Here are some of my blogging milestones for Aug 2006:

• Tue Aug 1: I bought my first blog, and with no money down. I can’t reveal all the details, but I already write for the blog. My cost is a certain amount of future cash, as well as a bit of webmastering/ organic SEO/ copywriting  work. Wish me luck. [Update: I’ve taken on a partner for the site. Between us, it’ll be a lot easier to monetize the site.]
• Wed Aug 16: Out of necessity, I’ve also been breaking my own records for most daily and weekly posts. As of this moment, I’ve published 17 posts today, to my blog and that of clients. That might increase, because I have several hours left in the day. Last week, I published 76 posts. Now this does include both short and long posts, as well as my two series of e-paintings, at Chaos Review and CountWordula.
• Thur Aug 24: I managed to post 20 articles today, including a mixture of short summaries, medium and long articles, and two e-paintings, for both clients and my own sites.
• Fri Aug 25/06: Landed another blogging contract. It’s a bit smaller than the ones I have now, but the client has other blogs that they want to discuss.
• Mon Aug 28/06: Another $0 contextual ad revenue day. August is typically a slow month. Next weekend is Labour Day long weekend in Canada and the US, and a number of other countries. Traffic will probably be slow then, too. Still, I’ve had some high days, which I think are signs of good things to come. If I can devote a bit more time to those ignored blogs that were bringing me traffic and revenue, then I’ll be closer to my personal blogging goals. (My biz-blogging goals are going fine.)
• Thur Aug 31/06: I capped off the month by posting 21 “articles” (as described above on Aug 24), with less effort than I expected. Wednesdays and Thursdays seem to be peak times for me, but I couldn’t tell you why. Assuming that I can keep this mixture of posts up, I could probably easily achieve 25-30 posts on some days. Note that some posts are the result of several days of note-collecting. And my 14 weekly e-paintings are produced over 2-3 hours on Sunday afternoons or evenings, then posted throughout the week. I’m also planning to turn some of the instrumental music I composed a few years ago into MP3 files, to post on my music site, Sound Alchemy Online Journal. I’ll have to write an intro for each track, but all the hard work has been done over many hundreds of hours. [Hint: Look into your own content archives to see what you might turn into blog posts.]

General: Daily revenues have been all over the place in August, but I’ve been having more regular forays into new daily amounts. Still really low, but definitely starting to show some promise. As with last month, contracts have kept me from blogging as often to my own blogs.

On the plus side, I was offered more contracts to blog, amongst other things. I’m also now one of two people administrating a new blogger-jobs exchange over at Performancing.com. Performancing Exchange allows notices for paid writing, graphic design, photography, web design, etc. I also have several proposals in the fire, and I’ll find out soon whether they bring any more opportunities.

Even if they don’t, now that I find myself much healthier, getting to sleep earlier, and waking up earlier, I’m finding myself more productive that I’ve been able to post to some of my dormant weblogs. It’s still not humanly possible for me to attend to all of my important blogs, let alone of of my blogs, but I’m trying my best without stress.

In general, despite being a low traffic month, August has been good for some of my blogs - even without a lot of new content posted. As usual, I’m speaking in relative terms.  My newer cooking blog (Curry Elvis) is saw much better traffic, clicks, and one-day revenue highs - mostly due to my writing about the Hell’s Kitchen reality TV series, which is now over. Still a long way to go before my investment in time is returned, but that comes with more content - in this case more recipes. I actually have the content - recipes, short stories, stream-of-consciousness musings, writing about writing - in the form of a digital journal of about 1000 pages in a Microsoft Word document. I kept writing in this journal every day, from Jan 2002 to late 2004, and haven’t written in it much since I started blogging.

The problem is finding the time to extract all the writing there. A lot of it is short stories, which are hard to monetize without an incredible amount of effort and planning (and probably best monetized using affiliate links to Amazon - although I could be wrong).

Then there are all the recipes - nearly 300 in fact. Imagine how much traffic they could bring in! Back when I was actively writing to my four old blogspot.com cooking blogs, I was extracting 3-5 recipes per day. They earned very little per click back then and I stopped. Now, however, there’s evidence that you can actually earn a fair bit per click, after time builds some authority for your site, and when the traffic starts to build. And given the number of daily ad clicks I used to get in total for those sites, it might be worth it for me to find a block of time to extract the recipes from my digital journal, edit them, then post them. Or produce a free PDF e-book out of some and sell the rest in a larger e-book. [All original recipes of fusion cooking.]

I’ve learned some interesting things in August about improving traffic and increasing earnings per click. As for how to improve CTR, I’ve read a couple of ebooks, but applying what they say either isn’t possible on some blog platforms or hasn’t worked for me. If you’re in the same position, either keep trying or find more popular topics. If your topic ain’t relatively popular, you ain’t going to earn much.