When you start your first blog or website you get excited about having 5 or 10 visitors a day. It’s almost validating just to have someone visit your site because you feel like you’ve done something right. Website owners find it easy to let their excitement get the best of them. Once you get a taste of traffic you want more, but the numbers don’t always follow your expectations.

My experience is that time produces more traffic and more traffic produces more income. I have a few websites that have 100 blog posts but have not been update in 6-10 months. 6 months ago they had 100 visitors a day but now they see 300. That’s a 300% increase without even updating the site.

The point is that there is a compounding traffic effect with the web. As your site ages in increases in favor with Google. If you continue to update your site you add more searchable content, get more backlinks and build more interest with your readers. If I never udpated this site again I know that I’d have MUCH more traffic in a year than I do now. But if I can be patient and continue to write there will be a steady stream of increase.

Your traffic really does grow at a higher rate later in the life of the site. Traffic is good, but earnings are better. Take a look at the Adsense earnings of my top website over the last 2 years. I’ve included March of 2010 even though this month isn’t over yet. I used a very conservative estimate because my numbers are so high already.

You can see where things started out and how they have grown. I would never have expected that they would grow faster now than it did in the beginning. I think most of us would expect things to grow at a steady rate.

Once you start, stick in there and wait 1-2 years, the earnings and the traffic is on its way.