Postcards from the Funny Farm

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Traffic
2517 / 3750 (67.12%)

In the words of T.S. Eliot, “April is the cruelest month.” I didn’t meet my traffic goals, not by a longshot. Still, I have to be thankful for every hit I got since my blog underwent so many changes. I see these changes as seed-corn for a much larger field in the future. For example, I changed my domain name from the boring and un-brandable: “postcardsfromthefunnyfarm.com/wordpress” to the memorable postcardsfromthefunnyfarm.com

Furthermore, I decided to pull way back from Entrecard. The reason for this is that I was getting a lot of hits from them, over 60% of all! These hits produced some new contacts and readers, but mostly the bounce rate of my visitors went to 100%. I want the hits to reflect real readers as much as possible. I talked about this in a post in more detail last month here.

Publishing
4 / 10 (40.00%)

I slacked off a bit here. Maybe my goals are too high? This is the primary reason I blog so I will be really paying more attention to this in May.

Money
121 / 100 (121.00%)

I met my goal amount for income in April. My sources were: 1) PayPerPost 2) PayU2Blog and 3) Private advertising.

Now for my May 2008 goals:

Traffic: 2650 total unique visits for the month and 100/day avg.

Publishing: 5 total publishings may include guest blog posts.

Money: 300 dollars through these sources - 1) PayPerPost 2) PayU2Blog and 3) Private advertising.

Thanks for reading Postcards from the Funny Farm. Watch to see how I do in May.

This article is Part II of my series “Finest Hour of Social Networks” where I examine social networks and their effectiveness in raising real traffic (low bounce rate/readers who stay more than the duration of two clicks!) This goal is important for monetization and for building a following to your blog. If these ideas are something you’re interested in, this series will help you achieve those goals.

In this article I review and offer some tips on using: Facebook and Fuel My Blog. Here at the second article, I have found I am learning a lot about what a social network is and can be for me as a blogger. I am looking forward to looking at more of the leading social networks for bloggers and sharing my findings with you in future articles. Stay tuned!

Facebook started buzzing around the sphere about 2-3 years ago as I recall. It looked like a vanilla MySpace. For that reason, I never bothered with it much back then. I have a myspace music account that I barely update, how could another “buddy” system get any of my attention? Eventually about a year ago, I joined the service and found it visually slick looking, less cluttered than Myspace. But Facebook is really pointless unless you have “friends” there.   I emailed everyone in my Yahoo! address book and found that out of 30-something people, only three signed up to make me their friends. Then after a long tome of not logging in, I began to get requests from old friends from high school. Some people I only vaguely even remembered. Since gettingonlne now with friends I have found all the addon applications to be really fun. You can waste hours playing around on Facebook.  But, alas, killing time is not one of my 2008 goals, so I limit my time there to about once a week. The good news is though, the service emails you where there are new notices or emails from your friends. You don’t have to hang out there all the time.

In conclusion, I think making a FaceBook account and pimping it as much as you can will help your blog’s traffic. I’ve had at least two comments this past month from people who say they surfed in through Facebook. I recommend it! If you do decide to register, feel free to make me your first friend: I am rileycentral on Facbook.

Thumbs up for Facebook! Now, what about this other mysterious service they call “Fuel My Blog?” Let me tell you what I have found:

Fuel My Blog is a quasi social network where you can “fuel” blogs you like thereby bringing them closer to the top of the list in their category. Sort of like trying to scale Google, this process can make you feel powerless over your own success. Once you join, you can put a widget in your blog that shows your favorite blogs on the service. People can “fuel” the blogs there through a three-click process that is fairly easy. My hope is that their great idea of boosting blogs through clicks will develop further. Three clicks away is too much clicking when I am trying to make merss reading rounds. It’s also discouraging when you know that your clicks probably won’t do much to boost the blog anyway. Fuel My Blog is very new and has a small number of blogs in their system. You can’t be part of this unless you are registered with them and you have their widget. I’ve been good about fueling my 7 a day, but is time consuming. In the end with Fuel My Blog you have a great name with a marginaludea that looks like all the other social schmoozing sites. It would be fine to have it if it offered something new, but as of yet they haven’t. I’m getting a little tired of clicking 10-20 times a day just to boost sites I have only just met through the service. When I find someone I know , I get excited and fuel them immediately just because I know them but that is not the best motive for promoting a blog, it should be spectacular right? Finding blogs to fuel is very cumbersome and the blog must be a registered member of Fuel my Blog for your to fuel them. This lags in much the same way Alexa lags in requiring it’s toolbar to build rank for a site.

My final word on Fuel My Blog is a “sideways thumb”: a little up and a little down. They seem like very nice people (they asked me to guesblog as a regular contributor and I have done 2 blogs for them) and the company looks good on the screen with nice bright graphics. Because of reasons I listed, however, I haven’t found their service to produce the best blogs. Then again, neither does DIGG, SU, or any of the other netwrks I use. I’m alwasy on the lookout for that company who can create and innovate a social system that really gets the good stuff to the forefront. I think much has to evolve for Fuel My Blog to be something the masses will spend their precious online minutes on.

Coming next in the series:

Part III

Twitter - What can that little light blue “t” do for ya! In addition to writing on Twitter next, some may recall I was going to write on 9Rules. I changed my mind and and instead, I’ll be writing something about IZEA and Social Spark. Stay tuned!

Now it’s your turn!

What do you think of using Facebook and Fuel My Blog to build traffic?

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.

It’s the end of the month and time again to see how I did with my blogging goals. Setting goals is an effective way to improve a blog and feel a sense of accomplishment when you meet them. This month I will be placing less of an emphasis on money but I feel strongly this will only be a temporary change. The non-monetary goals I am focusing mostly on will translate into more income but it will probably take 2-3 months I predict. Developing an online voice and presence is a surefire way to gain an audience. And everyone knows that audience translates into advertising success. By summer I will hopefully be talking about money as the main thrust of this series, but first things first. I broke down my goals into three categories:

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

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

Feb 2008

1. Traffic Goals:
   3,028 Visits: Goal exceeded by over 1,000 visits!
   93 Visits/Day avg.: Goal of 70 visits/Day exceeded by 23/Day!
2. My Web Publishing Goals:
   One of my main goals with my blog is to establish more of a name and an online presence through multiple online locations. I set goals to guestblog, write for BlogCritics, and always be open to writing for other blogs and websites. Below are the external articles I had published. These also help with backlinks and Technorati authority.
   *Guest Blog at Dad Balance
   *Guest Blog at The Outboard Brain of a Geek
   *BlogCritics Review
3. Monetization Goals:
   PayPerPost $69
   Total earnings for February: $69. Exceeded goal by $39
   In every category I exceeded my goals in February! That is a great feeling. Now, my goals for March:

March 2008

1. Traffic Goals:
   3,500 Visits
   100 Visits/Day avg.
2. My Web Publishing Goals:
   *2 articles for BlogCritics
   *1 guestblog post. (HINT HINT, I am available!)
3. Monetization Goals:
   PayPerPost $30

Think I can pull it off? I am very confident I can. You might consider subscribing to my feed so you don’t miss an update! March 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.

What do you think of these 3 blogging goals?