Another relatively successful year for THE Canadian Personal Finance site, however, not nearly as successful as I think it should be to justify the amount of time I spend on writing and developing the business.

Some of the highlights of my successes (to be optimistic):

1. My Alexa ranking has gone from off the face of the earth to 98,186, which means I think I have succeeded in the Yakezie challenge (got below 100,000 on Alexa).
2. My income from Adsense is up about 5% this year over last, which while good is still slave wages compared to the amount of work put into the site.
3. TextlinkAds kept up it’s regular payment pace, and it paid about 10% more for the year, so I mustn’t complain about that.
4. I had other income of about $200 from other bits and pieces, which is up a little bit over last year.
5. My presence of Social Networking seems to be much higher these days and I am drawing more readership from these sites, but they are not of very high quality, in that they are not big Adsense clickers, or purchase stuff that I link to on Amazon.
6. Had my first guest post in a while, with Side Effects of Credit Card Debt Build Up, which was received quite well and I did help out a starting blogger, so good for me.

As we can see from Analytics there were a few spikes in the year:

2010 Readership Analytics Graph

What Did Work This Year?

And the list of my most popular posts for the year were:

1. Gifts You Should Never Give to Your Kids, which goes to show that if you rip off an idea from MSN you can still get a lot of readers too. (2143 page views)
2. Pet Insurance WTF, does portray me as a heartless oaf when it comes to pets, but hey, if it sells, who cares?  (1443 page views)
3. Gosh Darn CPP and EI, which simply is me bitching about paying premiums, which is cool. (1342 page views)
4. Advice to Future University Students shows that any story that talks about teenage drinking, can’t be all bad (1230 page views)
5. Banking on Sunday is the first post that I really tried to push hard using Social Networking, and I guess it shows that this can be of use as well. (1181 Page Views)

So I guess the best thing I can do is repost these on Twitter this week, just to get a little more bang for my post?

Goals for Coming Year

I think I have a few simple goals for the coming year:

1. Make more money doing this.

Seems like the only real goal, so let’s work on that.

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That is an excellent question that I asked myself and then scribbled down on a piece of paper, which I finally have gone and looked at.

The best tool that I have access to this type of data is Google Analytics (which is now hooked in with my Adsense account). Google Analytics gives lots of interesting info about your site and my only problem is that I don’t reference it enough to figure out whether changes I am making or things I am trying are actually adding readership or not.

The actual data is as follows:

So what do we learn from this and all the work I have been doing with Social Media?

• Google seems to be giving me the most traffic right now, but I am not sure what Organic means? I assume it might mean searches, but you never know.
• The Canadian Capitalist is my second biggest referral site, which is also not surprising, given the readership numbers that site has.
• Stumbleupon is driving a lot of traffic to my site, but I had noticed that before, so no big surprise there, but nice to see as well.
• The big surprise was that Reddit was a big referral site. Everything I post there gets lost very quick, and inundated with negative comments and rarely has a score above 5, yet it supplies a lot of readers as well, so that is something to think about.
• All the other social media sites create not much interest really.

I now need to ask, am I doing this whole social media thing right? Maybe not, but I have had 1 or 2 posts go “viral” (for me) and get a lot of hits, due to them being well exposed, so maybe that is how it all works?

I am open to any ideas, or theories on this from any of my readers.

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Work continues to create more readership with THE Canadian Personal Finance Site, but as with all things that are hard to get, it isn’t easy.

Learning a great deal from Yakezie forums and such, but also have learned a few things that I may not have mentioned before, so here are a few important points that I have learned from some more experienced bloggers:

• Paid Text Link Ads (not the company, just links for advertising) can get you thrown into the Google penalty box. If your main income stream is Adsense, think twice about accepting paid text link advertising on your site. The penalty box is a Page Rank of ZERO (this one happened to the Canadian Capitalist).
• Never “like” or post your own StumbleUpon posts, that will get you thrown in their penalty box as well (I have heard that one from a few folks).
• DO talk to other bloggers about what they have learned. If you want you can “buy” some information in some of the E-books floating around, but I got a lot more useful information from direct contact with other bloggers.
• If you want to keep writing, choose a subject you like or care about. I write about Personal Finance, because my personal finance life is always interesting, and thus I have now been at this for over 5 years, and rarely run out of topics to write about. This site is a little harder to keep up to date, but I will try to post at least once a week about things that I have learned that week.
• Don’t over expose yourself on Social Media sites (sounds naughty eh), in other words choose a couple of posts that you think are good and push those with your Blogging Groups, don’t shotgun every post or you’ll end up not getting much attention.

Those are the points I can think of that I have used this week.

For my Yakezie friends, I have been adding you to my Google Reader sites, and have been adding you to my Twitter feed as well, but it is hard to keep up with everything (and hold down a full time job). I will also be diligently checking the YPROMOGROUP tag to help out there as well.

Guest posts? If there are Yakezie friends who want to send me a guest post, drop me a line and we can talk about it, I don’t mind guest posts, but so far I have got some pretty bad stuff from unsolicited folks, but my guess is that Yakezie members might write a bit better content.

I am also experimenting with the All in One SEO Pack for WordPress, but I will try it out here first before I add it to my main site. I am still in search of a better theme for my main site as well.

Hope my American friends enjoyed their Thanksgiving as well.

