My Financial Independence Journey » MFIJ blog » Blog Update: March 2013
Blog Update: March 2013
With three months of blogging behind me, it’s time to review the blog’s progress. March was a pretty solid month for the blog. Overall, I people seem to be very satisfied with the new layout. As usual, I’ll try to make this blog update post short, so that I can focus my time on writing actual content.
March in Brief
It’s been a good month. The blog has a great new layout. I still want to make more tweaks to it, but I’d rather be writing content and interacting with other bloggers so I’m putting it off. Otherwise, I’ve been making good progress on the Yakezie challenge. I’ve gotten to know a lot of Yakezie members and my Alexa score is almost below 200K! I’m going to keep on blogging and hope that I make it into the network.
March is also awesome because I upgraded my investment account to a margin account, which will allow me a lot more flexibility when it comes to options trading.
Google Reader – RIP
By now, you’ve probably already heard the bad news. Google is killing off Google Reader. Why? Because they’re sadistic assholes (and that’s being kind). Now I’ve got to find a good web based alternative to keep up with all the great personal finance and investing blogs on my reading list. Not to mention all the other blogs that I follow regularly.
I still haven’t found a good substitute, but if you know of anything that is web or cloud based that will allow me to sync blogs between my home, work, and phone. That would be great. It would be even better if it was free.
Become an MFIJ Follower
There are plenty of ways for you to follow the blog if you like what you see here: RSS, eMail, Twitter, and Facebook. Pick one and go for it. Now that Google reader is headed to that great compiler in the sky, you might want to subscribe with a couple of different options.
Also, if you are enjoying the blog let your friends know. More visitors and commenters will help this blog thrive and grow.
Help Me Crush the Alexa Challenge
I’ve made great strides towards crushing the Yakezie challenge. But I’m not there yet. You can help me complete the challenge by doing any (or all) of the following, you will help me reach my goal.
- Install the Alexa toolbar in your browser.
- Follow the blog with Facebook, Twitter, RSS, or email.
- Comment regularly (I try to reply to as many comments as I can).
- Tell your friends, family, neighbors, and pets about the blog. Spread the word of Financial Independence!
Stats
Since I switched from WordPress.com to a separate hosting site, my stats are now reported by Google Analytics rather than WordPress. I’m not sure if both systems count visits in exactly the same same way. But it appears that I’m still averaging around 100 visits a day. Maybe a bit more.
March Page Views: Almost 9,000. Sadly, there is no “almost 9,000″ meme that I can invoke here.
Alexa Ranking: This blog has gone from 397,753 to 210,684. Lower is better, by the way. So I’m making progress!
MozRank: 4.3/10 (higher is better) – moved up 0.1 points.
PageRank: 0/10 (higher is better) – no change
I remain clueless if these stats are good or bad for three months of blogging, but I’m really happy that I’m making progress.
Expenses and Income
Expenses:
$-28.00, The cost of the domain name registration.
$-133.65, The cost of hosting.
Total: $-161.65
Income:
Google Adsense says that I made $17.07 last month. But those aren’t finalized earnings, so the actual number might be a bit lower. Even after taxes are ripped out, I’ve managed to cover hosting for this month. So that’s great!
Readers: If you like what you’ve seen so far, please follow the blog via RSS, email, or Twitter. If you have something you’d like me to write about, I take suggestions.
Written by MFIJ
Filed under: MFIJ blog · Tags: blog update
24 Responses to "Blog Update: March 2013"
Leave a Reply to Jim Cancel reply
9k visitors after three months is the only thing you need to look at. That is AWESOME! keep up the great work!
Thanks! I think it’s going to be harder to keep at blogging now that the whether is getting nicer out. But I’m going to do my best to keep up my posting schedule.
Wow, that is phenominal! Congrats on the success!
Thanks!
These stats are crazy! It took me 7 months to get to where you are in terms of Alexa ranking. Keep up the good work and awesome content!
Thanks! Hopefully I can stay consistent through the next few months of nice whether.
Nice stats progression. Your Pagerank will probably jump to at least 2 or 3 when the next update happens
Not sure why Google is killing their Reader either. I think a lot of people are using Feedly as an alternative though. Haven’t used it myself but heard it’s pretty good 
Thanks! I looked into Feedly, but it won’t sync across computers. But I’ve heard that they will add this feature in the future. I’m looking into Netvibes at the moment. If it works well, I’ll be sure to mention it in an upcoming post.
Nice work, and congrats on the ongoing success (both blog wise and dividend wise!)
Thanks!
You are doing great. It really does take a while to get started. You are off to an awesome start!
Thanks!
As everyone said, you’re doing a great job. I didn’t get 100 people per day until march and you’re getting it after three months. That’s awesome. Keep up the networking. That’s key early on.
Thanks for the encouragement. I’ve been networking like crazy. It’s really a lot of work, and I still need to find the right balance between networking and creating content.
You are doing awesome!
Feedspot.com is the closest I have found to google reader.
Nice job on your progress. I’m annoyed with the whole Google Reader thing too. You should consider Feedly as an alternative. It’ll pull all of your existing feeds in from your google account for free so it makes converting a snap. Good luck!
Thanks for the encouragement. I’ve been looking at a number of Reader alternatives. Hopefully I’ll get to do something more in depth this weekend. I’ll be sure to post about whatever I find. Last weekend I actually took a bit of “me time” to have some fun, so I didn’t make as much progress as I would have liked on my blogging activities.
9000 page views and a 260ish Alexa ranking after 3 months is pretty impressive. It took me almost a year to get to those numbers!
Keep doing what your doing and the page rank and everything else will follow.
Thanks for the encouragement!
Great Post MFIJ, keep up the good work, your alexa ranking is better than mine, I need to work on this! You are doing a fine job!
Thanks!
9K visits is awesome! You should get some PR mid May with the next update. Great job on Alexa, 30K drop in 4 days is impressive, next stop 100K!
Thanks for the support! I can only hope I reach 100K. Maybe it’s possible, who knows?