When we start a blog we have big plans for it. We intend that our message will reach the entire (online) world and we pour much time, effort, and money into making that blog the best we can. And sometimes our efforts pay off big but more often than not they don’t. So how do you tell when your effort far exceeds the benefits you’ll get from the finished product?

Your audience is stagnant
One of the worst things for fish is stagnant water. That is water that sits and does not move. More than just not moving it’s water that is never refreshed by new water flowing in. Your blog can suffer the same affliction. If the same people come over and over again with no fresh bodies finding their way to your site it is a good indicator that you have a stagnant audience.

But how do you identify if you have the same people visiting over and over again with virtually no new faces? A good analytics package is key to doing this. Personally I prefer Google Analytics because of how comprehensive the feedback is. There are other visitor tracking packages but I have no experience with any of them so can’t comment.

If it turns out that your audience is stagnant you have to weigh your options. For me there is only one question that needs to be answered; Is my audience stagnant due to lack of effort on my part or is my message not resonating?. I can redouble my effort to get a larger audience. I can comment on blogs, I can join discussion groups, I can offer prizes, I can work the social media angle. All of those things are easily doable, but if what I’m saying doesn’t resonate with readers getting more people it doesn’t speak to makes no sense. At that point I have to decide if it makes sense to continue on or to abandon the project. It’s a cruel decision to have to make especially if you’ve poured hundreds of hours into it, but imagine pouring hundreds or even thousands of more and still getting nowhere?

Your content is a rehash of what you’ve already written about
No one faults you for revisiting a topic that you’ve already covered. In fact it is appreciated when you’ve come to a new understanding and a fresh perspective. What isn’t so highly regarded is when you say the same thing over and over again but in different words. Then it becomes tedious. I’m pretty willing to bet you don’t just get up in the morning and say to yourself gee, I think I’ll write about something I’ve already written about because I can’t think of anything new. Do you?

Take a look at your content over the past 3 to 6 months. How much of it is rehashed? How many times have you echoed the same thing? And to be clear I don’t mean your overarching message. Readers expect that to be consistent. I’m talking about your actual content. I’ll give an example. There’s many blogs that talk about how to make money online. But very few of them come at it from a fresh perspective post after post. Their new content is often a rehash of their older content. If your blog looks like this maybe you should consider bringing it to a graceful end.

You’re not gaining any traction
When we start blogging we generally have stars in our eyes but the reality is that it is a cut-throat business. You are competing with millions of blogs for a slice of the virtual audience. At some point you will need to take stock of where you are now compared to when you started and decide if you are moving in the right direction. There are many methods to reinvigorate your blog but that doesn’t mean you won’t still be spinning your wheels after a short lurch forward. If for whatever reason you just can’t get on solid footing and pickup traction to move forward it is time to consider retiring your blog.

Your blog has become a spammers haven
It’s nice to get comments. They validate your efforts and when we first start writing we want our time and effort to be validated by our readers. In fact sometimes when we first launch a new blog we will let some of the less intrusive spam comments slide. Just so we can show others that there is interaction on our site. But there is a thin line between letting a few spam comments slide and being buried in a landslide of spam comments. In my experience once the floodgates open it is nearly impossible to stem the flow. That’s why it is so important to stay on top of the comments.

But why does it even matter? How do spam comments negatively impact your blog? Well for one it’s a complete turn off for other people who might otherwise enjoy your content and interact with you. After all what makes you think I’m going to comment on your article when there are 200 other comments on it that have nothing to do with the article itself or even the theme of your blog? Especially since I know you’re probably feeling so overwhelmed you don’t bother even looking at comments anymore.

What about you? How do you tell if it is time to put your blog (or any other web property) down?

Are you ever amazed by the fact that there are some professions so useless but the world insists on their existence? I am. Every. Single. Day. If you happen to see your profession know that what you do is useless (not to mention pointless). Mind you, that doesn’t mean you are a bad person. No, no far from it! What the presence of your profession in this list means is that you do useless things.

Professional Philosopher
Yeah I know. When I first realized there are ass hats out there who are profession philosophers I nearly choked. I thought for certain this is a joke! Right?! Then I became aware that not only are these people out there, but A) they get paid to… well I’m not sure what they do and B) they all seem to have their own rabid little following. It’s kinda like they have their own groupies. If groupies were morons.

Wal-Mart Greeter
I hesitated to include this just because I’m not sure it qualifies as a profession, but the folks who do it sure seem to take it pretty seriously. In that case who am I to not acknowledge their total lack of necessity. Has a Wal-Mart greeter ever made your day better or your shopping experience more pleasant when they say “Welcome to Wal-Mart”? Yeah, me either. I’m all for giving people jobs, Wal-Mart but instead of wasting that talent how about opening up another checkout line? Or rounding up carts in the lot. Welcoming me to Wal-Mart just plain sucks.

