I'm back from my hiatus.

Blogging is still a strange animal to me in the world of online publishing. Just when you think you've found a great business idea for a blog, you realize it was a bad one.

I'm not necessarily talking about DoggieNews.

Rather, several other blogs and websites that I publish. I've spent the last few months pondering over those sites trying to find a way to increase income without incurring too much expense. I publish a lot of sites. That's my business. Unlike a thousand or million other bloggers out there, this is my full time job. I don't have anything else to support me.

So, I evaluate every website and blog that I publish carefully. Because for me, time is money. The more time I spend writing a blog, the more money that blog needs to produce. Otherwise, I'm wasting time.

So, I've pretty much said goodbye to bunch of other blogs that I publish. They sounded like great ideas at first, and they did attract lots of readers, but just didn't earn much income for me. But I've learned a lot of from it.

But that's not to say that DoggieNews is one the rare few that has proved to be lucrative. It's not that lucrative, but it still commands a very large audience. One of the problems with finding advertisers for dog blogs, is that most consumers don't buy pet products online. They go to PETCO or PetSmart. Actually, they go to Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer of pet products. In the pet world, the big box stores are still where all the money is.

The fact that there are so many Americans who own dogs, and so many more people finding their way online each year, is why I'm keeping DoggieNews. The volume of readership is large enough to overcome the difficulties of monetizing content.

My motorcycle blog, Biker News Online, will have a key role in my staple of websites and blogs. DoggieNews will also. As is my city blog, Menifee 24/7. I don't think I'll be trying to maintain 20 different blogs anymore. So, I'll have more time to put back into DoggieNews.

But that doesn't mean I'm going to rest on my laurels. I always have an eye out for new ideas.

Labels: Blogging