Another Adsense Cheque

Have received yet another adsense cheque payment. The amount is around US$120 which is quite reasonable considering the amount of work that I have put in. Or should I say that I have hardly put in any effort.

The earnings have still be unpredictable and though there are days when my adsense earnings can reach as high as $7, there are days it also falters for no apparent reason. New blog posts and stuff just don't seem to work. Sometimes, it almost makes more sense for me to just stop posting new articles and stuff and the adsense earnings actually still come in!

Amazing if you think about it. It is really the Parato principle where 20% of the work drives 80% of the results. Problem is I have yet to identified what I am doing right or wrong. And that will probably take me a longer time to figure out.

Quantity or Quality or Blog Posts

Am I writing right?

In pushing my boundaries, I have tried to push for both quality articles as well as quantity. When I write a lot, I realise that the quality of my posts tends to drop. But which is more important: Quantity or Quality?

I guess we can debate till the cows come home and never really be certain.

What is perhaps most important is ranking high up in Google's search ranking.

I remember doing searches on some obscure topics before and realise that blogs can make it to the top of the rankings even though the postings had no quality in them at all. Sometimes, it almost seems that it was a "cut and paste" job done.

So quantity or quality? You decide

Increase Readership of Your Blog

There are many ways to increase readership of your blog. For people who are famous, it is probably very easy. If you have a large network of friends who are willing to read your blog, it also helps. However, what I have achieved is to actually increase the readership of my blog without relying on any of these factors.

Well, content is really only ONE aspect of the entire equation. You could literally write a Nobel winning peace of work with the most ground-breaking discovery but it could be lost in the ocean of information in the internet.

So sorry. One good article or even one excellent article on a blog will not improve your readership by much.

Just think about it. What do people read everyday?

Answer: Newspapers

Why do people read newspapers everyday? If you can pinpont the reasons why people read newspapers, it should give you a clue on what readers are looking for in a blog too. Okay, there might be some difference but the idea is generally the same.

How Often To Blog?

New bloggers always face this dilemma on deciding how frequently to put up new posts in their blogs.

Frequency versus Regularity

Before discussing how frequently to put up new new posts in your blog, I think that we should clarify the difference between frequency and regularity.

Frequency is the number of times a new post is put up in a week or day.

Regularity is how often the blog is updated.

While it might seem that these two are the same, they are essentially different. A blogger could be putting up new posts very frequently but not regularly. This could be the serial blogger who has what I called "a posting spurt" where he posts 10 to 20 posts in a single day only to leave the blog alone for a few months before posting again.

On the otherhand, another blogger might post very infrequently but still does it on a regular basis. This kind of blogs are usually personal blogs where the bloggers update it once a week or month. Though the postings are not so frequent, they are nevertheless regular and a reader who is visiting the blog knows that when they visit the blog in a month's time, it will be different.

How Often To Blog?

How often to blog depends on the kind of readers you are expecting. If you post too frequently, you might chase them away as it is usually impossible to keep up with the quality of posts. Many experts agree that the posting frequency should be around one posting a day. New blogs should strive to put up at least 2-3 posts a day.

The issue however is not about frequency but about regular postings. If people are left to guess when to visit your blog, they will give up after sometime especially if they noticed that your blog is not updated regularly. Who wants to read stale news afterall?

How often you should blog also depends on the purpose of your blog and its audience. Once you determine who your audience are, you can safely decide how often you should put up new postings on the blog.

Blogging Does not Equal to Earning Money

Some people think that by blogging frequently, they can earn lots of money through affiliate programs or adsense. This is certainly not true.

I have a few blogs and I realised that certain blogs which I have not updated for weeks or months are still earning me a tidy sum of money each month. Talk about passive income!

On the other hand, certain blogs which I update very regularly and frequently are drawing a much smaller online income. So from this, I can vaguely conclude that though there is a correlation between frequency of posting and adsense earnings, there is certainly no simple cause and effect that can be derived.