As many of you might have noticed, I haven’t touched my blog for 3 whole months which was the longest time I had ever been away without writing.
The feeling is surreal and there hasn’t been a day that pass by without me thinking of writing a new post… for the whole months!
The longest time I had been away without writing a post was just 2 weeks so this is a huge step for me to make but it was unintentional as I was extremely occupied running my other event company startup.
If you think running one business is hard enough, imagine running 2 of them at once!
Nevertheless, it feels good to get back on my keyboard and start typing away good content for you guys.
Wanna know how my blog went by without me tending to it for 3 whole months? Well buckle up because this is going to be a lengthy read…
Stats for August, September and October
It’s going to be really packed if I squeeze in everything that has happened within those 3 months so to make everything clearer for me and for you, I’ll be showing my website stats separately starting from August 2015…
If you’ve looked at my previous monthly report on July, you can see that my graph is slowly spiking up and it’s getting ready for some good growth but since I haven’t posted anything the month after, it is slowly dropping down below the 150 website visitors’ mark.
Compared to July I had just lost 277 website visitors. Ouch!
Now let’s have a look at what happened in the following month in September 2015…
As expected, the graph keeps dropping down and it keeps getting worse too as I had lost 280 more website visitors as compared to August.
Now let’s have a look at how far my website goes down in October 2015…
This doesn’t look too bad! I just lost 46 website visitors as compared to September and this is actually because I put in effort to start sharing my post and build up my comments for visibility.
Still, nothing beats content creation and although I had soften the blow of losing traffic through social media and comments, the sole purpose of having a blog is to create more content and that is a lesson I learned the hard way.
I’m sure you’re curious as to how my social media channels are doing since I wasn’t able to attend to it much so here goes nothing…
Facebook Page – 142 likes (33 people left me!)
Blog twitter account – 80 followers (Lost 7!)
Personal Twitter account – 641 followers (+196 more!)
Google+ – 26 Followers, 6386 views (-1 follower but I gained 368 more visitors!)
I won’t delve much into the social media part though, as I know they went down terribly so I’ll save that for next month because I’m sure you’re just dying to find out…
The Sales – Did I Actually Make Any Money at All?
This part is a very thrilling to write about because truth be told, I too was keen to know if I’ve made any sales at all since my 3 months hiatus.
I checked and totaled up commissions for all 3 months and would you believe how surprised I was to know that I earned a whopping $417.50?
Just like the stats above, I’m gonna break down the commissions according to all three months starting from August 2015…
My August sales
As you can see, I earned $115.50 in August WITHOUT even touching my blog nor did I do any form of marketing!
Curious to know what happened the month after? Here’s the next table for the month of September 2015…
My September sales
I was even more surprised to find out that my sales actually grew to $165.50 even when I haven’t touched the blog for 2 months straight.
Now let’s see how my sales fare for October 2015…
My October commissions
The sales dropped a bit but I still earned a decent amount of $136.50 on the third month!
Adding up all the profits I earned from all three months, I earned $417.50 which is a pretty cool amount since I never even touched the blog and this only proves one thing – Online Business does work and is a long term process.
If you’re new to my monthly reports, the program I’m promoting is called Wealthy Affiliate and it’s currently my #1 recommendation out of all the products I have reviewed as it has the best benefits for a very affordable price.
Having a website is actually a form of an investment as it will stay on search engines forever, and you get continuous clicks from that as long as you have your contents.
So now comes the question of…
What Have I been doing These Past 3 Months?
One month is a long enough period to be a way from your blog but three months is just too darn long and I do not recommend anyone to do that as it will hinder the growth potential of your site.
Even professional bloggers like Neil Patel used to blog once a month before he decided to blog every week as we need to always be creating content to ensure healthy growth.
Building and maintaining consistency is important because if you traffic falls down, getting it back up again will be troublesome and it’s currently what I’m facing right now.
Still, I could not commit to the content creation part even though I wanted to as I was busy handling various events in such a short time period…
1) GP Conference
My GP Conference brochure
On October 3 2015, I was part of the GP Conference movement and it was a very hectic event that took up all of my time as I was the only person handling 1,000 doctors who want to attend the event.
Sounds simple but imagine handling calls up to 2am in the morning! Some doctors even called me as early as 5am and I had to go through that for a while.
I’m a workaholic so if you’re wondering as to why I don’t just switch my phone off, its because if I do, I’ll lose my momentum and i would have to trace back the other messages which would be rather messy. I always want to give out my very best when handling with people so as to leave out a good impression to them on my capabilities.
