Being one who never listens to advise especially from people who I don’t know , I decided to do my own little experiment. I would post one article per week in February and stick with only 3 blog moneytizing methods on 3 sites I run. I would then judge the results not from the number of rss users as most make money blogs do, but by the amount of money in my pocket at the end of the month.

• Make Money blog - This one
• A General Blog on a specific group
• A very Trade Specific Web site

I would also use traffic from the same sources and see exactly what the results were.The results were eye opening to say the least.

Without a doubt, it was not an issue of me blogging myself to poverty, Make money blogging niche is the most useless niche in the world. Let us see the common threads in the experiment.

Post 1 article a week. Stumble the post after 3 days ,then look at the rss subscribers, traffic results, income from Adsense, income from advertising, income from affiliates. That was all.

1. Posting An Article

This was a personal result I was tracking. When trying to write posts I needed to check how long it took me to research, and then post the article and how I felt about it later. The feeling part is subjective ,but since I am the only person deciding on this, then I can say it was objective. It’s my blog anyway so I should be the judge of this. I don’t know about you, but while researching on a topic I really liked, I felt much better about the results and I even had more to write about the topic.

I took less time writing especially on the trade specific site. In general, it took me half the time to write an article on the general blog it took me on the make money blog and a quarter the time in the trade specific blog. What that means , is that I would be earning more in less time in the niche specific blog than a general or a make money blog.

2. RSS Subscriber Statistics

I am sure that you have had a RSS subscriber rush of say 30 in a day. You come back the next day and you are back to 0. If you have a make money online blog, that is what happens. in the general blog, the rss subscribers were less to the point of no new subscribers in a week. In the trade specific blog, the results were amazing. The rss subscribers were increasing each day and sticking.

For the make money blog, I owe that to the fact that most subscribers to this list have like another 100 blogs they are following and if you post once a week, you are considered not a serious blogger. so your subscriber count will be going up and down like a yoyo until you become John Chow.

In the general blog, I put that down to knowledge about rss. For example if you have a general blog for women who knit, they might come to your site to see the latest knitting trends but most have a problem knowing what RSS is. Most general blog readers are not internet savvy yet. Why not write an article on how to use rss or a tool on your site. You might be surprised as I was on the results.

In the trade specific web site, if you give good information, they will not leave your blog. There is nothing else to say about that.

3. Stumble Upon Traffic Statistics

Stumble Upon traffic is very fickle especially if you have a make money online blog. I had 700 hits in one post. The next day I had 0 traffic from stumble upon on the same topic. Now that is what we call being deflated. It is absolutely useless traffic on a make money blog unless you use the suggestions I will give at the end of the post.

For the two other blogs, stumble upon traffic was consistent and it became the gift that kept on giving. I still have over 200 visits stumbles a day on a post that I did on the niche blog 4 weeks ago. My advice is to use good tags and a great review on your article.

A further advantage is that all the posts on the general and niche blogs are now listed in the top 5 in Google on the tags that I used for the stumble upon traffic. Use good tags and you will be surprised with the traffic you will get.

4. General Traffic Patterns

I believe if you are going to make money on the Internet, you had better get search engine traffic. The best traffic is search engine traffic. After tracking my web statistics, it was obvious that the traffic from search engines took more time on my sites, bought from my sites and made me some money.

In view of this, a make money blog ,unless niched to a particular aspect of make money blogging is not going to get you a suitable number of such traffic. For example, trying to find a topic that has not been blogged about by better bloggers than you will take you time. I think that is why we are always advised to write more than one post in this niche.

The best and most consistent traffic is coming from the search engines in my trade specific blog, then the general blog then the make money blog. It is all about time, if one article in a trade specific blog brings me a client who will buy something from me, why should I post on a make money blog when I am tired?

5. Income To Your Web site

I don’t think I need to tell you about the income but from lowest to highest it was the make money blog, then the general site, then the trade specific site. The source of income did not matter. Whether it was adsense, ad space, affiliates, even the dreaded paid to post.

This is what separates the haves and the have not’s. It is the income that is important. I don’t care about the number of RSS subscribers or page views. If a web site is not making money, it is a hobby. I have other hobbies other than writing articles. The difference in income was staggering and made me think on better ways to utilize this site. There is no way I will make a million blogging on this site and so there shall be a new focus.

After looking at the results above, the following is the way forward.

1. Time is money. Trying to find time especially when I am working another job is not easy. So there needs to be a different way to manage the time spent on the 3 different sites in order to maximize the income. Telling me to post 5 articles a day that earn me exactly 3 dollars a month, compared to posting to a niche site where I earn 5 dollars a day on 1 post a week is really the wrong advice.

2. Offer Something New. I have to find something I am good at to offer to my readers . I am working on that now and will be ready very soon. I can not stop this experiment until we find out what works and what does not.

3. Monetizing .- I have read a lot of articles on how Foolish John Chow does not care about Google page ranks etc. I now know why. He really was not making anything with it compared to his other sources. Does it make sense to have 2000 uniques on your site and get only 20 cts from the Google? I think most of us make a mistake thinking that we are here to make Google happy. We are here to make money, and any way you can do it, then do it.

If you find yourself in a situation where having a good page rank is not making you any reasonable money, why should you care about being slapped by Google ? Find another way to make full use of your traffic and subscribers. I am still very new in this but I can assure you, I would do the same as John Chow if I was in his position. Find a way to make money on your blog but the results I found above are just plain and clear. This niche is not one where you follow the usual steps and make money. You have to think outside the box and figure out your own way to monetise your site.

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