Blogging Journal-Month 7

Published August 9th, 2008

Another month has gone by in a blur! Some big changes happened in my life in July, and many wonderful things happened with Value For Your Life as well–just completely different from what I’d planned!

The good stuff

Always start with the positive. In July, the blog saw an all-time record for visitors, according to Awstats almost 15,000 of you came to visit! Being that this is a relatively new blog, that’s pretty exciting, and much appreciated. Since most of that traffic was from Stumbleupon, I’m not sure how that will factor into the growth of the blog. I guess I will just have to see what happens with August’s numbers! As always this blog is more about the great readers and writing fewer but good quality posts, but the numbers and stats just fascinate me.

Another first, I hosted a blog carnival (a periodic collection of posts submitted by bloggers with a certain area of interest). Thanks to Andy at the Carnival of Money Stories for giving me a chance to do this. I have received a great response and even made a couple of new blogging friends from this experience. Even though I’ve never met any of you, I really like the sense of community that these blog carnivals bring. In other exciting news, I just found out I’ve been accepted to host the Festival of Frugality at the end of Sept–LOVE this carnival!

Out of nowhere, my search engine traffic is on the rise again. Thank you Google, MSN, and Yahoo! It had dropped off for a month or so, but now stronger than ever. With my very limited understanding of how the Web works this remains a huge mystery to me, but I’ll take it.

Last month’s goals….

Well, in a nutshell, many got thrown out the window, but I rolled with it!

I started running my first contest and personal finance challenge, you can read more about that here. I’ve picked up a few great readers here from the contest. Unfortunately, with the new job and commuting schedule, the energy didn’t go into promoting these as much as I should have. I haven’t sat down yet and calculated how much of last month’s money earned can go towards the trip, or updated the pie chart for our trip fund. I suspect that by the deadline next week, we’ll be up to about 50% of our goal. Sheepishly, I admit that way too many things were going on this month, and knowing that our aggressive debt repayment plan is the priority, I wasn’t as focused on earning the extra income for the trip. Why? Because we have a sizeable emergency fund that we’ll borrow from to pay for the full balance next week, and then pay it all back over the next 6 weeks. I will write a whole post about this next week. Anyway, one more week left to get those entries in for the contest part by answering the trivia question on the contest page, commenting, or subscribing via email. Prizes are 10 Amazon.com gift cards, so get those entries in.

Goals I didn’t get around to were joining Facebook, posting a recipe with picture, and writing a book review here on the site. With all the other great things that happened this month, I’m not going to beat myself up over not getting around to these…there’s always next month!

Now for some links…

Thanks to my top 3 referring blogs last month: Budgeting Babe, Squawkfox, and Antishay Ventenne. Much appreciated ladies!

The most popular posts were: 101 Things I Love About Dogs, The Undeniable Pet Insurance, and Goodbye Sweet Shadow. I’m learning very interesting things about writing timeless content…only one of these posts was actually a new one! I usually write about topics relating to personal finance, and don’t write about animals very often because the topic is almost too close to home, yet some of the few animal-related posts I have got the most traffic last month…I really do find this all fascinating.

Next month’s goals:

1) Contest and personal finance challenge wrap-up

2) Keep participating in the fun blog carnivals

3) Re-vamp my about page

4) Decide what exactly to do and focus on my monetization strategy. Don’t worry, there won’t be any more ads visible than there already are–I just need to tweak and figure out how to best use them

5) Figure out how to do more writing during the week with my new 11 hour workday

6) Figure out and correct why pictures are not showing up in wither my email or RSS feed–this is driving me crazy, and I have tried many things, so any suggestions for fixing this would be greatly appreciated!

That’s all for July, enjoy the rest of August!

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