The State of My Blog

I was looking back at my Blogger dashboard the other day, studying my stats and looking at how many hits I'd gotten on various posts.  I realized I'd been writing this blog for over two years now.

What started as I gathered research on how to handle an inheritance has grown into a hobby that has earned me a couple of dollars, plus taught me a lot about both blogging and investing.  This blog led to me giving freelance writing a try, something I'd always wanted to do but never realized how to get started.

So, what did I learn looking at my dashboard?

My Five Most Popular Posts

Not surprisingly, four of my five most popular posts are Kickfurther Merchant of the Week posts.  I was able to promote these posts on a subreddit run by Kickfurther and sometimes the featured company promoted the post as well.  These posts also had giveaways and I was able to promote them on giveaway link-ups.  

Surprisingly, my most popular post, whether I look at the day, week, month, or all time, is For Where Your Treasure Is: Should I Give to Them?  I can't figure out how or why people are finding the post but they keep on reading it.

Where I Get My Readers

I get a lot of my readers from Financially Saavy Saturdays.  Another source is Rockstar Finance, which provides feeds for over 1100 blogs.  I can also see that substantive blog comments draw readers from other blogs.

How Many Readers Do I Have?

According to Google Analytics, which I have just recently installed, I had 246 active users in the last 30 days.  According to adsense, my views have doubled since this time last year, which is a good thing.  According to Blogger, my pageviews in June are about where they were last year, and WAY down from previous months--but there was no reason for them to be that high for a the last few months so I suspect a bot.  

Am I Making Money?

I'm making a little money.  Adsense pays me about $5.00 a month.  I'm about to write my third sponsored post.  I participate in a couple of affiliate programs but the only one that has paid me anything is Kickfurther.  I've gotten a couple of free sample products from Kickfurther merchants and found a freelance writing client via this blog.  However, if I was in this strictly for the money, I wouldn't be getting anywhere.

What About Social Media?

I have a facebook page for this blog and a Pinterest account to which I pin things from this blog.  I am on Bloglovin and so far, traffic from them seems to be the exception rather than the rule.  I also have a Twitter account and all most post go there via Bloglovin but again, I never see any traffic.  I'll admit that I don't "get" Twitter.  I follow a bunch of people but rarely look at my feed, I just don't see the point.  

What's Next?

Well, I'm playing with MailChimp, so soon I may be like all the big kids and ask you to subscribe to my email list.  First I have to figure out what I'm going to mail you.  Like I've said before, this blog is a toy, and not a job.  I don't want to be spending hours every week designing emails.  

I plan to keep blogging here as long as I'm enjoying it.  Hope you stick around for the ride.