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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I found an old post I had done last year (when I was in a particularly silly mood), called Men’s Health, which never really caused as much of a commotion as I had hoped, so I had forgotten about it.

Tip of the Week

As most of my Twitter followers know, I actually put 2 original posts up a day, during the week, one which is brand new content and typically posted fairly early in the morning. Around lunch time I make another post which is an OBG (Oldie But Goodie) post, where I attempt to get more readership and site walk-thru by Tweeting older content (given I have over 1000 posts, it is not hard to find 7 posts a week for this). Sometimes I attempt to mine really old posts, and have to clean them up a great deal (edit out parts, add viable tags, etc.,), and this helps clean up my site in general, so it is a very worthwhile exercise, in my opinion.

This week I went searching for Christmas related old(er) posts and tripped across my Men’s Health post again, and decided it would be an excellent candidate for Re-Tweeting, since I loved the humor in it, and I enjoy reading some of my sillier posts, so it was Tweet’ed on Monday.

As part of this content resurrection program, I ask for some of my blog helpers to retweet the content and such, however, most of them have left this post alone, and did not reTweet it, due to my copious use of Double Entendres, and the topic itself being about Erectile Dysfunction.

I had one friend post it to StumbleUpon, however they then said if they got banned for posting Adult content, I was in deep trouble! Digg did not seem to take the initial post either (although I note now it does have a Digg vote). None of my associates Dugg or did anything else to the post, so there it sits, un-Pushed, even though I think it is a fun post.

I guess the moral of the story is you can get a little too controversial, even when you think you are just being silly!

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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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It’s been a long time since I have posted here and sometimes I forget that I do have this blog to do experiments and just bluster about life in general.

This post is allegedly testing the Postie Plug-in for allowing folks to post an entry from an e-mail account. We shall see where this might lead. I tried the default wordpress version and it is woefully lacking so far.

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WordPress 2.7.1 is installed on both sites now although the automatic upgrade in WordPress seems to have failed. I used Dreamhost’s 1 click upgrade instead, which seems to have worked no problem (which is a nice change too). The 1 click upgrade may be the way to go in the future, we shall see.

Advertising seems to be hunting me down these days given the site seems to have a higher readership these days, and I am attempting to monetize my RSS feed a bit more. The RSS feed seems to be a bit of a dead leader when it comes to making money, so I am now inserting ads by hand into the feed just to see if that might help out. Have added Chapters Indigo, Quicktax, and BBC Canada to the list of advertisers.

I actually had a commenter mention how odd it was that I had Playboy on my list of ads, I thought it was interesting that someone actually even noticed, since I didn’t think anyone actually looked there. Good feedback to know.

The content continues to grow, with Video content on the weekend, and the occasional link by larger sites helping to keep the readership up.

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I got approached by yet another advertising firm to add Canadian Tire Mastercards to my financial web site, and I thought that might be a very good fit. I use Canadian Tire and their Mastercard does offer an attractive “loyalty” program, so I have added them to the site. We’ll see if we can make money with this one. Interesting that the firm seems to be a UK firm, but the advertising is for a Canadian firm, so that works for me as well.

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I got approached by the folks over at Wikinvest a while ago to add them to Canadian Personal Finance Opinions and I wasn’t sure it was a good fit, but I decided to go ahead with the system anyhow, and boy am I glad I did. The amount of new traffic and also new links has given me 20% growth in my readership and it continues to grow. I have also been able to integrate their embedded graphics stuff to show off financial numbers as well, so it is very useful to me, and I would highly recommend using them if you are a Financial site.

I have been having a great deal of problems with Dreamhost this week , my server crashed twice and put my site(s) off line for over 6 hours during peek times for me. I have complained to Dreamhost, but I think I will be more formal when (and if) I decide to re-subscribed with them for the new year.

I have also been fiddling with my side advertising blocks to see if I can generate any kind of income from them, because right now, I have made Zero from them, and am starting to think that this is just a “fool’s game” when it comes to this kind of advertising.

Finally Kontera really upset me when I saw that their links are appearing on this site, however, they are not giving me any credit for it I have sent them a fairly nasty note asking what the problem is, since I have copied their code into this site’s template, and since the links are showing up the problem is most likely at their end (and they are not counting). Stay tuned, those links may disappear soon as well (since I am making pretty much nothing from them as well).

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This site has had a busy week with a tremendous day of over 300 hits on Sunday for no apparent reason, which is interesting, if not confusing. If I am to believe the statistics I have seen this is an interesting trend, but more likely than not an attack from a “scraper” or something like that. 

On the advertising front, Bidvertising will be bidding a fond adieu from my sites, as it has earned me next to nothing even with large page impression numbers, and as I have learned, no point in flogging a dead horse when it comes to advertising, move on to the next idea. I am adding more Market Leverage sponsors in my rotators to see if there is interest from my readers, but we shall see (on this site).

As for the Canadian Personal Finance web site, I feel a complete refurbish of that site coming soon as well, given the only thing that is paying for that site is Adsense.

This site continues to not be listed normally in Google as well, I must figure out what is going on there as well. More interesting articles from my past coming too, as I clean out my archives.

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Comment relish turned out to be a bit of a non-helpful plug in, as it continued to send thank you e-mails to folks it had already thanked, and I actually got a couple of complaints about it, so I have removed it from the Finance Site.

I have added Comment Luv to the systems to see if anyone appreciates adding their own posts to my comments, we shall see whether it turns out to be of any value either.  This allows commenters to include links back to articles in their comments, to show some luv for the comment. I’ll see what this causes (my guess is a fair amount of SPAM, so I will be keeping my audit’ing on as well).

Text Link Ads are really pissing me off, as this is the second month where they have allowed “advertisers” to have ads up on my web site for an entire month, withdraw on the last day, and I don’t get any money for it? WTF? That is seriously bad karma, and I may remove it from my site, if this keeps up.

I have also removed Pingcrawl from this site, as it kept causing my posts to screw up and I never really got any valuable links out of it, so I have deactivated it for now as well.

Had some air-head from a “Pay Day Loan” company ask me about Advertising, and I normally don’t even answer those, but they were asking to advertise on my Blogspot site (you know the one that has 1 post and it points back to my normal site), so I played along and they were going to pay $250 for the whole year, until I pointed out I was not going to update the site, then they asked to advertise on my real site. The Karmic part of this mess is that this is the same group that said my advertising rates were too high and that I had no right to charge that much for advertising. You can guess my response.

Have a great weekend

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Seems like the RSS feeds on Canadian Personal Finance Opinions has gone a bit squirrely lately, if my Adsense counters are to be belived. The Feedburner counter on the site continues to show very low-ish numbers but I am seeing over 350 RSS feed page displays on my Adsense counters, so this is quite intriguing really.  Part of it may be that  Yet Another Related Posts Plugin has changed and now it actually includes related posts in the RSS feeds, so that may be what is helping as well, I am not sure.

Performancing Ads continues to work nicely for me, with more advertising spots being booked, which  means more money for me. Each time I get an ad booked, I up my rate by $1 to see if I am underselling my site or not.

I also got a nice call back from an old direct advertiser who has renewed  his yearly subscription with my site as well, so now I have two dedicated ads for the year, which is just great as well.  I am back to working for slave wages, instead of for FREE, Whoo Hoo!

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