30DC – Day 1 …

Today is easy peasy – three videos to get you in the groove and the first task is to come up with 7 niche topics. Although I have already decided what my topic is going to be, I came up with 7 niches. It will be interesting to go through the exercise and see what the research will bear out.

Fun part: $100 iPod cert for the best answer a to where is your favorite place to get ideas for topics. I put in … up against some stiff competition as there are some really good ones being posted. The winner will be announced Sunday night. Will let you know what my fave place is and whether it got a mention.

I belong to a team of three and we are literally circling the globe as we have the UK, Vancouver Canada and Sydney Australia represented. We discussed live chats via SKYPE but the time differences were difficult without someone’s time zone being in the dead of night.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
Blogger for Money.

PS … if you haven’t signed up for the 30 Day Challenge yet … GO, GO, GO!
Register at the Thirty Day Challenge . It’s best deal on the internet and you will learn a lot.

Whew! I feel like one of those melting subjects in Dali’s paintings! We are setting record temperatures here in Vancouver and the humidity is right up there. It’s enough to fry a brain or should that be melt it? Not the best environment to be blogging for money in.

Everything I read by the gurus is in sync with business in the summer … down, so I am somewhat pleased that July had an uptick on this blog.

Posted is the chart that shows the comparison between the two months, June and July(July is the blue line). The differences are not huge and July is still below May, but seeing as these are the dog days of summer, I am OK with that.

Comments and observations:

I like that there was an increase in visits in July over June and that page views also had a decent increase. Page visits and average time per page are down however. I am still frustrated that the overall visitor stats are not significantly better than when I first started this blog in January of this year! Yes, I know that I am in a very competitive niche and I am doing this for the long term, but still I would have thought the results would have been better by now.

What I find really puzzling is how did I happen to drop my page ranking? At the beginning of July I was super pleased to have finally been awarded a Google page rank of 1 (10 being the highest, but you have to start somewhere) and Alexa was down to the 2.5M level (the lower the number the better, ideally get below 100K)– today, no page rank and Alexa up to 4M. What gives? What did I do wrong? Did I offend mother Google somehow? But Alexa has nothing to do with Google.

Another puzzling statistic. Throughout most of the month my search engine traffic was running at the 18% mark, yet, today’s stat shows a mere 8%. Clearly, there is something I did (or did not do) that dropped that statistic as well. I am confident that had the trend continued to month end, the stats would have been better. Hmmmmm…. it is a puzzlement.

I have no affiliate sales to report for the month of July and Adsense is a mere $2.92!!! That makes it the lowest ever!

OK… maybe this is what the gurus refer to as being in the trenches. What can I do to achieve better results?

1. Increase frequency of posts
2. Review keywords (I am still fighting for “blogging for money”
3. Use selected keywords in postings
4. Repurpose posts and publish in article directories

These are steps I can take right now. I know how to. There is a fifth thing I can do, but I am not sure how to use appropriately yet and that is social media.

Having said that, today is the kickoff for the 30 Day Challenge and I will be spending most of my internet marketing blocks on this endeavor … most of my posts will have to do with my 30 Day Challenge experience and how it translates here.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
Blogger for Money

PS…I think somebody stole my cheese!

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