What Happens When You Stop Blogging?

Many of you know what it's like. You start a blog and you have every intention of posting to it regularly. then after a while you start to lose interest in blogging.

You don't want to fill your blog up with the same old stuff everyone else is posting and slowly your posting frequency goes down to zero.

There are many of these sleeping or zombie blogs out there. I've had some. Heck, this one is one that I thought I'd be posting to more.

I also have another blog that was fairly popular but circumstances changed that prevented me from writing articles regularly for it.

Or, even worse things might have happened? Maybe you really did pass away. Well, not you personally or you wouldn't be reading this.

So what happens when you stop updating your blog?

What Happens To Abandoned Blogs?

Back in the day, before there were all these popular services that allow you to create and host blogs and websites for free, you'd put up your homepage on a server you had access to. That's right kids. It was a home page for the most part. No fancy blogs, CMSs, or anything like that. It was a plain grey page with black text and blue links and we liked it!

You could have created other pages linked to your homepage but it was referenced to your account. Unless you were some fancy internet company that people thought were wasting money your home page URL looked something like http://www.servername.tld/~username

The server you'd host it on would be any server you had access to. Usually one of your campus' servers or the server belonging to your dial-up ISP. When you left college or switched ISPs your account and homepage would eventually get deleted.

Now with so many free and low cost hosting solutions, when a blog gets abandoned it stays online unless it was using a custom domain name that expired.

Do Blogs Still Get Traffic When You Stop Posting?

It depends. Some do, some don't. One of my blogs that has long been abandoned never really picked up steam and hasn't been posted to in many years. It might get one or two visitors a month.

Other blogs that I don't post to at all, or just not as regularly still get a decent amount of traffic. In many cases the traffic continues to grow.

People still find the sites on Google and people still reference old articles in links. Below is a graph of monthly visitors to one such site that very rarely gets any new posts.

For a while the traffic was declining as I was no longer posting regularly or working to promote the site. Then all of a sudden traffic started rising again and it didn't take long for blog traffic to double.

The increase in traffic happened around the time the domain was 2 years old. I've seen similar behavior on other sites that were not getting updated. There were no other significant changes to the site.

So maybe if you start a website try to stick with it for at least two years? Or maybe it was after one of Google's algorithm changes?

Surprise! Revenue

Is it still revenue if you yell "surprise" first?

In a few instances affiliate revenue started unexpectedly coming in for sites I no longer posted to.

One particular blog that still gets very little traffic started generating a decent amount of affiliate revenue a couple of years ago.

Considering I wasn't posting to the blog anymore it was like getting free money. It wasn't a huge amount but it was more than the minimum monthly payout for the affiliate.

The increase in traffic and revenue on those sites got me to start devoting a little more time to them again. The extra attention to the sites and additional articles helped traffic and revenues improve even more.

Do you have any sites that have come back from the dead? Post your experiences in the comments below.