That’s right those are two of the world’s most useless professions. There are other equally absurd professions, in fact, how about a bonus useless profession?

Professional Bloggers
Did you know that there are people who make shit tons of money by writing blog posts? DID YOU KNOW THIS? They write a post, and their loyal readers eat up their every word. You’d think they were shitting golden eggs judging by how other bloggers fawn and gush all over them.

But really, who am I to take note and then tell you how useless these professions are? That’s easy. I’m the guy you are agreeing with right now.

You can take that to the bank (hey at least you have something to deposit). You can’t make money online with half baked, warmed over content.

Repeat that out loud, “You can’t make money online with half baked, warmed over content!”

Good! And again! “You can’t make money online with half baked, warmed over content!”

And now remind yourself that your earnings suck because your content sucks worse.

That’s right, it is as simple as that. Your blog will not earn a penny if what you write sucks.

While this is only my fourth post on this relaunched site I have hundreds of posts, pages, videos and whatnot on other websites. So I’ve decided to write a little bit about how important it is to generate incredible content to generate any revenue.

What I won’t talk about
Before I start talking about the topic I want to discuss I’d like to point out some things that you will not read in this post.

1. How to make money online:
   
   Sorry, but my intention with this article isn’t to tell you how to make money online, or tell you the secrets of a six figure income or any of the rest of it. If you want that kind of information there are plenty of sites which claim to tell you.
2. How to write good blog posts:
   
   This is something that simply cannot be taught no matter how much one might like to try. It’s a skill that comes from writing hundreds of posts, reading hundreds of posts, and failing at writing good content more often than not. In other words I can only recommend that you practice, practice, practice!
3. How to “game” the adsense system:
   
   I’m not going to talk about how you trick your readers into clicking your ads, or how you beg a click from them without doing so overtly. Like anything else there is plenty of material out there about that kind of thing, but I am not going to add it to my site. Number one it is a clear violation of the adsense program policies and secondly it wouldn’t be doing you any favors if I told you those things.

In the beginning…
Before I started worrying about monetizing websites I started blogging to kill time. I was unemployed and sitting around the house with nothing to do. Well I could have been looking for a job but instead, for the purpose of this story we will agree that I had nothing to do. Anyhow as I was doing nothing I discovered blogging and quickly borrowed a few dollars from my mom to a) register a domain name and b) secure some cheap (but very reliable it turns out) from Hostgator.

The domain I registered is the one you are on now, www.ablogaboutnothing.com and I registered the name back in 2007. I think it was in July. Because of all the free time I had I wrote a lot of articles during the first few months. I believe I averaged around 3 500+ word articles per day. You’d think that a guy with so much free time could write even more, but when I wasn’t writing I was diving headfirst in to the so-called blogging masters of that time. I never missed a post from the likes of John Chow, Shoemoney, Problogger, and other names I no longer follow or care what they are doing.

But the problem was I had no idea what I was doing. You see, I was following the examples of people who know how to blog (and do so very well I might add) but their content was… lacking. I remember I was so enthralled with John Chow for so long because of the income reports I posted on his site. But then I started to realize what he posted had very little meat to explain anything, they just touched on the subject enough to pique your interest. Unless of course you count his oft used dining pictures where he would treat the reader to pictures of his every meal.

The same pattern I found to be true with many others. They wrote posts that really weren’t authoritative in nature. They had very little meat and getting anything out of them became more and more difficult.

After a few months of producing content for my own blog and reading others I got burned out. Around November I more or less decided enough was enough and stopped writing altogether. It should be noted that while I stopped in November my writing had slowed down greatly since I had begun writing.

A purchase that changed everything
In early December of 2008, having just written a few articles on A Blog about Nothing I went to a reptile store and bought a Ball Python. I had snakes in the past and by this time I was working so I thought I’d get myself another one. Of course like anyone else I started researching how to care for them online because it had been about 10 years since I had a snake of any kind. I found a lot of disjointed, unorganized information about snakes but aside from message boards there wasn’t a lot of authority out there on the topic. At least not that was easily located.

Let me backtrack to my blogging experiences in 2007 for just a moment. During that time I often heard mention of niche websites. In fact I remember reading a series on niche sites at the now (apparently) defunct DoshDosh and filing it away in my head.

So with my new snake in hand, and a lack of information about snakes as pets in general online I purchased my new domain name, pet-snakes.com and started producing content. But there was a problem. While I was researching and giving the basic information that was needed it wasn’t authoritative. I had picked up a lot of bad habits from my earlier foray into blogging. I was writing 350 word articles and honestly believing they were of value to readers. But they weren’t.

