A Traffic and Income Spike on My Blog

It hasn't been a good few days, and I apologize for what is likely to be another fairly dismal post. I feel my promise to be honest in this blog is turning into a bit of a cross to bear, but I will stick with it. Strangely the contrast between my off line and online lives is becoming more marked, and I sometimes feel I am bordering on schizophrenia. When I'm blogging I'm immersed in the "High dude!" and "totally awesome" world of Twitter, but then I come back to the reality of my normal business world, which to use Twitter language "Totally sucks, man."

So, what's been happening? Not much really - last weekend I thought I'd found a buyer for my car, and spent all week thinking how good it would be to get it sold and pay off most of the people who need paying up. Then yesterday the guy called me to tell me he wouldn't be going ahead after all, so that little dream died a death.

That leaves us back to having to raise some quick money, as one or two people are now really starting to push to get their bills paid, so we've been focusing our efforts this week into getting some fast cash into the business. We have made some progress, but I don't think it's going to be quick enough for us, so I've redoubled my efforts to sell the car and reduced the price again. Overall, the amount we need to get everyone paid, and to move forward really isn't that big - around 20,000 dollars. It sounds a lot, but we've regularly generated that in a month in the last few years.

The best option is still to sell the other house, but the market is totally flat, and I don't have any confidence in that happening. We're just going to have to keep going as we are now and hope we can continue to survive from day to day.

Once again we have settled into a kind of apathy, so housework suffers, exercise doesn't happen and we don't laugh and joke as much as we always did.

One thing I have found to be helpful to escape the stress has been to imagine and plan how things will be once we're stable again, and making a good income from the blogs. I've always successfully used visualization as a technique in the past to help me to achieve objectives. With a healthy imagination, you can get your sub conscious mind working towards those objectives. So recently, I've been daydreaming in some detail about what the future holds for us.

On a more positive note, we have had a truly amazing week on the blogging front:

We launched blog number three
This is another niche blog, so the stable now includes niche blog one, this one and niche blog two. I wish I could tell you more about them, but until I reveal who I really am, I can't do that. It's a pain because I would love each site to benefit from each other.

Niche blog number one smashed it's traffic records
It had a fantastic week, with nearly 70% coming from search engines, loads of new RSS readers and the signed up list has grown dramatically. I couldn't be happier with the progress we are making - I just wish we'd started a year ago!

This blog went crazy!
This blog's traffic has grown steadily since launch, and then it had a huge, and I mean huge traffic spike today, earning three times the normal visitors and page views. From the very basic server logs it would appear the traffic came from search, but until Analytics refreshes tomorrow, I won't know what did it - I'm very excited to find out.

Income went up, up up!
Obviously tied in to all this traffic, income from the blogs has hit an all time high. Don't get too excited - we're talking about 10 dollars here for the week, but when you think we only struggled through the 50 cents barrier per day not long ago, it's a huge step up. Assuming this traffic level stays with us, we're talking about 500 dollars a year - peanuts, but money earned out of nothing. And of course if traffic grows at this rate, we could be self sufficient from blogging inside 12 months!

Guest Post
I contacted David Risley and he expressed some interest in publishing a guest post, so I wrote it and sent it. I don't know if it will make the cut, but I was happy he even responded, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it hits his blog - it could have a huge effect on traffic and my standing in the community.

All this excitement was put into context when I read Darren Rowse's post today about how his traffic spiked to 250,000 visitors one day this week. I couldn't help but work out that with that traffic and even with my meager monetization, I would have earned more than a thousand dollars today!

So the pattern continues - great progress online and loads of crap off line. All I need to do is gradually replace one with the other!