This Is My Blog, There Are Many Blogs Like It But This One Is Mine

Some people make money with blogs, others don’t. Then there are some that just blog for the sake of blogging. That is what I do. This is my first and last post about blogging.

I have had a website of one kind or another for quite some time. You can see the progress that I have had over the years at Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. The site has almost always been a place for me to post items of interest to me for sharing with my friends and family.

Some years ago the trend of blogging appeared. There was now a name for what I was doing with my website, and the new software was becoming available to make adding content to the site easier. I started to use the new software, and it was indeed easier and much faster that hand coding my own HTML.

As time went on I slowly (very slowly) became aware that people with websites much like my own were making money off their sites. I was way behind the curve with this trend and I knew nothing about it. So, after doing some research, which didn’t take very long, I put my first Google AdSense ad on my site. The thoughts of money rushing into my checking account filled my head.

Nothing happened.

The important thing about monetizing your blog is that people arrive at your site and click on your ads. In order to arrive at your site they have to have some reason to be there, and that reason is content. My site content is more about what I feel like writing rather than a means to get people to my site to see and click on my ads.

If you use StumbleUpon, and I highly recommend that you do, and you have the correct interest checked, you will find you are able to stumble across hundreds of blogs about blogging. These blogs will give you tons of advice on how to make money with your blog. They will tell you about optimizing your site so that search engines find it, making sure that your ad is in the right place, and advice about how to get people to look at your blog, which is the most important thing.

So, I joined some of the programs that are available and added ads to my site and waited. I continued to read articles about blogging and attempted to use the advice I was given. The problem is that I just wasn’t interested in making blogging a full time job. The people who make modest amounts of money from blogging need to continually generate new content across the multiple sites they need to maintain just to keep that modest revenue stream flowing.

A recurring piece of advice on many of the sites was to determine your niche, and stay in it. Well, my niche is me and I am interested in many things. I have come to the realization that I am not interested in posting about one specific thing. I want to post whatever I feel like whenever I feel like. I’m not interested in maintaining a posting schedule where I feel like I need to produce content on a deadline. It’s just not what I’m interested in doing.

You will notice that all the ad content has been removed from my site, as I am no longer interested in attempting to generate any money from this blog. This will continue to be a place where I write when the mood strikes about anything that I feel like. If you like it, then feel free to read it. If you don’t, so be it.

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