I agree with you adsense requires a lot of trafiic to make any money. I think blogging has to be a long term project, write, get readers, and monetize; the first two probably happen in months if not years, depending on the effort; would that sound correct? When would you start thinking about monetizing? Ruben
I have a blog that makes $15 a day from adsense with only 100 visitors. It's not a spam blog either, just highly targeted. You can monetize right out of the bat if you target search engines instead of needing a high readership first to sell stuff to.
When your Design and Content are 100%. When you start a new blog you are always making changes to the layout, design and getting you foundation for your content. When you get the bugs out and get a pattern of posting frequency and nail down the kind of content you will be posting consistently, that is really the only time that you will know what will sell based on what your visitors are coming for...and then you have to test out a few to see what works and what you will be sticking with.
What's your niche man, I need to start a blog on that, Any methods you use to target potential visitors? I guess you're right if you target search engines you can start right away but still that takes a few months to get out of the "sandbox" and get ranked, if you don't have that much experience. Ruben
I would think that if you don't go for the search engine first, then you will have a hard time getting users. Who cares what the readers think as long as they come?
The best way is to do both. However, there are some confusion between readers and visitors. Readers love to read, comment, and follow blogs. But they most likely don't buy nor click ads. Readers may come from social sites who became your follower because they love what you write, not what you sell. Therefore, if you don't have something new they may leave you anytime. If you have tons of followers, you can make money from selling ad space. You can also sell something, but it's quite critical if you are overselling. Visitors are people who came across to your blog because they are looking for something and landed on your blog. Therefore, they may buy your product or click your ads. They might not come back again, nor even bother to know anything about you. If they return, this means they become your readers. This is the search engine traffic. Here is a post that supports my idea - Monetizing Blog Traffic Efficiently: Visitors or Readers? Having said that, it's giving what people want and not what you want to give. Otherwise, you may have tons of traffic from everywhere but you will not make money from them.
You make a really good point, Do I I want readers who will love my writing or visitors stopping by but clicking a few ads? I think the main thing is to find a balance, SEO I think is aimed at visitors while any other methods would be to target readers. It depends on what method you devote yourself to. My two cents Ruben