What is this hype about blogging?

I hope that some experienced bloggers can help me out here.

I have been making money from my normal old fashioned web sites for a couple of years now. I then decided to follow the craze and start to blog. I mean everybody is doing it and most people say that they make a fortune from it.

I am three months down the line now and am not very impressed so far.

This is why…….Also read an updated post on this subject at to-blog-or-not-to-blog

In a previous post I said that a blog to me is just another web site. It do get listed faster and easier on the search engines than a normal web site and it is much easier to update for people who do not know anything about web sites. So for the Internet newbie it is a great tool to get the message out, get exposure and to earn a couple of bucks.

I found that Google Adsense and affiliate ads on Blogs and forums do not perform nearly as good as on my old fashioned web sites. My old web sites FAR outperform blogs and forums.

I know some blog gurus will tell me “Boet, the secret is in the traffic”

Ja sure!

This domain gets about 10,000 visits  and 550,000 page impressions per month. Adsense wise it earned me a big total of $5 last month.

Then we look at a stupid little web site which I used years ago to promote Pre-Paid airtime. In the mean time I decided that selling airtime is not for me but I did not want to let go of my domain name. So I just added some adsense ads and left it to be. This site receives 700 visits per month with 1090 page displays and earned me $20 last month. (www.airtimeagencies.co.za ). My best domain (which is also an old fashioned “web 1″ normal web site) earns me about $220 per month.

This is just one example. I run about 25 different traditional web sites which all earns me an adsense income.

In my opinion blogging is real hard work. To have a successful blog you need to post something at least once a day. I see there is this hype of having tens of thousands of pages full of posts on your blog. It does make sense because the search engines will have more pages to index.

But because of this I see that there are some top bloggers who posts anything stupid they can get and some of it does not even makes sense. The one guy just makes posts with a Youtube video of a band or something. I think I must be missing the point here. If you are a fan of XYZ band you can get the video on YouTube yourself, why would somebody put it on his blog, besides adding another senseless page to his portfolio.

Then you have the guys who fill their blogs with excerpts from other blogs. They do not even do it themselves, they have an automated system which does it for them. I guess they also do this only to have tens of thousands of pages full of useless information to fill their space and get indexed by the search engines.

Perhaps I am too old fashioned, if I cannot add some useful content in a page I will not post it, even if it means that I do not have tens of thousands of pages on my blog.

Example of a forum, www.hilux4x4.co.za gets 46,000 visits and 614,000 pages each month. It makes whopping $50 per month. Compare that to 700 visits per month airtime site? The Google ads in the forum are well placed and I have moved them around a lot to try and improve the performance.

Perhaps some of the real blog gurus can help me out here.

1. Is it really worth adding thousands of senseless posts to a blog just to get the numbers up?
2. Why is the click rate on blogs and forums so much lower than on normal web sites?