Making money without any effort; having a blog apparently

I've discovered something really unusual over the past month; I stopped blogging because I ran out of time, inspiration and felt I had nothing worthwhile to add to the site. This is something I think is important for any blogger to do - concede defeat at the right time. If I kept writing I'd be saturating the site with poor content and that's no good at all.

However, not blogging consistently for nearly 2 months has highlighted a few interesting things about my blogs (but this site in particular). I thought it was worth collating my thoughts into a semi-coherant post.

What I've come to realise is that the site was actually sustaining itself without any involvement from me at all. Sure when I post new material the RSS feed picks up, but what I thought were surges in subscribers due to content were natural tides of users. Let me explain what effects I've noticed.

RSS subscribers rise and fall like the tides
I previously assumed that RSS subscribers were directly correlating to my new content; sure when I post new material I get a few hundred people read it through their RSS aggregator, but during this "break" the subscribers have gone up and down exactly as before. In fact they broke a new record only a few days ago, 3-4 weeks since my last post. One of my other blogs has consistently increased RSS subscribers since I stopped writing - so that's an almost unexplained occurance.

Earnings
Sure my earnings have been less because I've not been actively promoting the site; pushing for sales, trying to close advertising slots etc. But what surprised me is that last month posted a pretty decent total (surpassing a couple of months where I'd actually tried). This month has been low, but my earnings were not really impacted upon by the lack of fresh content.

Traffic
One of the most sobering things to discover was that Seopher.com doesn't actually get traffic to new content; therefore my traffic has remained consistent over the past 2 months of inactivity. The daily totals have been about the same and while the month average is lower than normal - that's purely because I've not been promoting new content via the normal outlets.

So what does this actually mean?
It means that if you can create a blog with a sustainable income through older material (referals, search engines, etc) that keeps converting, you don't necessarily have to keep fresh content going up at the same rate. My eCPM has remained pretty consistent over the past couple of months and while it is lower than if I'm running the site properly, it's about 60% of what I'd normally hope to achieve and that's pretty good as a passive income.

I'll be returning to blogging properly when I'm ready; I've got a few design projects on at the moment. I'd be more likely to return if Seopher.com was struggling to grow without me, but it seems it's fine on it's own for the mean time. It needs a redesign and a new angle before I could hope to achieve my goals. Until then, ciao!

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