The event is about private GPs all over Malaysia uniting and showing their concerns on the Malaysian government’s action to imply the dispensing separation plan and opening up their government clinics near private clinics.
Me preparing the venue for the event
It was the first ever large-scale event event that involves private doctors in Malaysia and it also managed to get the attention of the media as doctors are extremely busy people so it’s a miracle to even get a thousand of them all in one place let alone a hundred.
I am glad that they chose me as part of the organizers (There were only 3 organizers), I gained a lot of experience on how to handle large scale conferences and I was happy to know that the event went by successfully.
Here’s a picture of me at the event managing the floor at the conference…
How the event looked like when in session
2) Dota 2 tournament for MSU University
My Dota2 tournament poster
Exactly one month after at 3 November 2015, I organized another event and this one is on another different niche entirely – gaming.
Here in Malaysia, Mountain Dew is growing aggressively and they are targeting the youth generation here to establish their brand and that is by contacting all the universities locally to get a representative in order for them to do an inter-university competition.
As most of my team members are from the Malaysian Science University (MSU), we chose to represent that particular university and organized the Dota 2 tournament for Mountain Dew.
My team received an award from Mountain Dew !
My organization skills were getting much better after the conference and for that, we received an award for being awesome, pretty cool!
3) The Christmas Fund Bake
My first event infograph!
On November 18th (Yes, just 15 days after the tournament!) I’ll be organizing yet another event called the Christmas Fund Bake at Taylor’s University, Selangor, Malaysia.
For this event, we aim to raise funds for single mothers to buy school necessities for their children (Like bags and uniforms) as New Year is approaching and being a single parent, finance is a huge issue.
The event is yet to come so promotions are still ongoing until the 18th so please, do support me and our Facebook event page here.
My event Facebook page
Simply Cookies is the social enterprise responsible in helping these single mothers break out of their poverty cycle by hiring them as employees but this year, they want to do something different hence this event.
However, they are only a cookie company so in order to successfully carry out this event, they hired me as their organizer and though I get minimum wage, I still accept it because of the social calling in it.
My close friend was brought up by only his mum and my cousins too so unintentionally, I do understand the traumatic pain the children have to go through as well as their mothers which is why I feel that it’s my responsibility to make a change.
So far, we’ve been getting good response and we’ve managed to secure 7 sponsors altogether but in terms of funds, we are still lacking behind due to the rushed planning.
Because of that, I’ve put together a crowd-funding campaign on Start Some Good…
I do not believe that we’d reach our goal as we are really short of time but any contribution you make would really help us out!
My Final Word
So there you go, what happens if you leave your blog for 3 whole months.
Basically your blog will survive but it will gradually decrease in traffic and visibility which is actually a bad thing since you will need to spend more time to build up your momentum.
Still, the downside is that my sales are still ongoing because being in the Online Business industry, my content will always stay on Google and many of them are already on the first page which I guess is how I managed to still get some conversions.
I wasn’t really proud knowing that I left my blog unattended this long as I still have to make payments to my Aweber account which I haven’t also touched for a while but I’m happy that I finally found the time to start writing again and boy, it feels good to be back.
Until next month, thank you for reading guys!
Cheers!
You are doing well. I also started blogging. Need support from you. How can i will be successfull?
By putting effort on building your blog, by learning more on how to grow your blog, by being patient, and of course by not expecting results overnight because there is no shortcuts to success.
Hello, Riaz, it is so nice to meet you and get to read your October 2015 Monthly Report- My 3 Months Hiatus From Blogging. Wow, you have done an awesome job with your blog, and the details you have given us, the readers, is so inspirational. I have been away as long as 3 weeks, but would never think to be away any longer. You are such a special person, helping with all of the venues you do! Congrats to you!
With Kind Regards,
Linda
Wow thank you for the kind words Linda, that means a lot to me. 3 weeks is still fine, I’m glad you got back to work a soon as you could, I wished I could have put in more effort in too. Thanks for dropping by, hope you have a great day!
Hey Riaz,
Seems like you’re very busy outside the online platform. Exciting things are happening for you. Your website drops weren’t as bad as I though it would have been. Your commissions earned while you were away really motivated me to keep going with my business. Online business can be a great way to generate revenue without you being there. But would defiantly like to see we touch basis every once in a while from your blogs. Always provide helpful content.
