Blog traffic
This blog post was written about six months or a few months ago, a long time ago.
Recently, I saw Google Analytics data showing that this post was viewed several hundred times in the past month.
For someone like me who updates their blog only once a month, or for someone whose blog is mostly read by myself with only a few visitors,
seeing a sudden increase in traffic for one post is a very positive feedback.
But that’s about it; other posts and blogs haven’t changed much, remaining relatively quiet.
However, I write blogs partly to record my online notes, and partly as a gamble that after a while, it might inexplicably gain traffic.
As long as the blog exists, there’s a certain probability of gaining traffic, which is much more worthwhile than buying lottery tickets. Lottery tickets require purchasing them, while a blog, aside from the initial cloud server and domain name, only requires content output.
Traffic statistics
This also exposes a problem:
The data from Google Analytics matches the data from my own deployed umami application,
but it doesn’t match the data from the Postview plugin I installed on WordPress. After all, that plugin hasn’t been updated in many years, and I didn’t expect it to be inaccurate.
I also wanted to deploy another open-source data analytics application, Matomo, but although this project is comprehensive, it’s too outdated. For now, I’ll just stick with umami.
Blog income
Don’t count on Google Ads revenue for your blog.
You can see 700 blog visits and 30 ad impressions, resulting in a total monthly revenue of $0.01.
That’s practically no revenue; it doesn’t even cover the cost of a cloud server or domain name.
With that time and traffic, a 1,000-view YouTube video can earn around $0.10, and your blog has virtually no traffic.
Tips
Therefore, blogs are primarily for personal hobbies or brand promotion.
The only way to generate revenue from a blog is by recommending your own paid products or providing commission links.
If advertising revenue can’t even cover the cost of cloud servers, then don’t expect it to sustain your lifestyle.
By the way, the blog post that suddenly gained 300 views was just a casual rant about the internet and Reddit’s shadow banning.
It wasn’t knowledge or entertainment; it was purely a stream of consciousness, a rant. Therefore, more professional content might actually have lower traffic and be more time-consuming and labor-intensive.
Currently, until you can generate revenue exceeding server costs, blogs are essentially YouTube videos and articles, and also one of the ways to get backlinks to YouTube.