My search engine rankings
Because my content was not of any great value no one visited my site. I would spam comments on every blog under the sun (almost none of them having anything whatsoever to do with snakes or animals of any kind), joined a lot of forums just so I could post a few times with my web address in my signature, and even held a contest to give a lucky winner a free snake up to $500 value. While all of those things got me a tiny bit of traffic none of them brought people who wanted to stick around. My bounce rate was around 95%, give or take a few percentage depending on the day. But worse yet was my site, so focused on one subject; pet snakes, with relatively little competition couldn’t rank higher than in the mid 150s.

At this point I was given a free phone consultation with Marc Butler of the Keyword Academy. It lasted about 20 or 30 minutes and he pointed out somethings to help me improve my google rankings in the search for the keywords I wanted to go after. His advice had very little to do with my site, or my content but rather focused on my link building. It was sound advice because in following what he told me I managed to break into the top 15 of Google search results. But if you know anything about search engine positions you know that if you aren’t on the front page, above the fold you might as well be on page 10,000. People simple do not give any credence to sites that they have to scroll or worse yet change pages to view.

For several months I languished on page 2 of the Google search results. And kept doing the same link building I had been doing the whole time which consisted mainly of comments (except now I focused on animal related sites) and forum signatures. But I was gaining no traction.

When things started to change
One day I got an email from a reader telling me that they were very disappointed in my site. You see, apparently they were one of the few people who went to the second page of Google’s search results and clicked on my site. The email basically said I was just regurgitating things that everyone posted on forums and sometimes on other sites. In other words it had no content that defined it or made it stick out from all the rest. Which while distressing was 100% accurate. I was just parroting what other sites had to say.

I thought about it for a while and at that point decided to write a post about how to make a homemade snake cage. I decided it was going to be an authority post. When people wanted to know how to make a snake cage out of those simple items my article was going to be the gold standard. So I wrote the article, made a youtube video so everyone could see what was going on and I posted it.

Within two days my Google rank had moved from 15th to 10th. All because of that one article. So I waited a few more days and wrote another article with as much depth and authority as I could muster. And then another and another. Soon I noticed I was climbing my way towards the top of the search engine results. It has been a slow process and I am currently at the 2nd spot with a lot of work to do to knock the first spot off.

What changed and why it is important
Three things changed, first I stopped commenting on blogs all the time. Second I stopped spamming my signature on forums. The third, final and most important thing to change was I began to produce high quality content on a regular basis. I stopped using the old blogging skills I had learned when I first started and started to write like an authority on the topic. That meant I was turning out longer, and much better researched articles than I had in the past. I should note, just like Corbett Barr said in his clarion call for bloggers to write epic shit longer does not mean better. It does not mean epic. When you write longer posts you better have epic shit to write about or it won’t do you any good.

Let’s take a good look what I just said.

• Stop using old blogging skills:
  
  If your site isn’t getting any traction it’s time to stop what you have been doing that doesn’t work. Right about now I’m tempted to throw out a cliche about the definition of insanity is… but I’ll spare you. That doesn’t mean it’s not true. When you keep doing something over and over again and it never works you are insane! That means it is time to toss out the old skills and learn new ones. Your website and your audience will thank you for it.
• Write like an authority:
  
  If you’ve started a website and people are reading it then that’s a pretty good indication you already know more than 99% of the general populace about your topic. Act like it! Stop mealy-mouthing what you want to write and put it out there like the authority you are. If you don’t consider yourself an authority on the subject matter you cover then stop writing until you are so familiar with it that there is no question in your mind about your authority.
• You better have epic shit to write about:
  
  Websites are a dime a dozen these days. Ecclesiastes 1:9 has this to say:

  What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.

  And nowhere is that more true than when it comes to blogs. Whatever topic you write about, someone else has written about it as well. So you better turn out some awesome content to even begin to compete. It better be epic. If it is not it won’t matter how much work you put into it. Regurgitated crap is regurgitated crap.

In case you lost your place we were talking about how I suddenly made a leap in the Google search rankings. It had nothing to do with spamming comments or spending hours per day working on SEO. It happened because I started to write articles that had value to them. I started to write for people and not for search engines. Which was an approach that was counter-intuitive to everything I had learned up to that point.

Back to making money with my websites
Like I said earlier you won’t learn much about adsense from me. In my opinion everything you need to know about monetizing your site with adsense is already out there. What I do want to tell you about, to pound into your head is that what makes money with adsense isn’t how well you blend your ads, or where you place them on a page, or even how many hits you get on your site. Rather what generates revenue from your adsense ads, or any method you use to monetize your website is your content. It’s the value that you give to your readers.

For so long people have known that content is king. It is what makes you and your brand relevant. It’s what makes you an authority and being trusted as an authority makes your readers inclined to click your ads.

Last December I requested some extra money from my employer for 2 spare Cisco routers and 3 spare Cisco switches. I just felt it would make sense to have a redundancy in place. But they denied it and sometime this past weekend on 5/28/11 one of the pieces of equipment failed. Now instead of having another one ready to swap in I’m having to wait 2 days for it to get here before I can do anything.

