Here are some milestones for April 2006, for my collection of weblogs. There weren’t many, so I actually forgot to post this on May 1st.

1. Apr 23 - It’s Apr 22 when I’m writing this, but Apr 23 marks the 1-year point since I first installed Google AdSense on my hubsite, Chameleon Integration.
• That site has undergone numerous design changes, finally ending up as a weblog that deciphers techno-jargon related to computers and the Internet.
• While I had a few clicks to my AdSense ads fairly soon after, I didn’t really get regular clicks until late August, when famous problogger Darren Rowse was running a series promoting other bloggers, and he created two links to BlogSpinner V1.0.
• I did the unthinkable, however, and clicked on my own ads during the first few weeks that I had added AdSense to Chameleon Integration. I had not read the AdSense TOS (Terms of Service) correctly, and was under the impression that they would just filter out my clicks, since they’d know my IP address from when I logged into the control panel.
• Fortunately for me, that’s exactly what they did, but they very well could have enforced their TOS and terminated my account. I do, on occasion, accidentally click on ads because of the roller mouse I use. Again, fortunately for me, they just filter my clicks out. But I highly recommend that you do not click your own ads no matter how interesting the ad looks. (That was why I had done it.)
• A year into using Adsense, and my AVERAGE daily revenue has increased exponentially on a daily basis. However, it’s still not enough to make a living on. Far from it. However, my statistical forecasting methods suggest that if I keep up the hard work, I could be making a living from AdSense (and Chitika eMinimalls) within another year.
• The biggest mistake I’ve made in weblogging? Diversifying too rapidly. As a person who has been writing professional for well over a decade (not including 15 years as a computer programmer and technical writer and trainer), I do a lot of writing on different topics. I expanded too quickly and started way too many diverse blogs too soon. The result is that I neglected many of the blogs and thus never built up their traffic to a point where the search engines would sustain the traffic forever.
• I’m now hovering between 200-300+ pageviews daily for my collection of weblogs. But that could have been closer to 1000 by now had I dedciated a bit of tender loving care to each blog individually. This neglect of my older Blogger.com/ Blogspot.com blogs probably isn’t going to change. With my newest blogs, however, I’m taking some time to build up the article collection before going on to the next new set of weblogs.
• My traffic has also suffered in the past week, which is the result of not posting articles due to recovering from pneumonia. The traffic seemed unaffected the first week that I was sick. But in the second week, when the number of my weekly articles dipped significantly, traffic took a dive. Easter also had an effect on traffic, and as a result, my daily AdSense income dropped.
• The good news is that statistical forecasting shows that my long-term daily average revenue is still climbing. Short-term averages (7-day, 14d, 28d, 56d) are all over the place, but long-term is probably the most important. Since the long-term (280d, 308d, 336d) graphs are showing increase, that generally suggests that things will right themselves eventually. (But that’s not a guarantee, just a prediction based on patterns.)
2. Some where during the first 2 weeks of April, I pass the US$100 mark again for Google AdSense. So around the end of May, or the first couple of days of June, I should see my second-ever contextual advertising earnings cheque from AdSense.
3. Blogging wore me out, to the point that I ended up with pneumonia at the beginning of the month. I’m still recovering now, in May. Initially, my reduced number of fresh posts didn’t seem to affect my traffic or earnings, but eventually they did. Now I have to climb back to my high-water mark of 350+ daily pv (pageviews). My goal is still 1000+ daily pv by the end of August.

That’s about it for April. Having been very sick at the beginning of the month, I didn’t blog as much, and I’m trying to make up for that.

One note, which I’ll make official later, is that I’ve decided that instead of writing/ planning 4 different blogs about writing, that I’ll combine them all into a single blog at the top of my CountWordula.com domain - with the possible exception of TaleSpinner, which is about fiction writing.

The intent is to combine BlogSpinner V3 (this blog), InPrint (about language, semiotics, communication, etc.) - which never got off the ground - and some other aspects of non-fiction writing into a single WordPress-based weblog about writing, language, and communication, CountWordula. More info to come.