Postcards from the Funny Farm

I made more money in March than I have made blogging to-date. In this post I show how. So, without any further ado, lets get to my March 2008 goals and results.

In February’s post, I broke down my March goals into three categories. This worked so well that I will be doing the same for April. You may recall the three categories are:

1. Traffic Goals,
2. My Web Publishing Goals, and
3. Monetization Goals.

First, let’s look at last month’s stats:

March 2008

1. Traffic Goals:
   3,532 Visits: Goal exceeded! (was 3500)
   114 Visit/Day avg.: Goal of 100 visits/day exceeded!
2. My Web Publishing Goals:
   Just to reiterate: One of my main goals with my blog is to establish more of a name and an online presence through multiple online locations. These also help with backlinks, Google PageRank and Technorati authority. I went on a publishing field-day to put it mildly! I hope to do even more next month.
   
3. Monetization Goals:
   Feeling a little jaded after Google smacked my page rank from a PR4 to a PR2 because I used IZEA, I decided to set my PayPerPost goal low in March at $30. I exceeded that goal with an income of $65 from PayPerPost in March. Also, I was able to make $20 from Loud Launch and an incredible first month of $70 with PayU2Blog. The PayPal payment just went into my bank account an hour ago. Can you say Sarah and I go to Chili’s for lunch today??? ;) Oh, one more money item: I gained 2 125×125 paying advertisers this month. It is a pleasure having them and I plan to do all I can to keep them happy.

Okay, now it is time to list my future goals for April:

1. Traffic:
   3750 Visits.
   175 Visits/Day (I know it is almost doubling last month’s goal, but I am networking through 9Rules and BlogCatalog much more as well as some sources I’m choosing to wait to mention in case they don’t work).
2. My Web Publishing Goals (10 published articles in April): Publish on …
   BlogCritics (2)
   Associated Content (1)
   FuelmyBlog (2)
   GuestBlogging as the coveted offers come in. I would anticipate a minimum of 5 offers, but we’ll see. If I don’t get that many, I may approach YOU! ;)
3. Monetization Goals: I’m making a goal to make $100 minmum on PayPerPost and PayU2Blog. We’ll see what the ads bring in as well but I am not setting an ads goal at this time.

Think I can pull it off? I am confident I can. You might consider subscribing to my feed so you don’t miss an update! This month should be an exciting month of meeting these new goals. Oh, and if you are interested in getting traffic from this blog, I would like to do a guestblog or interview for you on your blog. Let’s talk! Thanks for reading Postcards from the Funny Farm.

I’ve been reaching out in the past couple weeks to new blogs hoping to find some new connections.  My existing faves all rock and I enjoy reading them, but my goals for 2008 include getting more traffic and so far I have learned the best way to get traffic is through making connections and visiting and commenting on other blogs.  Here are some ways I am finding great new blogs currently that you may want to try if you’re not already:

1. The following widgets: MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, Entrecard, Spottt, and BlogRush.

2. The Blogrolls of my favorite blogs and Bumpzee.

How do you find new blogs to read? 

I’ve written several articles in a series on things I’ve learned about blogging but not enough about optimization. Blogs and websites make up such a giant piece of our modern commerce today that it really is no longer an option for the webmaster/blogger to ignore this issue. There is simply too much money to be made!

All decent websites and blogs are the same in that they they hold content. After that one thing in common however, they they are not all the same: some are visited often and some are not. Which one sounds like yours? The reason is no accident. Sites that have been optimized pull readers in consistently and earn dollars and those that have not been optimized don’t.

As an avid blogger and webmaster, I’ve done lots of homework of how to optimize my sites through proper categories, keywords, and tags. I’ve seen amazing results as well. It is very exciting when more website traffic comes as a result of hard and tedious work.

Still, I hunger for more traffic, readers, and through that more income for my blog that I seem to have “hit a wall” using my own efforts. I recognize that hiring a professional to bring more website traffic would be an exciting idea. After looking around a bit, I found this amazing company called: Think Big. The results show a proven track record of increasing traffic for their clients’ websites. There are many things I can do as a webmaster: Write relevant content, post exciting photos, make and tweak themes, code css, html, and php, but search engine optimization, I have learned, is truly best when left up to a professional such as Think Big.

We all want more traffic. Would you consider hiring a company to optimize your site?