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 just read a new ebook by John Chow call The Ultimate Blog Profit Model and
it’s awesome. I think you will really enjoying read it as well.

Download the eBook here:
http://www.blogprofitcamp.com/ListMachine2/?ref=ezrfnzq

John Chow runs one of the biggest and most profitable blogs in the world. He
makes over $40,000 a month just from blogging! His new eBook details exactly how
he does it.

Best of all, the book is free and can even win you an Apple iPad! John will be
awarding a new 16GB Apple iPad to one lucky person who downloads The Ultimate
Blog Profit Model.

You can’t lose on this deal. You get a free eBook detailing how John makes over
$40K a month from blogging and you get a chance to win an Apple iPad as well.

Here’s the download link again:
http://www.blogprofitcamp.com/ListMachine2/?ref=ezrfnzq

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So I stumbled across a new plug in for WordPress which creates a Theme for iPhone, iPod and other handheld devices, and it seems pretty cute.

WPTouch  by Brave New Code is quite the plug in and I am testing it out on this site, with an eye towards putting it on Canadian Personal Finance in the future (after all one of the functions of this site is as a test site for new ideas and concepts). The theme is Adsense ready so that is mighty cool as well, but right now I haven’t tried to customize it very much either, so I have much to read and learn about using this cool new plug in.

So far, I rate it as a Must Get if you are using WordPress and you want more iPod and iPhone readers. Not sure how I advertise this capability yet, but we shall see, stay tuned.

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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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Essential Blogging

I took this book out of the Ottawa Public library just to see what interesting tid bits I might pick up, as I usually find all books by O’Reilly and Associates very informative.

The book itself is an excellent resource for beginner bloggers who want to start out and figure out how to set up their blog (using Blogspot as their hosting software). It does a step by step set up procedure and then starts adding in more and more details for the beginner to “tweak” and enhance their content to get more readers and more interest in what they write (unless you are writing a blog you don’t want anybody to read, very useful advice).

When I first started blogging I think I would have appreciated this book a lot more because it talks about changing the default templates from Blogspot and how to use all the variables that blogspot gives you access to.  Lots of information on how to customize the default blogroll for the blogspot set up would have helped me a lot as well.

Some information about Movable type work, that I skimmed, since I wasn’t really interested in it.

Review:Overall a very useful book for the beginner blogger who wants to get started quickly and wants to learn the ins and outs of blogging and get up and running quickly. If you use blogspot I would also recommend this book (although hopefully there is a newer version that elaborates on the Widgets in the new Blogspot configuration). 

I did not buy this book, I borrowed it from the Ottawa Public Library and would not buy it myself, but it was a useful read for me.

ISBN: 0-596-0038-9

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• Related Blogs on How To
• How to get great client insights

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So the Globe and Mail has a poll on about the Best Financial Bloggers in Canada (or Top 5) list and I note that I am not mentioned, yet again. Canadian Financial Opinions may not be a classic financial blog, but at least it is not some “get rich quick” stock picking web site or some crap like that. I looked at the list and there are some good ones, but to exclude some of the sites seems a bit short sited by them, but I guess it is their poll, so I guess they get to make the rules too (I am glad I don’t subscribe to their paper).

This weekend will be spent trying to clean up the Financial site and figure out whether this site might do better over with the Financial Blog on it’s own Domain. The current set up is a bit arbitrary and I think I can learn a lot if I take this site to a private site and then get to screw around more with the Style and Theme. Stay tuned, we shall see.

Also, investigating new advertising schemes as well, because right now, this “business” is not going the way I want it to (the Financial Blog) so I need to start really thinking about this one.

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So more and more I am getting SPAM comments being sent to my blogs, which is really annoying. What is funny is that the WordPress version of my financial blog, which really only got created as a mid-step for backing up my entire Blogspot account, is getting more and more of these SPAM comments from “adult” sites. I have turned on comment moderation so they don’t get on to my site, but it is still annoying seeing these kind of blatantly stupid comments.

I may get off my fat duff and move the financial blog onto it’s own domain and hosting system, which may mean this blog moves too and a few others that I have, so stay tuned, because I did speak to the Canadian Capitalist and he was quite helpful with his responses to my queries. Always try to learn from other folks in your field (especially the successful ones, although you’d be surprised what you can learn from failures too).

I am torn about whether I like reading about how much money folks make on their web sites. It is always funny to read John Chow‘s statements, because he is so darn successful but other sites I almost feel annoyed when I read about how well they are doing, but I suspect in most cases it is me being envious (green is not my best colour).

Have a good weekend all!

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This piece of advice was given out, by none other than Tucker Max who’s book “I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell“, a New York Times best seller came from his on line ramblings.

“The most important thing is having good content,” Max said, during a panel session here. “All these people write to me and say, ‘I have great content’ but it’s dog sh*t (sic).”

The article this is connected to is quite funny, with the author berating bloggers who think all they have to do is show up and they will make a fortune. I agree that there is a lot of work to be done, but his drunken, womanizing (and somewhat illegal) ramblings while most assuredly an extension of the truth (if not interesting fiction) are not the highest of literary value either. Maybe he views himself as Gen-X’s Hunter S. Thompson, but somehow I think he lacks the credibility and believability.

So, work hard, publish your work, and then have your literary agent sleep with someone at the New York Times, at least this seems to be Tucker’s advice.

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So currently all my blogs and such are hosted on BLOGGER, mostly because I am cheap, and also didn’t know whether I was going to keep doing this (I ask that question most every day, am I going to stop blogging today?). The cost of having my blogs and sites hosted externally is relatively low, so I am thinking that may be the next step I take with my sites.

I actually got a comment or e-mail from a reader once who said that they don’t click on Adsense ads or any type of ads on sites that are hosted for free. I think that kind of snobbery is a bit annoying. If you think that the writer’s work is good, and the ad is something you are interested you should indulge, but saying, “Because you aren’t paying your way, I am not going to help you”, is a bit of snobbery that I just don’t understand.

Who(m) you host with and how much it costs, really depends on the type of site you have and how much network bandwidth you are going to use. My sites are mostly just text based with a few pictures thrown in, but not many, so I can usually look at the cheapest hosting options, which usually is no more than $10 per month if you sign a 1 or 2 year contract. If you are planning on creating a picture hosting site, that is going to cost you a bit more, so keep that one in mind.

And don’t be a snob, help out those bloggers! –C8j

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Yes, there are a couple of ways to tell whether you are being read or not (and we’ll delve into that later), but one of the most tangible ones is through comments. If people are leaving comments about your posts you know that:

1. Someone IS reading this, not just your Mom or Dad
2. Someone cares enough about what you have written to comment on it
3. You are heading in the right direction

Now I must caution that in the early days, if you are not careful you will get Comment SPAM. SPAM in e-mail is annoying, but SPAM in your comments is downright irritating, and must be obliterated. You can stop this by diligently checking your comments, or by setting up that your comments must be read by YOU before they are allowed on your site, which is a good idea too.

The other thing to do is read other sites and comment there, because that sometimes brings folks over to check out what you are saying as well. Now don’t be a knob about it, and just make comments like, “… come see my new great site at spam.spam.spam.spam.com …”, or I will come over and kick you!

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