A Moment of Weakness

I think every blogger has a moment of weakness where they second guess the decisions they have made with respect to their blog(s).  Really this is only human nature.  This self doubt is often triggered by an unexpected dip in traffic despite everything positive done to keep the traffic at a certain level and growing.  It doesn't matter that the dip in traffic could be due to any number of reasons ranging from a change in the search engine algorithms to a change in the weather that sees readers away from their computers more to a glitch in the traffic reporting program.  What does matter is this plants the seeds of self doubt causing you act before thinking the action through clearly.

It has been a rough couple of blogging months for me what with my leg injury and being out of commission so I should have expected a bit of a drop in traffic.  Quite frankly it has been a struggle to keep my head above water blogging over the last seven weeks.  Adding to the traffic issues is Google did change their algorithm that could affect traffic both postively and negatively.  I haven't done an in depth analysis of how this has impacted my blogs but on the surface traffic from Google remains about the same, perhaps a bit more in the blogs that have gained PR.  I've been doing less pinging so need to get back into that routine and I've been off Twitter more than normal.  I did notice a bit of a glitch with StatCounter as well.  So last night I checked my stats to see a lovely did.  Without checking into the reasons my mind wandered over to it would be so easy to go back to Entrecard.

So I mosied on over to Entrecard to check out their new rules and regulations.  I had been under the impression I could restart my one blog as advertiser only without having to have the widget on my blog.  Wrong, and the widget must be placed within 850 px of the top of the blog.  Then I have to pay if I don't want certain ads running but then I discovered I could sign up as a sponsor meaning no widget on my blog and no mindless clicking 300 cards per day.  The biggest problem is when I left Entrecard as a direct result of the previous owner it was for good but Entrecard is now under new ownership and the pre-existing problems seem to have been solved.  In my moment of weakness I decided to give Entrecard another try but as sponsor only so my ad will be shown but I don't have to do anything else other than pay my advertising fee.  In this way it works out quite similar to CMF and Adgitize advertising. 

This will be a one month, $10 investment to see if advertising with Entrecard will help boost traffic.  Having been with Entrecard before I know how members are simply in it for the clicking and they will pass blogs by that don't have the widget, so that is not encouraging.  Now I have to figure out a reasonable amount of traffic for that $10 for the month to see how it compares.  Ten dollars worth of spikes at CMF will get me 50 spikes at 50 clicks each so 2,500 visitors.  Fourteen dollars worth of advertising at Adgitize gets me an average of 50 visitors a day or 1,550 visitors per month.  So if Entrecard comes in somewhere between the two I will be happy.  If not I'm out $10.

Garden Gnome
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