Once again, I’ve been so busy that this “milestones” post is an afterthought. As with 2005, December 2006 was a weaker month for pretty much everything, compared to October and especially November. Here is a brief summary of my blogging milestones, mostly in the area of revenue/ monetization.

• Traffic. Traffic was up and down in December, partly due to the holidays, partly due to a lack of posts on my sites. My writers (I have a few) either had other things to attend to, or I didn’t have time to edit them. It’s crucial to the success of a blog, for many reasons, to post regularly, even if it’s only 3 per week - but better if it’s three per day. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to write much for my own posts, and it’s the reason why most of them aren’t going anywhere.

• AdSense revenue was oh so close to $100 in 2 months - the first time this has happened in just 2. Usually, it takes me 3 months to hit Google’s payout low watermark. That’s good, but also disappointing.
• Chitika is still nothing to talk about, but my research shows that it works best on product blogs.
• Performancing Partners is probably only good for high- traffic sites. There are a lot of people with Blogspot-hosted blogs who I think are going to be very disappointed.
• ReviewMe requests were steady. However, I missed the deadline on a couple of requests by a few minutes, and couldn’t find a writer for a second request, which wasn’t suited to the site it was for anyway. [I assign reviews to some of my writers. If someone wants it, then I’m fine with that. If I have time, I might write a review.]
• Text-Link-Ads (TLA) continues to work for me, with new sponsors increasing, but only on 2 blogs. (Though I still make less than US$300/m in total.) One blog is still maxed out. I’m waiting for Feedvertising for those sites, too. I have a bunch of new sites that I purchased (more in an upcoming article) whose Google PRs are 3-4. I’m hoping that in the 2-3 months I’ll spend  spend building PR ends with TLA adding support for the TypePad platform, as that’s what they’re running on.
• Affiliate programs. I’m considering some for the sites I’ve purchased. Unfortunately, I know very little yet about how to promote this form of advertising. In a year’s time, I’ve made exactly $0 from programs like Amazon. Though it’s likely true that you need good traffic to succeed with affiliate programs, which I don’t have for my sites. (But the sites I’m paid to blog for do, though none of them run affiliate programs.) What little I do know says you have to write about the products quite regularly, and have your affiliate links in pretty much every post. I have not considered any other ways to earn revenue for these blogs.
• Site purchases were a sort of gift to myself in December, and while I don’t think I made a mistake in the sites I purchased, I didn’t do my homework about monetizing. One site, a forum, has made maybe $3 in AdSense, but the other six were in a state of transfer to me. I don’t have a writer for the six, and I can’t yet afford a moderator for the forum. I’ll be continuing my series on buying sites in the near future.

As part of my New Year’s Resolution to be more productive and efficient than in December, I had to drop some blogs and consolidate some efforts. I don’t really lose money this way, as I wasn’t getting all my work done anyway. In fact, I earned about half what I should have in December because too much work made me feel guilty that one client project or another wasn’t getting done. As a result, even less work got done. Guilt is not good fuel for running a freelance business.