That being said, I inadvertently ran an experiment. The experiment solidified my belief that it’s so much better to work smarter than harder.

Back in April of 2006 I created a website. It’s a true website and not a blog. The pages are static pages that are not interactive. No comments allowed.

A few years later in January of 2009 I created another website. Well, it’s not really a website, it’s a blog. On this blog I did not enable comments because I wanted to try to re-create the website feeling without having to go through all of the website coding. This blog is also static as it does not allow reader interaction.

Here’s what I discovered about the first 10 months after each site went live.

There are a lot of variables here. When I created the site in 2006 I didn’t know very much about writing for the web. However, the one thing I did realize was that Google AdSense was a powerful earning tool so I tried to get as much content on the site as quickly as I could.

I did manage to populate the site, but it’s quite obvious from the above numbers that I should have taken my time to pick and choose my content more carefully. As time went on and I learned more, I made changes to the site, but I think the initial damage was done.

Don’t get me wrong, it still earns a steady income, but imagine how much more site #1 could have earned if I had used similar tactics to the ones I used with site #2 above.

What I learned:

• Bigger is not always better
• Traffic does not always translate into dollars
• A small niche site can be more profitable than a larger multi topic site
• Working smarter is much better than working harder
• Slow and steady beats a wheel spinning frenzy any day