It is now the 12th - exactly 2 months since my last post. I didn’t realize this when I woke up and decided to blog today, but it’s an interesting and encouraging coincidence. Today is the beginning of the renewal of this blog, which I am determined to continue.

Where’d Matt Go?

Two months ago I disappeared almost entirely from blogging since I wrote my previous post. I stopped writing my blog, I stopped reading other people’s blogs, and I most definitely stopped paying attention to the myriad of statistics that I normally track for this blog. I did this because I simply ran out of time, much more so than I had ever imagined. This shortage repeatedly extended itself as I found myself picking-up more website work, marking business student exams, finding a better place to live, handling a failing hardware emergency, and finishing off what was technically a school term.

Truthfully I didn’t intend to stay away this long, but I fell into the trap of breaking the blogging habit. Much like exercise, dieting, or anything else that requires a regular commitment, a short pause became a very long one. By the new year I could have been writing again, but I put it off longer. Today I decided enough was enough.

The Blog’s Been a Bit Neglected

The break has proved to be an interesting experiment for this blog itself. A big deal is made about how blogging encourages links, viral spreading of content, search engines love it, it prevents global warming, and so on. Not blogging for two months is a massive setback. Inevitably daily readership is lost, RSS fails, rankings crumble, and traffic goes down the tube. I’ve noticed all of these happen and in my return I’ve prepared for the worst. Here’s the sometimes surprising good and bad of the past two months:

1. December was terrible: it must have been the holidays, as traffic and Adsense revenues both plummeted at an alarming rate. January has shown an awesome rebound.
2. The Comments Keep Coming In: real human beings are still reading. I still regularly receive comments on my previous articles.
3. Search engines still love me: my page rank may have dropped from 5 to 4, but the search referals are going strong. A single well written article really does mean a lifetime of traffic.
4. I no longer remember my Amazon Associates password by heart.
5. I have a back-up business opportunity: thanks to my lost virginity article, I will forever have a strong presence with people searching for “virginity stories”. It’s one of my top searches.
6. This blog does have serious passive income potential: the fact that I have continued to earn money and receive traffic while doing absolutely no updating or promotion of the blog is proof positive that it does have passive income stream qualities. Every penny I have made since I stopped writing is money that has come in regardless of what I have been up to. In the blog’s current form this hasn’t amounted to much, but hey it’s less than a year old!
7. Most blog’s don’t make it a year for a reason: this has been a very time consuming project and I can understand now why I hear about the failure rates of blogs so frequently. It can be demoralizing in these early stages to see a relatively low return on your efforts, and when much higher return activities are available it can be difficult to put in the proper time to this blog. Nevertheless I am determined to beat the statistic, and I am positive that with patience I can make this one of the top blogs out there.

I’m going to continue on writing about entreprenurial topics, and now that I get to manage my business fulltime I hope to have some interesting new insights and stories to tell. To anybody that’s been checking this thing for two whole months, thanks for sticking by me!

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This entry was posted on Friday, January 12th, 2007 at 10:39 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.