I have also realized one thing with blogging and adsense. You can make a good income with it, but it will take some work. You will not become a millionare, but it will pay the rent and your other bills like electric and cable. In any month, I make anywher from $1,000 to $2,000 in adsense income. Not bad for being a freelance writer and consultant.

The things that you need to do to make this a reality; publish articles everyday, comment on other people blogs, and participate in forum discussions.

First, you have to publish at least one short article per day and at least 1 feature article per week. A short article is about 200 words, and a feature article is about 500+.

Second, to traffic to your blog you have to read and comment on other people blogs. When I say comment, I mean a constructive comment that contributes to the discussion at hand. Leaving a comment that says “Damn good blog, visit mine at http://www.myblog.com” is not appropriate. This type of comment is called comment spam. Since my comments are held for moderation, I can filter out comments like this one.

The third thing that you should do is to scour the web for discussion boards that relate to the topic of your blog. For example, if you have a blog on e-commerce, then find bulletin boards for web designers, web site enthusiasts, and general business forums. You can even participate in discussion forums that are local to where you are located. For example, since I am located in Hawaii, I participate in forums by the Honolulu Advertiser. When participating in these forums, contribute to the discussion so as not to spam. However, you can and should use a signature with a link to your website. Include this signature in your discussion post.

By leaving a constructive comment and contributing to a discussion, it will lead to more people visiting your blog to read what you have to say. In this day and age, it is all about meaningful content.

Of course, I’m free to disclose how much traffic GVOD receives: average page views/day: about 15,000; average unique visitors/day: about 4,500; average return visitors/day: about 1,500. The numbers have dipped over the winter holidays, which I guess is to be expected, but I’m a little fearful they may not fully recover. The attention of people on the web can be quite a fickle thing. Oh, yes: 248 Bloglines subscribers (same RSS reader I use) last time I checked.

I’ve considered branching out into other areas, but nothing else really feels right (i.e., not something I’d do for fun anyway), and thre’s only so much time in the day. Between a full-time job, two blogs, and helping a few others with their blogs, that’s about all I can handle. GVOD is a lot of fun to do… actually more fun than I thought it would be.