Hey there Vinnie, I’m glad you liked my website content. Sure thing! I always update my site every once in a while so that people are always updated on the progress. Appreciate the feedback!
It’s good to know that even you did not create any content for your blog for 3 months you still made some money. This shows that once you create a quality site with a quality content, it will work for some time. It is better of course to create the content every week and to increase the visitors and make more money, but at least thanks to your experiment we learned something about content creation. Thank you!
Thanks Kristof, agreed with you on that one. I did however took a break again, another 3 months right after and now I’m back again and will definitely write another post end of this month. Cheers
It looks like you have a pretty successful blog Riaz. You haven’t touched it for a few months yet you still made some money.
I’ve never had such a long break from blogging yet, but I am so busy now that it’s quite possible that I won’t publish anything new in the next 2-3 weeks.
I have a blog which makes me between 200-400 dollars a month. I’m wondering if I would notice any decrease in earnings if I left it for 2-3 months? To be honest, I think I would still be making at least $200 a month with this blog.
So I agree with you that blogging can be a great source of passive income. You don’t have to work on it all the time to be making some money each month.
Hey Luke,
That’s really great news, congrats on earning from your blog, very well done! To grow your income you really need to put in effort into content creation so I envy you for finding the time to do that as I’m currently struggling with that myself.
Having a blog is definitely a great way to get passive income, its slow to grow but its slow to decrease too so its a good investment for anyone to have a second income stream. Thanks for dropping by, cheers!
Hey, Riaz!
I thoroughly enjoyed reading your article on your blogging progress over the last few months 🙂
As a website owner myself, I gained some awesome insight here, and it’s great to see you are making some steady progress with making money online.
I too have discovered that if I don’t publish any posts for a while, my traffic dips which is frustrating. But once we get some momentum with publishing posts frequently, traffic increases and so does the income.
Thanks for your report, and this will help to inspire other online business owners 🙂
Neil
Hey Neil,
Its great to know you liked to see the progress. I like to be as transparent as possible so do let me know if there are questions you’ve been meaning to ask too. That momentum is important to keep, it better if we grow it rather than replenishing it if we lose the momentum. Cheers
I came across your site and I must say that I am refreshed and I am comfortable with your writing style and your overall presentation, SMOOTH. I wish you luck on your new endeavor in Maylasia, with the event company. Are you a native? How did you get involved in that industry?
Hey William,
Yes, I’m a native Malaysian and the reason how I got into the events industry was because I was working for various hotels before and through that, I managed to learn a thing or two about planning and negotiation. Thanks fro the kind words, I’m glad to know that my writing style is still okay after 3 months of not writing. Cheers!
Hi there. Really interesting and inspiring post. I have always been curious about what happens if I leave my blog for that long. As I have very few traffic, around 15 visits per day, I experience a drop but in a smaller scale when I post once a week instead of twice.
I am glad you could still make sales and that’s the beauty of. Internet marketing. The work you did in the past is paying you dividends!
You said it your sales totalled, which means they are recurring commissions, did you managed any new referrals during this period?
I was actually expecting a bigger drop, I think you will get back on track very quickly, your blog is great.
Thanks for sharing
Thanks Stefan!
As long as you post weekly, it should be fine and your blog will definitely grow at a steady pace. I’m glad my past work is paying off, this gives me more motivation to work harder because every post is a chance for me to increase my growth.
Regarding the recurring commissions section, not all of my referrals stay forever. Some leave halfway but along the way I do get new referrals too every month. Total up all that and I get a nice number which is the ones you see on my stats above. Thanks for dropping by, hope you have a great day!
I see. I was posting once a week but I am aiming for 2 Now. I hope I can keep the pace… I heard consistency is really important.
Thanks for that. Have a great day
Consistency is key, Stefan so its kinda important. I’m trying to target 2 posts a week too now, good luck!
Your article is really inspiring. I just started out on my web development journey and work none stop on my 4 sites. It’s nice to know that when I finally do crash and need that break chances are that everything will be fine when I come back to it. I don’t know if I’m brave enough yet to take 3 months off thou. lol Great website I’m gonna bookmark it so I can come back and check it out later.
Hello there Merceadez,
Your blog will definitely be fine if you’re not there to tend to it for a while. I doubt anyone would take a 3 months’ leave though, I didn’t intend to but I’m glad I finally found the answer to my question on what would happen if I do lol. Thanks for bookmarking, hope to see you again here soon!
