I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving.  As I thought we had a bit off a drop off this month, but it was expected.  Our income number dropped only slightly which was very surprising.  Maybe we’re finally out of the so-called Google smart pricing for adSense.  Anyhow here are the numbers

Time for my monthly review.  Unfortunately, nothing exciting happening on the blog over the past month.  Each major stat is either flat, slightly up, or slightly down.  Hopefully I can inject some enthusiasm into the blog during the month of August.

That being said, I’m participating in the 2009 edition of the Thirty Day Challenge.  The goal of which is to earn you first $10 through online marketing.  I’m going to do my best to follow each day step-by-step, but my real goal for the 30DC is to apply all the techniques to my army of web properties.  So, hopefully I can build one solid blog through the 30DC that produces $10 and can increase current web property traffic at the same time.

Income June 2009

AdSense – $127.34

Amazon Associates – $15.23

Total – $142.57

I’m pretty sure I’m not monetizing my traffic to the full potential.  Why?  It has to do with laziness.  I need to experiment with the other forms of monetization rather than relying on Google AdSense.  Also, I only added a few Amazon links in probably no more than 20 out of hundreds of pages on my sites.  I imagine I can increase my Associateds income by 5-10 if I added links and ads throughout all my pages.  Maybe it’s time to investigate a plugin that would do this for me.  Finally, one of my new web properties has finally started to show some promise attracting 30-40 new visitors a day.  This property has not been monetized either.  I’ll probably wait till I reach upwards of 100 visitors a day.  I’m going to keep the goal at $150 till I actually reach that number.

I did add a few clickbank links and have received over 100 clicks, but still waiting for my first sale.  We’ll see how that goes over the next month or two.

Subscribers

June 30 – 1245

June 30

• Blog 1- 1350
• Blog 2 – 8
• Blog 3 – 3

The grand total for RSS subscribers this month is 1361 an increase of 116.  Not a very good turn out falling way short of the 200 goal.  Lets scoot this one back down to 150 and hope to clear 1500 subscribers this month.

Traffic

Site Usage

Visits = 22,184+2,357
Page Views =  35,630 +804

It least we trended slightly up this month.  However, the bad news is that this includes stats from my all three web properties rather than just the one.  While my new sites contribution is slight it finally has reached some significance exceeding 1000 visitors and 1500 page views this past month.  I’m thinking htis is the month to reach the goals below…at least I think we can hit the number of visitors number.

Lets stick with last months goal 25,000 visitors and 45,000 page views.

Here is my month-by-month comparison chart:

This month finally saw a change with an upward swing slightly up from the month before.  My thoughts at the beginning of this month is two fold.  First, experiment with my monetization strategies and second implement Thirty Day Challenge concepts to increase traffic and revenue.  I’m excited this month as I usually do much better with structure and that structure being the 30DC.

See ya next month!

So this is the final post to complete my gallery.  If you read the documentation carefully you’ll notice that the gallery doesn’t work until you have at least 2 posts in your gallery.  After adding 2 posts with the “Featured Content” category, and the articleimg custom field pointing to the exact location of my image I got a working featured content gallery slider on my site.  Check it out on the home page: Bloggers Project.

The image size I used on this article is 500×375.  Take a look at the Featured articles section and you’ll see that there is black space on the right and left side.  For optimal image size use the same size you specify in your gallery.  The other two articles I used are 557×333 which is the exact same size as my featured content gallery.

If you have any questions on the featured content gallery plugin then let me know.  I am by far from an expert, but I was able to get mine up and running.

This is part II and if you’ve read the documentation then you’ll know you need at least 2 posts to get this bad boy working.  My next post will be part 3 to complete the content slider.

There are so many plugins available through WordPress that I can’t imagine using another Content Management Software (CMS) package for any of my projects.  Joomla has come across my plate several times and I’ll work with Joomla, but WordPress is definitely my CMS of choice.

I was recently asked if we could add an rotating image gallery to a site a created about a year ago.  I was pretty sure there would be a plugin available and I’ve also built Flash files that rotate through a sequence of images.  After doing a little research I found the Featured Content Gallery plugin.  The plugin does exactly what I hoped it would do.  It’s very simple to use.  Just take a look at the Featured Content Gallery plugin on the home page of this blog.

Featured Content Slider

So what’s the step by step for this plugin?  Pretty simple.

1. I’m not going to review how to install a plugin, but just download this guy from here: Featured Content Gallery plugin and install like normal.
2. Here’s a screen shot of the options you can use on your blog:

1. I used the category “Featured Content” for all of my gallery posts.
2. It’s recommend you crop your images to equal the same size you create your gallery.  I used 557×333
3. I’m rotating the most recent 3 posts from the “Featured Content” category, but you have other options as you can see in the Featured Content Gallery Options menu

Things didn’t go quite as planned during the month of June.  I didn’t get nearly as many posts up on my sites and to add insult to injury I didn’t completely finish the development/design of the two websites I was working on.  Anways, enough excuses lets get on to the stats and goals for next month.

Income – June 2009

AdSense – $123.40

Amazon Associates – $12.35

Total – $135.75

My AdSense totals were going strong through the middle of the month and I was looking like I was on pace for my goal of $150.  However, the end of the month my revenue and pageviews began to sputter possibly due to the low number of posts.  I’m going to stick with the same goal for June and shoot for $150.

