Traffic Update #4

I hope that I will be getting to some of the John Chow type income updates soon, but last month I made about $50 from this blog or about 1% of my affiliate income. But I have some monetization ideas. Some a little bit different than the run of the mill. The difference is not monetization type, because that never changes much, but in execution. That's the next project and I really can't wait to get to that one.

Before September, I didn't blog that much and didn't take it seriously. I already was making money online and what I was doing seemed like a lot less work than blogging, but I like writing and blogging would give me an excuse to get a little extra out of my day. So I set out on a plan. First, I took a challenge from John Chow and ended up being one of the finalists. Then I read both John Chow's and Yaro Starak's ebooks. Yaro had a list of things to do daily to build traffic to a blog. I followed this loosely.

1. I posted five to six times a week. I started with a daily plan but couldn't keep up with it. I am all about trying something new, but not spending so much time doing it when it took away from my affiliate marketing time that paid the bills.
2. I commented on ten blogs a day. I slacked on doing this a little, only commenting on the days I posted new articles.
3. I joined the maximum amount of groups at MyBlogLog each day. There is no end of blog communities to join there and I don't care which category your blog falls into. I originally found groups through searching, but when I signed up for the MyBlogLog contest I had to be smarter. By checking the new members of high traffic communities related to mine, I found new communities that I could join shortly after they were formed. And since the community owner had just joined another community, I knew the member was active and the chances that he would join my community was higher. And don't think I an doing this only arbitrarily. My feed subscriptions have ballooned in the same period to over 900. Can I read them all every day? No. But it gives me a good mix, whatever mood I happen to be in that day. And the randomness works like a second subconsious mind, bringing me posts I never knew I needed, never would have searched for, but  is a perfect fit for what I needed to learn that day.
4. I also stayed active at Cre8buzz. I got an invite and decided I would give it a try. There's a good group over there and I would like to see where this site goes.

In the last month, I switched it up a little. I continued with the above list and added a few new things. I started using delicious to speed link so I could add to it whenever I wanted to during the day. This not only gave me trackbacks but locked my research for future posts and projects in place on my blog. If you haven't noticed, I tend to go on theme trends. Two or three posts on one subject and then another. It is really hard to trim this blog down to a narrow band of subjects when I actually have to deal with everything I cover in order to run this online business. But my speed linking usually follows right along with my posts and I use them myself as footnotes to my posts.

I released this theme. This seemed to help a lot initially and a few sites are using it. I will definitely be creating more.

I joined Entrecard and I would recommend this to anyone with a blog. In fact, if you pick one program to join, skip Blogrush and go directly to Entrecard. There is a lot of useless traffic as there is with any system like this, but there is also a lot of great traffic. I have discovered a lot of "diamond in the rough" blogs through Entrecard. And guess what, newbies can be just as innovative as A list bloggers. Sometimes, even more so. The only way to discover this is search and Entrecard brings new blogs to you.

I have also been in and out of Stumbleupon. If I find a great post, I would comment and stumble it. Nice little trick that works, almost as good as stumbling your own posts. And if you want to be first to comment, use Google Reader. It's damn fast at updating and by clicking on my home link, I get a list of blogs that just updated only minutes ago.

I should analyze stats better to give more exact numbers of where traffic came from, but I am having a little issue with stats software currently. Being one who can't take anyone's word until I have tried it myself, I have have four statistics programs running at once. I figured this would reveal which is the best. But each one gave drastically different numbers than the others, enough that I don't trust a single one. This includes Google Analytics that tends to not count hits from search engines that are not Google. But that is the subject of another post. So for now, here are some numbers. I skipped December because I was in a bad mood that day and didn't collect all the numbers.