OK Blogger blogs are not as popular with black hats as they once used to be but some still use them though it takes more skill to get anything out of them nowadays. Hence, I thought it might be useful to trace a pattern I seem to see with most Blogger blogs. This pattern, though it doesn’t really tell you what exactly to do with your blogs, can be useful in getting the most out of Blogger’s service.
So – what happens when you create a new blog on Blogger?
- First it sits there unnoticed by anyone – and this stage can last from a few hours to a few weeks, depending on your luck and some other things
- Then, you start getting traffic from other Blogger blogs (in some cases even massive traffic) – this happens when people start clicking on “Next Blog” button and/or the link in the list of recently updated blogs after you post. This traffic, while consisting of the least savvy users who are likely to click on your ads/affiliate links or whatever it is you use to monetize your blog, it the least targeted – so your income can hardly increase during this stage.
- Next, if you’ve been pinging Technorati and other blog/feed indexing services, you start getting hits from there. This traffic is a bit better targeted but the exposure is normally still pretty low, and due to the nature of these indexing services this is short term traffic, so to say – it mainly happens when you post unless you cover some really unique niche where you’re one of only a few people to post
- Then the search engines come into play. The order who comes first (Google or Yahoo or MSN) can be different and it can take some SEs much longer than others to pick you up. But this is where the real traffic starts. First, you would only have one home page indexed and not ranking for anything at all – but gradually, they pick up your archives. This is when, depending on the content of your posts, you start ranking for every niche search out there – and this is the peak of your blog’s lifecycle.
- The final stage: Blogger spam blogs (like I said, I hate the word splogs – blogs is already unnatural enough) end their life either being banned by the search engines or terminated by Blogger. Well, the third outcome certainly is you stopping to post there/use the blog.
What should you do in the end of your blog’s lifecycle to maximize its conversion?
In the first case, your traffic clearly drops significantly – but since as a rule blogs don’t necesarily get banned by all the SEs at once you can still enjoy some traffic from those who left it intact for now. If it is you who stopped using the blog, its exposure will also drop with time as search engines love frequently updated blogs much more than dead ones – unless you had something truly unique posted there. But don’t kill your blog physically in any case – leave it be and if you have something to click on there there will still be people clicking on it, even if less frequently (2 cents by 2,000 blogs…. you get the picture).
But what if it’s Blogger that killed your blog? – well, even in that case it might still uprise you with some minor conversions. Search engines are sometimes slow to delist sites that no longer exist – and this applies to terminated blogs as well. there will still be cached pages in the search engines – and there will still be characters who would want to see them – and you won’t believe me but I have personally sen soem of those characters clicking on Adsense ads on those cached pages!
UPDATE: Well, I just checked out of curiosity and it appears that very often Google only displays public service ads on cached pages…. so one source of income less – not too bad anyway since nobody can still do anything about the affiliate ads and the like – and I haven’t checked Yahoo, let me know if you find out 😉
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