Subscribers

May 31 – 1094

June 30

• Blog 1- 1240
• Blog 2 – 4
• Blog 3 – 1

The final total for my three blogs is 1245.  I exceeded my goal of 150 for the month with a whopping 151 new subscribers.  I could definitely have done much better had I produced more articles and done more marketing.  Lets go a little more aggressive this month and shoot for 200 subscribers.

Traffic

Site Usage

Visits = 19,827 -1,306
Page Views = 34,826 -1,374
Pages/Visit = 1.76

Traffic Sources

Search Engines = 15,496 (78.16%)
Referring Sites = 3,666 (18.49%)
Direct Traffic = 663 (3.34%)
Other = 2 (.01%)

I know my numbers are down, but I can attribute that to two things.  First, I haven’t worked on my sites as much as I want to.  I had one post on one site, two posts on another, and 8 posts on the third with no marketing efforts.  This month I’m going to set a goal of 1 article every weekday of the month per blog.  That amounts to the magical number of 69 total post for the month of July that’s versus only 11 total posts during the month of June.  I’m hoping that will bump the numbers to a higher level.  Also, we had a little issue last month when upgrading to WordPress 2.8 and our Google Analytics plugin.  Needless to say the plugin failed and brought down the admin panel on my WordPress blog.  Google Analytics was down for about 1 days and we saw a drop in stats.  Minus the Google Analytics snafu we were probably up slightly from May’s totals.  Probably something like 22K Visits and 36K Page views.

Lets stick with last months goal 25,000 visitors and 45,000 page views.

Here is my month-by-month comparison chart:

So overall the number’s are down for a second consecutive month. I have no one to blame, but myself. Rather than focusing on the numbers I plan on making a concentrated effort on producing more content and put some emphasis (vs none last month) on my online marketing efforts.

In my lifetime information has always been readily available whether it be through the Library, Encyclopedia’s, or the Internet.  Today it’s easier then ever to get at any information in the comfort of your own home.  This can be good and bad.

Back in the day…I’m talking 80’s and early 90’s I used a thing called the library when searching for information.  I often times ask some of my younger friends (you know the type – social media savvy, under 22 years old, internet power surfers) if they’ve used card catalogs, microfiche, or any general library skills.   Usually they have no idea what I’m talking about.

Information In My Youth

I was among the lucky one’s throughout grade school.  As I recall my parents purchased the 1981 edition of the World Book Encyclopedia.  Our household was the envy of the block.  No longer did we always have to trek to the local library for information.  Every bit of history was right there, readily available in the World Book Encyclopedia.

Ten years passed…I used the Encyclopedia’s as if they were gods word on what was fact and fiction.  I still had to check out other supporting resources from the local library (newspaper articles, books, magazines, etc), but my time spent there was limited compared to my friends and fellow classmates.  I was able to work faster and get things done much quicker then everyone else for ten years.  Ten years…of reports and school work.  Ten years…as the main source in my bibliographys.

The year was 1991…10 years after the purchase of our beloved World Book Encyclopedia’s.  1991 was the year I moved out of the house and into the college dorms.  Something happened during my time at the University.  There was a shift in how we got information.  Of course, I no longer had the use of the World Book Encyclopdias in the comfort of my home, but instead the University library was a hop, skip, and jump away from my dorm room.  This is not the shift I’m talking about.  During my time at the University I learned about computers, networks, email, and the internet.  Back then the internet was not as it is today.  However, during my time in college the World Wide Web came to be and I discovered the web browser and the vast amounts of information available at the touch of a finger.

“University of Arizona – 5 or 6 of the best years of your life!” I remember seeing a t-shirt during my freshman year that had that line on it.  I laughed at the time , but just as the t-shirt predicted…I graduated in 1996 (year 5) and didn’t move back to California until 1997 (year6)…5 or 6 of the best years of my life.  Everything had changed when I returned from my life in Tucson.  Most of my friends had an AOL account and email address, a dialup connection, and at the time limited access to the internet (we payed for dialup access by the hour back then).  Information was readily available 24-7.  I could pull up a search engine (I think I was using Alta Vista at the time) and type a word and receive hundreds maybe thousands of articles on the subject.  The way we received information had definitely made a shift during my time in college.

Internet Information Overload

All of this information easily and readily available to us can be a good and bad thing.  The bad thing is what spawned this article.

While I’m sure there are many bads here are a few that were bugging me today.

• Statistics - in my case I’ve been monitoring my statistics daily sometimes even hourly this has got to stop.  Of course in the back of my mind I remember reading a recent  Problogger article specifically about Blogging Mistakes with becoming a Stat-A-Holic being number 17 on the list.
• Statistics Part II – the obsession continues as I search through several blog lists trying to compare my blog statistics to other blogs around the internet consuming hours of time.  By the way, it’s easy to see other blog statistics by checking their “Advertise” page we’re the author will often times reveal key information such as Unique Visitors, Pageviews, RSS subscribers, etc.
• Reading and Not Acting – reading can be healthy, but when it consumes your day to the point where you are not taking action.  That can be an unhealthy obssesion.

As I’ve already mentioned this list should be much longer, but I’m really just venting my own frustration and by the way…after mentioning and looking over Darren Rowse’s 21 Blogging Mistakes article I wanted to write a follow up post about all the blogging mistakes this blog currently makes.

I hope you enjoyed this little rant.  What about you?  Where did you come from? and how do you feel about the availability of information in the world today?