One of the first steps towards achieving my new blog goals is to lay everything out there for you. In this blog post I’ll go over my current traffic situation, popular keyword phrases, RSS readership track record, and earnings to date.

So first up is traffic. I’ve been keeping track of my blogs stats via Statcounter and Awstats since it’s creation. For the purposes of the current challenge, I’m going to use Awstats. According to Awstats, my monthly uniques has ranged anywhere from 1795 to 3253 since March. I moved servers back in March, so I don’t have any Awstats before then. Below is a screenshot (click to see full size) to help give you a better idea of where I stand traffic-wise.

There is a general incline in the graph, but unless traffic increases this month, I won’t beat my July traffic totals. To reach my goal of at least 400 uniques/day (which is 12,000 uniques/month), I will need to quadruple my traffic. In other words…I need to increase my monthly traffic totals by 3,000 every month.

I’m not saying it can’t be done, but it will be very hard!

Next up, popular keyword phrases. This is one area I definitely need to work on. Anyone want to guess what my number 1 keyword phrase is? If you guess ‘myspace bulletin ideas’ then you’re the winner! Now what on earth does my blog have to do with myspace bulletin ideas? I know why it’s ranked for that term (because I used to own a site called Bulletin Traders), but really… I’ve never posted any bulletin ideas on this site. The next top five keyword phrases are:

  • computers internet blog
  • wordpress forum plugin
  • lithman
  • microphone won t work
  • oj interview video

Not bad. As I scroll down my list of keywords, I notice a recurring theme. Myspace. I rank for a lot of weird myspace layout searches. That’s a result of my posts about Pimp Myspace. If I want to attract readers to this blog (and get them to stay), I need to change the keywords I rank well for. Getting visitors looking for myspace layouts isn’t helping my cause. I hate making blog titles obviously keyword targeted, but I might have to start doing it.

Third on the list is RSS Readership. Looking at the graph below, we can see that my general RSS readership trend is on an upward slide. That’s good news. The extremely large spike you see is a result of getting a post published on the front page of Digg. My RSS number shot up to the 200s that day, then quickly dropped. If everything goes well with increasing traffic, then RSS numbers should follow.

Last on the list is earnings. This section is pitiful. For someone who loves money so much, I sure have done a crappy job at monetizing my blog. In the past most of my money made here came from selling sponsored posts and links. Recently, however, I added TLA to the sidebar. TLA brings in about $10/month per link. With 2 links there I’m looking at maybe $20.

I’ve also sold featured links in the sidebar to members on Digitalpoint. These sold for $12 each. There are 2 of them, so that’s $24. The 120×600 skyscraper ad was also sold on Digitalpoint for something like $15.

In total, we can say my blog produces about $60 in revenue per month. So I’m about 1/5 of the way to my goal with 4 months to go. Blog earnings should go up a few bucks with the addition of Adsense. I really don’t know how I can come up with the rest of money, other then selling paid post reviews, selling more links, and an increase in TLA earnings. If the PR update ever comes, I may reach PR6 which will definitely help me get close to $300/month.
So that’s where I stand going into the challenge. As you can see, I have my work cut out for me. But also, I’m in a decent position to get the job done.