Wow… I am totally impressed that you can take three full months away from your internet business and still earn over $400. Can I ask you a couple of questions?
How long have you had your website going/
What’s your number one piece of advice for someone who is still trying to make her first sale. My time is limited and it’s a challenge for me to post 3 times per week.
Thanks
Deb
Hey there Deb,
Sure thing, you can ask as many questions as you like! I asked myself the same questions though. I’ve been on my website for a little over a year now and one piece of advice that I can give is something i’m sure you’re very familiar with – posting content consistently.
I do understand your limited time, I feel the same way too which is why if you really have to, the bare minimum frequency for anyone to post is actually once a week. But do make sure that you give that post your absolute best because that particular post will have to make up the other 3 posts that you were supposed to do every week. Content promotion is of utmost importance, you always want to share on all your social media, especially on Google+ and LinkedIn groups as you can get great traffic from there for free. That’s how I made my first sale within the first 3 months when my blog was still barren.
Hope that helps Deb, do let me know if you need help with anything else. Best of luck on your site!
Hello, I’m new to the Online Marketing and I just started learning a little over 2 months ago. So I still have a lot to learn and the traffic i’m getting is barely around 1 to 2 per day and I think I never had more than 20 per day. But at this point I’m just glad that people are coming to websites. I’m just curious to know how long have you been working on your website and did sales drop too after you left it? Or were your average sales still around the same amount?
Hey Joon,
Don’t worry, that’s actually quite normal for new websites. I get the same amount of traffic as you for the first few months, all you need to do is keep writing contents weekly and share those posts on social media aggresively. I’ve actually written many posts on how to gain traffic on my home page if you could just check it out.
It took me 3 months to make my first sale and only after that did I notice an increase in my traffic and this is because Google takes somewhere around 3-4 months to evaluate new websites as there are millions being built every month. They just want to know if you’re serious.
Consistency is key and if you persevere, you will get there. but its important to know that growing a successful online business is a slow process. Sure, it might be difficult to write out contents but the best thing about that is that it will stay in Google forever so in a way, that is a form of an investment long-term. Because even if you don’t write new contents for a while, you still have your existing ones to help you out.
I’ve been working on my site for a little over a year and my sales did increase for a few months… until I decided to cut down on content creation as I was busy with something else. Still, the sales do carry over even when I haven’t touched my blog for a while and that’s the beauty of having an Online Business, all you need to do now is to grow it and keep your head up. Hope that helps! Cheers!
Wow thats an impressive 3 months (short) report of blogging! I wounder how it will look like in 3 more months or lets say 9 more months! Me to started a blog about one year ago and I can tell you that it took me about 3months before I made any money at all… But after that it just went through the roof! Great job by you! and keep up the work I promise you that your results will start to explode very soon :o) / John
Thanks John!
Really appreciate the encouragement and the kind words, I do love your website and you inspire me to work harder. I’m slowly picking up the momentum, hope I’ll reach to where you are now soon!
Hi Riaz, You have a very informative page formatted well easy to read good visuals lots of graphs. The only thing I noticed was a couple of typing errors on spelling and something I saw on other peoples site as well. Your social pins are blocking the left side of your content. Hope this helps you? Have a blessed day!
Larry
Hey Larry,
What kind of things did you see on other people’s sites, if I may ask? If you could point out those mistakes that would really help me out. Do you mean the social pins at the leftmost part of my page, the ones on the white margin? They don’t really bother the content though, as they are on the white margin isntead of the content itself but thanks for the feedback!
Hi Riaz,
I stopped by your site sometime in October and realized you haven’t posted anything new. I worried that you may have left altogether… I am glad to see that you are back!
Just wanted to leave a quick comment for you as I assume what Larry is saying here is when he views your site on a mobile device. The vertical social buttons can sometimes block the view. I tested your site on my iPhone and it was fine. But on my iPad, the social buttons you have here do block the left side of your content.
I had the same issue with my website theme too, so I took the vertical social buttons down. You may want to check it and see for yourself on your tablet or something. Hope this helps 🙂
Yuko
Hello again Yuko,
I did have a very long leave but truth be told I was very worried about my website’s progress too but I’m glad that I’m back – its time to pick up the pace and increase my growth once more. Thanks for the heads up on the vertical social share, I’ve checked my iPad and saw that it was indeed blocking the content so I took it down. Many thanks, appreciate your feedback! Wishing you all the best in your site too.