The Importance of Site Building

Sometimes I feel like a struggling musician, perpetually toiling away in obscurity but ever waiting for that big hit which always seems to be just around the corner. Part of the process of making money online via blogging seems to be to start a lot of blogs with the foreknowledge that they won't all be money makers. I don't know of too many people who achieved success with their very first blog -- in part, that's probably because people tend to pick a topic close to their heart or what they're most interested in without reflecting on keywords or potential popularity. Most bloggers seem to become more analytical and research-oriented as they go on, but I have to admit that just writing what you want is more fun especially since "research" doesn't guarantee success!

The more I think about it, though, the more I realize I haven't had an absolute failure yet. There are two blogs I created early on in my blogging career that I have tended to think of as failures. One I couldn't find a good monetization strategy for and pretty much ended up relying on random affiliate banners and text referral links. The second blog was a mistake simply because the keyword situation was bad. Not only did I have a lot of competition, but most people searching for those keywords were using them in a different context than I was. (Ugh, I thought this post would be more relatable if I spoke in general terms, but after reading that last sentence I wonder if specificity would've been clearer!) The odd thing, though, is that both those blogs did benefit me in the long run. I got referrals and made a little money from both. If you calculate the amount of time I spent working on those blogs and compare that to the results I actually reaped from my efforts, then building those sites probably was not a good use of my time. Nonetheless, I got something from it all, and it was not just experience though that was probably the most valuable gain.

Ultimately, what my past endeavors have shown me is that the most important thing a blogger or writer or webmaster can do is to keep trying. Keep building those blogs. Even if you're building blindly, without doing any keyword or niche or market research, that's better than doing nothing at all. Building gives you the chance for success at least -- to paraphrase (and murder) Tennyson, "Tis better to have blogged and gotten few clicks than to have never blogged and gotten no clicks at all." Stay in the game and keep fighting!