Blogging Journal (Month 3)
Published March 25th, 2008
Another month has come and gone. The website is officially 3 months old! On the blogging front, things are generally going well. Things have been crazy at home and at work, specially with Shadow being sick. I’ve just not felt like it’s a good time to write about some of the more trivial things I’d planned on doing last week. I started a couple of posts, but I just couldn’t get into them. I guess that’s an important blogging lesson; you should only write about things you feel like, and are passionate about. Right now, the progress with the site, and the support of my readers is giving me something to look forward to. When I’m ready, I’ll post some more about what’s going on with little Shadow.
On to the site: Many great things happened this month. My goal of traffic doubling every month was accomplished again! I’m really enjoying participating in the blog carnivals, and will continue to do so. I really appreciate that interested readers are coming to the site. Many are taking a tour around, and are starting to come back. Also, I’m randomly starting to get a lot more visitors from search engine queries, I don’t exactly understand how this works–but I’ll take it–thanks Google! I’ve got a few more subscribers than last month, that’s also encouraging. Although it was a goal for this month, I think I’ll wait a couple more months before doing a post calling out to the readers–when I have more of them ;)
I accomplished most of my goals from last month. One big scary goal was to share the blog with my family and friends. The response has been great, and I’m glad I had the courage to finally let them see and help me participate in something new. I’m also very pleased with the new design of the site. A very interesting revelation happened with the site colour scheme…you can read more about it in Positive Thinking in Action.
On a technical front, I opened up a feed reader account with Google and subscribed to a couple of feeds. In the Google reader it shows many, many posts at length, I don’t know if I like that. For people like me who write really long posts, that might get kind of tiresome for the readers. Maybe I’ll try a different feed reader and see if I like that better. At least I now have some clue how it works!
Again no luck with a newsletter program. I did take some further steps to figure it out and ask for help–just no one responded! I get that they are busy, I’m just not quite sure what to do. I guess it’ll have to be a goal for next time. Maybe the third time around will be the charm.
Now for some links. My most popular articles this month were: My 25% Grocery Savings Rule, Get Your Spouse Involved in Personal Finance, and the ever popular 25 Ways to Save Money.
Thank you to the following top 3 referrers this month! paidtwice.com, brokegradstudent.com, and frugalbabe.com I also wanted to mention Dawn over at frugal for life.com who linked up to my 25 Ways to Save Money post early on, just shortly after I launched the blog, and a few people every month still come over from her site to check things out.
On to my goals for the next month:
1) To vanquish my nemesis the newsletter program. Seriously, if you can suggest a free, easy to configure email newsletter program, please contact me at valueforyourlife@gmail.com
2) Open accounts with some social bookmarking sites, and start getting involved
3) Open a Facebook page. I don’t know how much this will have to do with the website, but I realize that I may be the only person left on planet earth who isn’t on Facebook. So many of my friends, young and old, want to connect with me through this medium, so I will give it a try before it goes out of style!
4) Get some pictures taken so I can start putting some recipes up
5) Do more research on blogs in my subject areas
6) Keep working on writing good quality posts and building traffic
That’s all folks. Tune in next month for more of my blogging adventures!
Broke Grad Student on March 27, 2008
Glad to send some traffic your way. You’re doing a great job with the blog!
Frugal Babe on April 7, 2008
Good to hear that I’m sending people your way. Congrats with the 3 month anniversary!