This is a summary of my personal and professional blogging activities, published with the intent of encouraging newbies to stick with it.

• Content: My own content has had a dramatic decrease. I’ve been trying new writers, and they’re just getting up to speed with regular posting.
• Chitika: Not enough revenue to warrant payout.
• Clients: One new client (small monthly contract), 4 new weekly contracts from existing clients. Still learning to balance work on the fly. I’m going to write a small e-book on how to juggle too much work and give it away free on this site.
• Google ad clicks: An interesting phenomenon is becoming more apparent. If you have multiple websites running the same contextual advertising, it’s obvious that there will be a range of earnings daily. But if you organize a list of your sites for a given day in decreasing order of total earnings, the number of clicks per site that day will show a bell curve. That is, in decreasing order of revenue, the sites in the middle of the list will likely have the most clicks. This isn’t a surprising phenomenon to anyone who has studied statistics in depth, but it’s interesting to see that it applies to blogging as well as nature. Overall, I set a new record twice in November for most clicks in a day on my sites, obviously.
• Google Adsense: Quite a bit of variation, but more in the higher end, and higher lows. The low watermark on my daily earnings is rising. At least in November. Whether that’ll remain after December, I’m not sure. Last year, December revenue was lower than October and November. My 28-day MA (Moving Average) has been oscillating in low frequency for the past month, hovering around the same point, plus/minus. In other words, movement in daily revenue has been lateral. On the other hand, November set a record for payment for me, so things are still improving. What’s important
• Google CPC: Average daily CPC (Cost Per Click, or in this case, pymt per click) is all over the place. But an average of the average over a long-term will likely show a steady but slow increase since, say, July, when my posting to my own sites decreased because of client work.
• PayPerPost: Don’t qualify yet, as I haven’t maintained a posting frequency on the sites I would do this on.
• Performancing Partners:
• ReviewMe: In addition to the initial ReviewMe review, advertisers requested a total of 3 additional reiews in November (though one didn’t get submitted until Dec 1st - today). I wrote the first one, and had other writers write the other ones. So I should amend my comment. I’ll donate a percentage of the review money earned by me specfically, not other writers.
• Squidoo: No payment yet since the very 1st one, but I set my “threshold” of payment higher and haven’t actively promoted the sites and groups.
• Text-Link-Ads/ Feedvertising:
• Traffic (pageviews): Overall, my own pageviews went down, but revenue still hit a monthly high.
• Other (affiliate progs): No revenue from any affiliate programs such as Amazon, Linkshare.

General: Despite my decrease in posting to my own sites, my revenue and traffic hasn’t been overly affected. That’s partly due to miniscule increases in Google PageRank (my hypothesis) and normal Oct-November boost. I’ll have to wait and see if it continues in December and into the new year. Though I do except to have one or more writers posting.

I have enough contracts now that it’s equivalent to a full-time writing job in terms of pay, almost mid-four figures monthly, in US$, which translates to a reasonable salary for a writer in Cdn$. It won’t pay for a house, not yet, but I’m planning to see if in late 2007, early 2008, I can use future savings to buy a condo so I can move back to Toronto.

Though I don’t want to count my proverbial chickens before they hatch, things are obviously better than when I was dry soup noodles for my meals and Mr. Freeze for dessert just a few years ago. I just have to learn to balance the immense workload, which requires every single bit of my task management, project management, diplomatic, and organizational skills. If there’s any interest in learning some of these techniques, drop me a comment, and I’ll try to put together a small, free ebook on my methods for January.

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