I've abandoned several blogs. No, I'm not happy about this.
Why abandon a blog that I've put a great deal of time, even years, into?
For me, it comes down to few things, but mainly a work vs reward measuring. Doing a good (or even decent) blog takes a lot of work. I'm honestly not the best writer in the world, and creating a blog that's on topic consistently and creating that amount of rich content is just hard.
I found my traffic was always good if I could blog at least 3x/week, but really 1x/day was the very best. Even if you're doing that by sitting down and queuing up content for the week, that's a lot of effort (generally an entire day) just to blog consistently.
What I always wanted to do, was to get together a group blog with 5-10 friends, which we could all contribute to on some semi-consistent topic (like Mashable, Techcrunch, etc but smaller in scope and goal). Then each person doing 1-2 things a week would be totally sufficient and keep things interesting.
Yet, the reward for this was always pretty low. I didn't like putting ads on my site. Amazon referral links were pretty good on occasion, but if you don't have a product oriented blog (or huge traffic) it still barely paid for hosting. So 1 day/week (15% of your time) for that much coming back to me was pretty low.
Why abandon a blog that I've put a great deal of time, even years, into?
For me, it comes down to few things, but mainly a work vs reward measuring. Doing a good (or even decent) blog takes a lot of work. I'm honestly not the best writer in the world, and creating a blog that's on topic consistently and creating that amount of rich content is just hard.
I found my traffic was always good if I could blog at least 3x/week, but really 1x/day was the very best. Even if you're doing that by sitting down and queuing up content for the week, that's a lot of effort (generally an entire day) just to blog consistently.
What I always wanted to do, was to get together a group blog with 5-10 friends, which we could all contribute to on some semi-consistent topic (like Mashable, Techcrunch, etc but smaller in scope and goal). Then each person doing 1-2 things a week would be totally sufficient and keep things interesting.
Yet, the reward for this was always pretty low. I didn't like putting ads on my site. Amazon referral links were pretty good on occasion, but if you don't have a product oriented blog (or huge traffic) it still barely paid for hosting. So 1 day/week (15% of your time) for that much coming back to me was pretty low.