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So somehow THE Canadian Personal Finance site is back to a Page Rank of 5 with Google. This has meant I am now inundated with requests for link exchanges (which I mostly ignore), SPAM comments by the tonne (somehow this has increased), and lots of requests for advertising on the site.

I have no real explanation why the site jumped, but my guess would be my creation of an Adwords account did not hurt my site much. The traffic is slowly increasing, however, my guess is that it could just as easily slow off, if there isn’t future work to increase readership.

Digg and StumbleUpon are both brining more readership which is good, but it ends up that any mention on either the Canadian Capitalist or in the regular printed press tends to bring “looky Lous”, who only look for a day or two and then they are gone. I am not sure how to best keep those occasional readers.

A theme change is needed, but I have not had time to get one that interests me as of yet.

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Income Better But Not Great

This seems to be a continuing complaint by me, that the income for Canadian Financial Opinions is really not what I was hoping it might be after 5 years of writing, but I continue to try new ideas to see if that might help push income to a less slave level and more to a not bad paying hobby level.

Text Link Ads Rules

At the end of it my TextLinkAds income seems to be the most reliable, with Adsense about 1/2 of that income and then no real income from any other sites, although Amazon does create a little income here and there.

I am also continuing to test posting by e-mail as well, which works OK, but it does have a few interesting issues, that I am learning about.

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So my Adsense data has been showing a declining readership directly, but an exploding RSS readership, but this seems a little fishy to me.

Page impressions	Clicks	Page CTR	Page eCPM [?]	Earnings
AdSense for Content top channels	164	1	0.61%	$6.70	$1.10
	Queries	Clicks	CTR	eCPM [?]	Earnings
AdSense for Search top channels	1	0	0.00%	$0.00	$0.00
	Ad Impressions	Clicks	Ad CTR	Ad eCPM [?]	Earnings
AdSense for Feeds top channels	895	1	0.11%	$1.00	$0.89
Total Earnings					$1.99

Yes, I am not making much, but that is not the point, right now I am getting HUGE RSS readership and I think I need to find out exactly what this is.

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So I am really not sure what this will actually do, but here is an adsense video player test to see how it might work on my web site.
The important part of all of this would be to make sure that the video player appears stand a lone on the page.

I wonder what kind of content I might get from it?

Interesting.

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An update on my attempt to carve out a meager income with my blogging so here is an update for March from Canadian Personal Financial Opinions :

• Adsense income $60.44 with about 16000 impressions (including RSS)
• Kontera income $3.78 on 7,528 page impressions
• TextLinkAds income $56.61 earn with 8 ads running out of a possible 8 (text link ads)
• Performancing Ads $00.00 from 0 advertiser
• Pepper Jam Ads income $0.00
• NeverBlueAds income $0.00
• TTZ Media income $0.00
• Marketleverage income $0.00
• ReviewMe review income $0.00
• Pay Per Post income $0.00
• Privately arranged ads income $20.00

Total income for the month of February 2009: $140 (up a little)

Page rank for the site from Google: 3/10

Page rank for site from Alexa #677381 (down)

Number of RSSReaders from Feedburner: 470 (avg) (same) but this number is complete fiction as well, since I can see more readers, yet my numbers remain down.

Text Link Ads return as pretty much my major income earner, my guess is this month I will revamp the web site and I will be remedying some of these situations. 

Still working for slave wages.

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An update on  my attempt to carve out a meager income with my blogging so here is an update for December from Canadian Personal Financial Opinions :

• Adsense income $77.92 with about 13000 impressions (including RSS)
• Kontera income $8.46  on 8735 page impressions
• TextLinkAds income $37.06 earn with 5 ads running out of a possible 8 (text link ads)
• Performancing Ads $39.00 from 2 advertiser
• Pepper Jam Ads income $0.00
• NeverBlueAds income $0.00
• TTZ Media income $0.00
• Marketleverage income $0.00
• ReviewMe review income $0.00
• Pay Per Post income $0.00
• Privately arranged ads income $20.00

Total income for the month of July 2008: $182.44  (up 40%)

Page rank for the site from Google: 3/10 

Page rank for site from Alexa #588840  (up)

Number of RSSReaders from Feedburner: 420 (avg)  (same)

So both Performancing and Kontera on my watch, since I have not seen dime 1 from them, even with their claims of income, and they may fall off the roof if I don’t see moneys from them soon.

Overall a very good month with readership up a great deal and income levels up very nicely as well, not sure what exactly is causing this, but hopefully this will continue.

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An update on  my attempt to carve out a meager income with my blogging so here is an update for December from Canadian Personal Finance Opinions :

• Adsense income $51.54 with about 5000 impressions
• Kontera income $7.84  on 4400 page impressions
• Text Link Ads income $38.09 earn with 5 ads running out of a possible 8 (text link ads)
• Performancing Ads $15.60 from 1 advertiser
• Pepper Jam Ads income $0.00
• NeverBlueAds income $0.00
• TTZ Media income $0.00
• Marketleverage income $0.00
• ReviewMe review income $0.00
• Pay Per Post income $0.00
• Privately arranged ads income $20.00

Total income for the month of July 2008: $133.07  (up 30%)

Page rank for the site from Google: 3/10  (up 1)

Page rank for site from Alexa #597268  (down)

Number of RSS Readers from Feedburner: 420 (avg)  (same)

Again, no income from a lot of the advertising, but more income is good, my goal of $10K for the year seems a pipe dream for now, but I will work on that too.

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