Common Questions Of The One Month Old Blogger

My hope is that these blog questions are useful to more than just brand new bloggers.

So you’ve been blogging for a few weeks now and have many blog questions that have risen since you started the process.  Well, let’s see if we can’t answer a few and maybe raise a few more.

“When should I start putting ads up on my blog?”

One of the things most bloggers have in common is the idea of making money blogging.  They can’t wait to put up their first ads so they can start watching the money roll on in.  But then you quickly realize that it’s not that easy and certainly not that quick.  But this doesn’t mean you can’t start playing with some advertisements on day one.  This is Darren Rowse’s philosophy.  He feels that if you wait too long and let your readers get accustomed to zero ads and then start adding them, you’re more likely to put off your readers than if you were to put them up from the get go.  This certainly makes sense.

But one of the blog questions you have to ask yourself is, “Is this REALLY where you plan to make your money blogging?”  It’s hard to make more than pennies a day without some solid traffic, so a new blog can’t expect to produce much with something like Adsense for a long time to come (unless your name is Leo Babauta).  You may find that it will be affiliate sales or even selling your own information products that will bring home the bacon.  If this is the case, having the clutter of AdSense may not be what you want for your blog.

I see many proglogger sites (real money makers) that use both, so maybe it should be a no brainier.  I used to place AdSense ads on “Motivate Thyself”, but dropped them after only seeing $10/month and knowing that it wouldn’t be for many months that I’d even see that $100 minimum (the amount you need to make before Google will cut you a check).  You could argue that some money is better than none, but it wasn’t worth the clutter for the low dollar amount.  For me, selling your own products and connecting with some solid affiliate programs makes more sense until you hit those super high traffic numbers that make AdSense a viable option.

“When Should I start seeing MONEY from the ads I place on my blog?”

There’s no way to say for sure, but I can say this; it’s probably longer than you think or hope, but will happen if you are patient and have a plan.  Most new bloggers (and many veterans as well) seek to monetize their blogging pursuits with very little aim.  Throw up some ads here and there and then try to build traffic like crazy.  This will eventually semi-work, but the real money is acquired by the blogger with a plan.  A strategy to make the most of every single visit they receive on their blog.  Learn to maximize the ‘worth’ of your traffic and you will make money doing what you love.

“How often should I post?”

This one’s been beat to death (well, so have the others ), but the common rule of thumb is one per day or at least one per week day.  Blogopolis tends to really die down over the weekend, so you won’t take much of a traffic hit by leaving out Saturday and Sunday, but for consistency you should consider the other days.

Now let’s look at the other sides of this question.  What about multiple times a day?  ProBlogger does this and you definitely see this at the mega blogs like LifeHacker and Techcrunch.  But many of these mutli-posters are backed by a team of bloggers.  Darren Rowse of ProBlogger does this for a living so he has more time than most ‘evening bloggers.”   If you can’t put out quality content multiple times a day, don’t post multiple times a day.  Also, many readers don’t want more than a single post per day anyway.  Your not the only blogger in their reader, so you may just be turning much of your readership off with this frequency.  This isn’t to say that some blogging situations don’t require multi-daily posts.  We just need to make sure ours is one of them.

Then we have the less frequent posting schedule.  It’s pretty simple with this one; unless you write some seriously LONG posts or content that takes a while to chew on, you will generally receive less traffic with a low posting count.  And if traffic is one of the things your after, this isn’t for you.

“When should I put a Feed Counter on my blog?”

New bloggers are often antsy to show off their reader numbers.  When we first start out we want others to know, “Hey, people actually read my blog!”  This is great!  We SHOULD be excited.  But a common rule of thumb states that nothing draws a crowd like a crowd.  Show that you have 5 readers and you may end up turning off some newcomers.  I know this sounds terrible and I really DO wish that every new visitor cared about the content over anything else, but the fact is, bloggers want to be a part of large groups.  Even small, large groups.  If I’m Joe-New-Visitor and I see that this blog has 100 readers I’m less likely to question my stay than if I see 1.

So if I had to throw out a number I would say, if you itching to put out a counter, wait until you hit 100.  Sure, this will fluctuate.  One day it might drop to 92 and then hit 107 the following day, but around the 100 mark is a good rule of thumb.  But hey, if you want to lay it out there that you’re rock’n 5 readers, more power to you!  Most bloggers know when they see such low numbers that they’re looking at a blog that probably just went up.  Watching those numbers rise from day one could be a fun process and one that your readers might enjoy being a part of.

This is just a few of the common questions I had when I first started out so I hope you found them valuable as you look for the right answers.  They are all hard questions to answer and none have a ‘RIGHT’ answer, necessarily.  So I hope my answers to some common blog questions were helpful, even if just for direction in finding YOUR specific answer.

Eric

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