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

Maria (aka WriterGig)  was interested in a followup to my experiment in about a month to see if my results would remain as they started or change as Google does its Google thing.

Here are the results:

The article I wrote for Suite 101 remained on the first page of the Google search results garnering 4,200 views. The article I wrote for eHow fluctuated, between the first and third page for a total of 3,087 page views. The article I wrote for HubPages disappeared. I didn’t spend time looking through Google to find out where it went. All I know is that it earned 105 page views.

If earning money on the internet is a function of driving traffic to the articles, then clearly Suite 101 and eHow are the winners in this unscientific experiment.

I’m not totally giving up on HubPages as yet. I’ll keep them on the back burner and place an occasional article there. After seeing the results of my experiment, I can’t justify spending too much time building lots of hubs at this point. Over time with an occasional hub here and there, I’m sure the income will eventually build. After all I did earn money on those 105 page views, but I’m not willing to devote nearly as much time there as I will at Suite, eHow or populating my own sites/blogs.

Try Your Own Experiment

My results may vary from yours depending on the keywords, time of year, direction of wind and who knows what else. I think that it’s wise to test the waters every once in a while to make sure you’re spending your time in a way to bring in the most reward for your hard work.