You may recall that I set a goal last month to make $100 online. I've totaled up my earnings, and the grand total is... $9.28. That's less than I made in a month before I made this resolution to begin trying to truly monetize my blog.
I think the reason for the low number is that I spent most of July tweaking my site design and trying to get it ready for monetization, as well as trying to increase traffic. As a result I spent less time doing things that would actually make me money. Over the preceding couple of months, I had written an average of about four or five sponsored posts per month. In July I wrote one. This month has been a lot of the same so far, so I'm setting August's goal at a much more attainable $15. If I can't do that, then I'll know I'm just not working hard enough.
On the traffic situation, I'm a bit frustrated. I have been able to bring more traffic through things like StumbleUpon and Entrecard, but most of it is just that: traffic. Drive-by visits, but very few people subscribing or coming back for more. If anything, this is only hurting my click-through ratios for my ad networks, because I have this highly increased number of impressions but the same tiny number of clicks on the ads. The contest has created a few new subscribers, which was part of its purpose, but it remains to be seen how many of them remain once the contest is over. I'm feeling pessimistic about the whole thing right now, but maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised.
One of the ways I've been trying to increase quality traffic to the site is by commenting on as many blogs as I can, every day, without actually spamming. I won't comment just to drop my link if I don't have something relevant to say on the topic of the post. At first I tried out an application called Comment Kahuna. It's supposed to make the process of commenting on many blogs easier, by letting you search for posts to comment on (by keywords as well as other criteria such as the platform the blog runs on, PageRank, whether "nofollow" is enabled, etc.), and then auto-filling the name, e-mail and URL fields for you so you only have to type your comment and submit. After trying it out for several days I found it to be completely useless. Its searches are not date-sensitive, and many of the posts it presents to me are months, even years, old. Commenting on something that old for the purpose of creating backlinks, even if your comment is relevant, is too spammy for my taste. And, I am unable to get through more than ten or so search results before Comment Kahuna's built-in browser locks up and only beeps when I click anywhere, requiring me to forcefully shut it down via the task manager. Then after restarting the application, I have to run my search again and try to remember where I was when it crashed, as it makes no effort at remembering which pages I've already viewed. This is all much more hassle than it's worth, so I've moved to using Google Blog Search to find posts to comment on. This is giving me much more relevant results, and sorted by date, so I can be sure not to comment on anything more than a week old. So I have to fill in my own details this way... oh well. In most cases I only have to type a letter or two before Firefox takes over anyway.
My next big behind-the-scenes project is to convert the whole site to PHP, which will make it easier to incorporate certain ad networks into the pages. The change should be fairly transparent to you: the only thing that will change is that URLs which now end in ".shtml" will end in ".php" instead, but the old pages will all be redirected to the new, so all of your links and bookmarks will continue to work.
If I can get all the technical work finished up this month, then in September I can focus more on actually generating income, and hopefully you'll see those monthly income goals gradually increase.
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