October’s Income on InvestorBlogger

The last three or four months have experienced a number of milestones in InvestorBlogger’s rise. Today, I’d like to report on a new milestone that IB reached today: $6,000.

Less than two months after passing the $5,000 mark, we’ve reached $6,000. I have already updated the sidebar with the new amount and the average per month, too.

Financial results are posted below:
Payperpost: $129.50
Google : $7.19
SR/ReviewME/Other : $64.48
Adlinks : $58.84
Stocks: $109.72
Hosting : $128.72
Bank A/C Interest : $20.71
Total: $519.16

Payperpost had a good month until Google’s PR update; and I scored several requests from LinkWorth. I also turned down quite a few posts on Sponsored Reviews, Payperpost, Blogvertiser, and Smorty, mostly for requests for not disclosing the sponsored nature of the post. This, to my readers, seems grossly unfair. I do try to disclose as much as I can.

Traffic results are as follows:

In October I added 75 posts including this one and a review that I will finish tomorrow. I’ve had over 1300 unique visits this month, showing 2,800 page views. Traffic from Google has fallen considerably since August, though other areas have picked up the slack. Google’s organic search results account for only 5% of traffic to this blog. Given the recent PR downgrades, it’s difficult to imagine that it would get much less. In fact, given Google’s poor showing on this blog, I’m considering actively removing my blog from their search engine (after all, if they don’t support me, why should I them?)

Also, in the past month or so, we’ve moved to a virtual server, which has really benefited the blog, after the down periods in August and September. The pages typically load very quickly now, and the blog themes and plugins have all been trimmed to the basics, to speed up the responsiveness of the blog. Managing the server is relatively easy, but not without problems such as these mysterious spikes that happen daily.

what causes spikes

Also, some of my customers websites have done *very* well in many ways, including PR. One or two of my other blogs have had PR upgrades, but InvestorBlogger was downgraded.

What does the future hold under ‘Big Brother’?

I’m reconsidering the future of the blog now, after the PR downgrades. It’s been quite demoralizing to have a PR5 blog dropped to a PR2 grade, and lose over 30 PR rankings for internal pages.

There are three or four possible directions I could go in:

1. Just freeze the blog as is: simple effective and the resources are left as they are.

2. Continue posting and ignore PR and Google. Continue to build a blog and a reader base, despite the difficulties.

3. Sell the blog, the domain or both.

4. Just blitz everything, except the domain.

What would you do? Have you faced these problems? Let me know your thoughts. Your thoughts will shape my response… so let me hear!