It’s July 1st, we’ve reached the half-way through the year, and the stockmarkets are in a dive, ad revenues are falling, and oil is way up! How are we doing on InvestorBlogger? Well, in some ways it’s a very mixed bag.. here goes…

Background

In June, as many of you know, I spent nearly a week re-arranging the sites on my server as well as cleaning up the server, but server problems continued with nearly 24 hours of outage in June alone!

To that end, I’ve spent quite a bit of time setting up my primary sites on their own hosting with a fair amount of punch to each. I’ve been using several hosts, including BlueHost, and HostMonster to name but two. I’m now looking at a third ‘meatier’ host for one of my other clients… and my own blog(s). This has sapped my time, commenting and online socialization somewhat as I spent most of the time working on the sites,… I’ve still 2.5 clients to go as well.

Results

Grand Total: $11,101.00

As you can see from the numbers, I’m only recording the actual categories that have any income at all. This month, affiliates didn’t produce much income at all.

* Bank Interest: $28.71
* Dividend Income: $107.11
* Blogging: $63.75
* Advertising: $149.68
* Hosting = $131.15
* Consulting = $113.10
* Total = $593.51

This brings my grand total to a shade over $11,101 for the months since I began blogging about my journey to wealth. It’s still pretty impressive, but I’m now setting higher goals and looking at ways to boost traffic to the site in the coming months.

Traffic

In 2008, June traffic was of course DOWN on previous months, but compared to 12 months ago, it showed a healthy 50% jump, and the traffic is fairly resilient. In fact, Google Search is now sending more traffic than ever before. Other traffic is down as I’ve been less aggressive promoting my site on social networks that I typically used to. Once my sites are migrated to new servers, I’ll start doing more of this. Total page views are a little over 1920 from over 1260 visits. It’s a far cry from John Chow, isn’t it?

PayPerPost vs. SocialSpark

This has caused me to rethink my stance of 2007. While I’m not ready to abandon my stance, I feel that it’s only a matter of time now before I do.

TLA income is now reducing, and that has been my biggest reason NOT to switch policy. It’s pretty impossible to do Payperpost now anyway because of their stance on links, and my relative lack of PR. In fact, if I get PR back, then I can’t do Payperpost as you are not allowed to accept no-follow links (PPP’s choice). If I keep my stance, I can’t do PayPerPost at all, because of the lack of PR rank (PPP’s choice) and the serious competition for opps (PPP’s choice). In November 2007, and subsequently, it was possible to make a choice, but right now, Payperpost has backed me into a corner, and shows no signs on standing down on any of the three problems it has caused me:

• 1. Opps requiring PR;
• 2. Not requiring no_follow;
• 3. and Inpost non-disclosure (coercive non-disclosure).

It’s now seeming very silly of me to continue to ‘co-operate’ with PayPerPost when the issues that I face are the result of decisions that PPP made. I will very likely go totally no_follow on all my links, shortly; a decision that I will not reverse again. In fact, I stopped doing PayPerPost in January, because of conflicts with my existing advertisers; and it’s ironic that a company that helped me to develop my blog is now the single thing holding back the development of my blog.

Top Five Articles in June

1. 10 Reasons Why Adsense Sucks for your Blog
2. A Man With A Plan
3. Asus Eee PC 900 with Vista
4. Weekend trips around the NE Coast of Taiwan
5. and Harley Davidson Launches in Taiwan

Challenges

Unlike JohnChow, I didn’t set out to make money solely from this blog. Rather I set out to describe my journey to wealth, along the way noting what worked and what didn’t work. The biggest challenge I face is simply lack of time; I don’t have enough hours in the day to build up my wealth in other ways, though if I were working full-time as an employee, this would be a bitter pill to swallow. As a part business owner, I find it easier to accept!

The second challenge is sheer lack of technical skills in the area of server management and configuration. I know what I want to do, but since I’m an Arts major, I find it quite frustrating to try to fix things that go wrong. Don’t get me wrong: I do know how to fix a whole host of problems, but when it comes to networking and the Internet, I’m a relative newbie!

All of the other challenges result from these two alone! So I need to find new ways to face this!