Blogging Journal (Month 4)

Published April 28th, 2008

Hard to believe it’s the end of April already. I’m four months into this project, and some interesting things are continuing to happen. There’s a lot going on with my family and little Shadow (he had a setback last week, but that’s a whole other post), so I’ve not carved out enough time for writing the last couple of weeks. On the plus side, at least I’m in a routine of daily maintenance and housekeeping duties with this site and the relevant sites I use to manage it. I want to keep my goal of posting 2-3 times a week, but what I might have to do until things normalize again is to write a couple of articles in one day and stagger posting them out throughout the week–that’s a nice feature about Wordpress (the blogging platform I use), I can write things ahead of time. Nothing worse than checking back in anticipation for a new post and getting nothing. Rest assured I’m working on it, and we should be back to 2-3 posts a week soon.

So I joined a couple of social media sites to see what they’re all about. I started with Stumbleupon and Digg. Digg was pretty easy to use, but it seems like new posts are being added by the second–I guess readers vote for which up-and-coming posts should be featured. I also found Stumbleupon very interesting, but a little confusing so far. Maybe I’m not that tech savvy. I tried this social media site since some of the readers have stumbled my articles and I wanted to figure out how it works. Don’t get me wrong–I’m not knocking the site at all–their members were responsible for sending a huge spike of traffic my way last week, and that was pretty exciting. I’m not on Facebook yet, hopefully next month.

Thanks to the big Stumbleupon traffic spike of about 4500 people in 3 days (2500 from one article alone on the second day), the site quadrupled last month’s traffic statistics. It had a bit of a snowball effect as a couple of the readers stumbled some of my other posts as well. I know that I won’t have retained most of these readers, but I’ve picked up a few more subscribers and return visitors as a result of this.

Even though it’s still literally pennies a day, my Adsense revenue is continuing to increase with the traffic…in a couple of months it may even pay for a whole month of web hosting ;)

The search engines are continuing to send an increasing amount of traffic my way. I’m pleased about this. According to the results in Awstats about 35% of the people that visit the site are bookmarking it to come back later. I have no idea how accurate this number is, but it sounds good anyway.

This month’s most popular articles were 100 Frugal and Healthy Eating Habits (currently a featured article in Stumbleupon’s frugality category), 7 Ways to Increase Your Water Intake, and My 25% Grocery Savings Rule. I’m starting to really experience the value of writing timeless posts: The post about water intake was one of the first articles I wrote, not many readers then, but the social media visitors sure thought it was helpful–I guess I never really expected this, but it makes sense. There is a lot of great info out there, you just don’t always know about it.

The top 3 referring blogs this month were: Rather-Be-Shopping.com, Festival of Frugality.com, and MoneyNing.com. Thanks everyone!

Next month’s goals:

1) Get back on a 2-3 posts per week schedule by writing in big chunks and staggering the posting times throughout the week.

2) Open a Facebook account.

3) Keep working on the newsletter program problem.

4) Brainstorm ideas for my first contest!

5) Recipe pictures…If I keep reminding myself…I’m going to do it…

6) Keep focusing on traffic building and writing the best content I can.

As always feel free to email me at valueforyourlife@gmail.com with any feedback or questions. Enjoy the next month of spring weather and keep an eye out next month for some contest details!

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