about really. I’ll have to choose a major one and stick with it. Perhaps blogging about the other things here and there.
Tyler, keep with it and try not to pay attention to the Adsense earnings and let that discourage you. I’m in a similar boat as I have only earned about $20 in the months I have been running Adsense but I am trying to keep up with the quality content.
If you can build up traffic, I think the clicks will come. But it can be a bummer to work hard on your site and content without getting any clicks when you see these made-for-adsense sites with no content and they are racking up the clicks like crazy.