It’s actually a pretty catastrophic failure as far as our network goes. It controlled the routing for our email, web page and for internet for about 50 people. Yes, we also act as a small ISP for members. Anyhow, here’s 5 reasons you should have a spare router handy. Obviously this isn’t so important in a home environment but it never hurts.

In case of hardware failure
If the whole thing just shits the bed you’ll need to put a new piece of equipment in ASAP to get the network back up and running. This is what happened to us. The router shit the bed and now we’re up shit’s creek without a paddle. At least until the new (refurbished one) gets here and I can get it fired up and online. Never assume that your hardware won’t fail, assume it will and be prepared for it.

In case of software failure
If your equipment is really critical sometimes just being able to throw a working system in while you take care of software issues is a blessing. Maybe you reload your Cisco IOS and for some reason it corrupts. If you have it setup to fail over to spare you just keep going until things are fixed

In case of user failure
This one should be self explanatory, but in case it’s not I’ll explain. When you fuck up (and I said when, not if) sometimes for any number of reasons you can’t fix the problem in short order. So you throw in your backup equipment, the network starts singing nice and pretty again and you have time to fix your mistakes.

Now can anyone tell me even one valid reason not to have spare equipment if you can afford it?

I just realized as I was looking through the dashboard that I still have inbound links coming to this domain. Duh! I forgot for some reason that wiping out the content on this end doesn’t do anything to the links on the other end. Except maybe break them. Which means I’m going to have to do something about that. Here are my options as I know them.

Ignore them and let people end up on a 404 page
This has a certain appeal to it. Namely if I want to be lazy. Problem is that when people see a 404 page not found error they rarely do anything except leave. Which means it would be wasted traffic. While this idea is the simplest it is also the least effective in terms of building an audience.

Write new posts so that there is content at that location
It’s not hard to do that, but the idea of wiping the database and relaunching ABaN is to start completely over. If I just put new content in the same location as the links lead to it just seems… wrong.

Import the old posts to the new blog
This isn’t much different than writing new content under the same title and location. The problem I see is that it’s old content and once again defeats the purpose of starting over.

Redirect those broken links to an About Me page
Now this is a solution that makes sense to me. I can get the traffic from those links and send it to what is arguably one of the most important pages on a blog. Where I get to talk about myself. Just kidding, but if you don’t know and understand the importance of your About Me page on your blog you should spend sometime learning what it is really about.

Choosing the right redirect
Now that I’ve decided to redirect the broken links to the about me page I need to do some behind the scenes magic. But first I need to determine what kind of redirect I will use. I’m going to chose between a 307 (temporary) redirect and a 301 (permanent) redirect. And the winner is the 301! Why? Because this is a permanent redirect and won’t be returning to the original location. Also it should be noted that there are 8 different server side redirects but the 307 and 301 are by far the most commonly used. At least they are what I most commonly use.

.htaccess magic
In order to redirect I will use the following code in the .htaccess file:

What if I don’t have a .htaccess file?
Not all web servers make use of the .htaccess file and therefore a different method of redirecting will have to be explored if that is the case for you. I won’t get into how to do them but an IIS web server can be redirected by following these directions.

So do you think this is a good idea or is there something else I should do with that traffic?

Originally I started ABaN (A Blog about Nothing) back in July of 2007 but after a while I got bored with where it was going so I rarely did anything at all with it. In the last 2 years I think I posted 5 times. I wasn’t generating content and it had become a haven for spam comments. So I recently decided to wipe it and start from scratch. I still have the old database and might at some point open some of it up but for now think of this as a whole new journey.

A relaunch of ABaN has been in order for a while now and this is the fruit of that labor. Don’t laugh. I almost considered doing something really stupid. Spending a bunch of money to have a professional design. Ok, now you can laugh.

What we will explore
You know, the beauty of having name like A Blog about Nothing is that most everything is fair game.

• I’ll write about monetizing your blog from time to time
• I’ll reference making passive income the smart (and sustainable) way
• I’ll talk about my dog now and then. Probably a little too much.
• I might talk about my job… wait no, scratch that idea. I won’t talk about my job
• I’ll talk about the ebook I am working on
• I’ll talk about idiots who get eaten alive by bears in the zoo because they climbed into their enclosures
• I’ll make fun of other bloggers and their sites
• I’ll make fun of myself and my other sites
• I’ll complain incessantly about how Eurasian Collared Doves are taking over my yard but I’ll continue to fill the bird feeder

By no means is that an exhaustive list. For the most part I’ll just go with the flow and post whatever makes sense at that time. That’s really why it’s called A Blog about Nothing because there is no niche audience I’m trying to reach with this little piece of the world wide web.

And now I have a question for you. How will you remember to checkout the updated content on this blog if you don’t subscribe to my new rss feed?