An Experiment: No More Guest Posts and a Focus on Quality

Posted: 15 Jan 2013 10:15 AM PST

As some of you guys will remember, a couple of years ago I changed the direction of my business activities. Until 2010 all my income was coming from my blogs and websites, mostly from advertising, affiliate marketing and from selling my own products online.

That year I decided I wanted to move to software development. First of all because I was having a blast programming, which I started as a hobby. Second because I figured I would be able to tackle larger problems/projects writing software.

I spent most of 2011 and 2012 learning more about programming and working on the development of web and mobile apps. 2013 will follow along the same lines, as I have a couple of large/ambitious mobile projects to execute.

In other words, it was getting tough to keep updating this blog daily as I was spending most of my day coding and working on other areas of the business.

My initial solution was to reduce the frequency of updates slightly to four posts per week, and bring guest authors to fill the days I wasn’t able to write. It worked relatively well, as 2012 was a record year in terms of traffic, but I wasn’t happy with it.

Pretty much every week I would receive a couple of emails from readers who thought the guest posts had a different style and voice, arguing that they came to the site to read my stuff.

I thought about it and decided to run an experiment in 2013: I won’t be publishing guest posts anymore and will write all the posts myself (so be warned: you are stuck with my ramblings now!).

On top of that I will also focus on the quality of the posts and not on the quantity. In other words, I will only write when I have something to say. I won’t be running filler posts anymore.

Obviously the frequency of updates will fall (I am planning to write 1-2 posts per week), but at least you can be assured that whenever you come here you’ll find something worth while to read.

I am not sure if the traffic will increase or decrease with this change, but at least I’ll be proud of the content on the site. And despite spending most of my time coding these days, about 60% of my income still comes from my blogs and websites, so I am still in touch with Internet marketing and website promotion/monetization. In other words, stay tuned for some cool stuff in 2013!