Reviewing Your Blog

Sometimes it pays to step back and take a good look at your blog or blogs. It's easy to get into a bit of a 'rut' so to speak, where you keep churning out the same stuff over and over, and forget to try new things, new templates, new ad placements, or even new affiliate programs.

Blogging is still new enough that all the science hasn't been worked out yet. Especially the science of making money from blogs. For one thing, there is no standard approach that works with everything, everytime, that is why experimenting with ad colors and formats, as well as the location matters.

It also pays to experiment within your niche. Yes, it is good to have tightly focused niche subjects, it certainly helps with advertisements and it also helps with the search engines. But, ask yourself occasionally, are their other related topics that are still within your niche, that would be useful to your readers and still be on topic. Sometimes using your keyword tool is very useful for this, because it may point out some keywords related to your blog topic that you haven't use, and that you can use to create a post or two.

Readers looking for information on cottages for example, are probably also interested in looking at information about boats or canoes, or even home renovations and repairs. These may not be exactly about cottages, but they are certainly related. I use these technique with success on my Cottage Chronicles blog. Since I began that blog, I have posted about much more than simple cottage ownership. I have also written about small engine repair, boat building, boats in general, log cabins, fishing, hunting, animals and wildlife, even bird feeders. It's a broad niche, or at least it can be, at least the variety keeps me from getting too stale.

Even here in this blog, which I originally intended to be about making money with Adsense, has grown to include information about other affilate and pay-per-click programs that we can use to make money.

The trouble is a niche that is too tightly focused is that you run the risk of eventually running out of material to write about. That is the death knell for your blog and for earning money from it. You need good quality, fresh, updated information that is posted regularly to maintain a successful blog.

I am the first to admit I am guilty of not doing that with this blog, so I am not knocking you, just suggesting it is something we all need to be aware of. This blog for me, is all about making money on the internet, although it doesn't exactly read like it, this is really a diary type blog as far as I am concerned. It's my other blogs that I am really trying to develop, although, the more I write this one, the more I find to write about. Making money from the internet is a broad subject and one that interests a lot of folks. Whenever I am talking about my various blogs, this is one that many folks ask about. Perhaps because they too are trying to make money from their blogs.

I started out talking about how it pays to go back and visit your blogs, and see where there is room for change, or improvement, or at least some fresh ideas that may take you down a slightly different road. This is particularly useful if your blog isn't making much money, what have you got to lose? I have read lots of posts from other bloggers who have made some changes, some even very minor, to their blogs that weren't producing returns and suddenly they start to make money.

If you have a blog that isn't getting you any Adsense revenue for instance, but you are getting lots of traffic, it may pay to rethink the format and placement of your ads. Experimenting with different formats, colors, placements is one important way to find out if your ads layouts are set up for the best monitization.