When i first started this blog i thought about posting once each every two-three days, well in October i posted 4 posts. When i first started this blog i didn’t imagine that less than 2 months later one of my blogs will receive more than 111K unique visitors alone.

What’s for dinner tonight?

The breakthrough - how i got over 100K in 15 days
Earnings for October - did i reach my goals?
November goals - going a bit higher, only a bit

The breakthrough

Basically the relatively huge amount of traffic came to one blog, which is now officially my flagship - TDB. After a frenzy average of 5 posts a day and not too much traffic coming in, I’ve decided it’s time to focus on what I’m bringing to the table, and not how much.

I’ve started writing and complying several unique posts a day, two of them were titled “Best Car Paintjob Ever” & “Dust Art”. October 15th came and still no major traffic; When i said this to my friend he asked me if I’m doing enough marketing, real marketing. I couldn’t really say yes, so he suggested i submit every unique post of mine to social bookmarking sites and such. I’ve decided it’ll be 8-10 for each one.

I’ve started by submitting to Fark, the highly trafficked site by Drew Curtis, i wasn’t really expecting much, surely not over 64,000 visitors that came within 48 hours. Later on the dust art post got featured on Reddit - Another site most of you probably know.

Just when i felt traffic started to calm down, popular Neatorama and readers’ pick BoingBoing (PR8) featured the post about the car paintjob. These 4 main features (Fark, Reddit, BoingBoing & Neatorama) led to dozens more links coming from big, medium and small sites and forums.

As of now the unique visitor count shows an average of 5K uniques/day, less than the dozens i was getting a week before, but that’s only normal and i’m sure that with the right content and marketing i will be able to raise to at least 7-9 thousands/day regularly.

Earnings for October

Now this is where it gets interesting. One of my goals for October was to “earn 3 figures from my online projects”, which meant that I’d be satisfied with $100, maybe $150 if it really went well. Let’s see if i reached my goals:

Income:

- Google Adsense: $240 ($48 in September, 500% growth!)
- Direct link sales: $65 ($15 in September)
- Paypal (donations): $60 ($0 in September)
- BlogAds: $30 ($0 in September)
- Text-Link-Ads: $15 ($13 in September)

Total income: $410

In a normal month i wouldn’t have any expenses, but since this month brought in more a mid 3 figures, which i haven’t really expected, i decided it’d be a good idea to put some money back:

Expenses:

- Blog face lift: $35 (tiny customizations on TDB)
- Image template script: $40 (making separate templates for images on TDB)
- 2 Domain names: $18 (weekendlinks.com & another mortgage related domain, more on those later)

Total profit for October: $313 ($76 in September, 415% growth)

Not bad isn’t it? as i said, by far my highest earning month, i reached the 3 figure goal, I’ve actually reached all of my goals for October except one: getting AlleNation better known among bloggers & entrepreneurs, and i can’t complain since i haven’t had any time to do so with all the buzz around.

November goals

November should be quite challenging, both keeping the traffic & income rates up isn’t going to be easy, therefore my goals might seem a bit surprising and even underrated for some of you:

setup my mortgage related blog to update automatically and watch the money coming in

Again, i might be aiming high on some, and low on others, but accomplishing the important goals of this month should assure that I’m going on the right track.

Until next time…

As i mentioned before, I’ve purchased weekendlinks.com & another mortgage domain name this month, i plan on developing weekendlinks.com to a nice link-submission based site, i might talk about the other domain later on. There are still some matters and manners i wanna talk about, but this post is very long already.

Allen