Blogging sucks.
I don't think I'm going to put that much effort into this blog any more. I'll keep dropping Entrecards, but that's mostly because I find lots of interesting shit while I do it - not so much because I actually want the traffic (I could care less at this point). I'll post here when I have something to say.
Paid blogging, in general, sucks. I'm almost guaranteed I'll never achieve a page-rank on this website because of it - and I don't really have a problem with that, paid blogging is essentially cheating the pagerank system (otherwise, pagerank would be irrelevant and the higher paid opps would go to people with higher traffic, regardless of pagerank).
With a blog, you have to keep working at it. If you don't have anything new to say, people won't be bothered reading your website. I often go for periods where I don't have anything to say, and I don't want to feel compelled to make up some off-topic bullshit just to appease the types of visitors a blog attracts. I started this blog originally because my Hungry Hacker journal page was too difficult to update - and also to try and cash in a little bit with paid blogging. But these days it seems more work than anything else, so I'm going to cut back a little bit. I'll only post when I have something I actually want to say.
Contrast all this to my Hungry Hacker Industries website, which is monetized exclusively by affiliate marketing, chiefly through eBay. I really haven't updated that site in over a year, I only really log into it to delete the spam and reply to odd comments. The purpose of this website is providing long-term information that stays pertinent for several years, and then as an afterthought providing useful affiliate links that are on-topic and non-intrusive.
It works. I haven't done a damn thing with that website for over a year, and it still averages out to about $20USD a month income. If I actually worked at it and provided new content (I have a few things in the works, but nothing completed yet), I'm sure I could ramp that up to a reasonable income, but what's nice is knowing that if I take a break the site will keep plodding along. It'll keep generating it's own traffic, because my home grown content management system was built from the ground up for fair-play search engine optimization. And, obviously it'll keep generating an income regardless of the work I put into it.
So yeah, I think I'm going to get back into the tinkering and start documenting that stuff again, it's far less aggrevating than fighting for opps with paid blogging companies.
yeah, payperpost does lead to spammy blogs - a while back my blog was one of the thousands which had a picture of eyeglasses, but at least i tried to make my posts a little bit witty. but in the end, it just lowers the quality, and helps to force you to think of something to post, resulting in crap you normally wouldn't submit going up for all to see. oh and don't do paid blogging if you care about your page rank, you will almost certainly lose it.
i'm not going to stop posting here, i'm just not going to try so hard. the end result should be higher quality posts, even if there are some silent days.
Take care of yourself!