December Update

Well, since the last update, much of the site has been finished updating. All short posts have either been consolidated into much longer articles, unpublished for revision, or removed. I only have 50 articles now but about 100K words in total. So the average lenght is much longer than before.

The massive changes in organization have also finished and are settling down: 4 silos, each with 10~20 articles of about 2000 words each (average). Each silo header page is quite long.

However, I’m not sure that my site structure is correctly understood by Google yet. Categories are settled now, but tags are still dynamic (but not indexed).

I’m still playing with some URLs to get a better feel, but the redirection plugin tracks the changes. I just have to be careful… I don’t end up with a series of redirects.

Results so far

Page views have jumped 30.38% since November, in my target market, though the page consolidation has made a mess of some stats. The content has been moved & redirected. Now that much of the consolidation is done, I’m hoping that more stability in rankings will return. Less flux, more stability. Google stats in webmaster are right now not encouraging.

Income

Income wise, well, I’m not expecting a lot but there is some upwards movement. I hit $42 in December despite a quieter Xmas & a very bad post Black Friday period (unlike most other people here). Somehow it balanced out.

Sharing

I’m still updating content on an almost daily basis, adding images, reorganizing, editing as ways to keep the content fresh. I’m now posting my pages to LinkedIn, Twitter & FB… just to get it out there. I’ll do Pinterest soon.

Stolen content

Current strategy is to weed out all the copycat content thieves who have stolen my content, there are still quite a few pages leeching my content. So I’m planning to get them removed from Google or wherever else soon. One or two pages are particularly affected. In some ‘light’ cases, I’ll just rewrite 50 words or so. It’s more effective.

Backlink Building

The mailing list is a complete disaster with dropping subscribers, and few sign ups right now. Backburner. I’m still figuring out ways to create links so I will do a bit of commenting, guest posting and link building through organic means… kind of floundering there.

Goals

So goals? Can I reach total 12K page views? That’s a goal! I came close but reaching it would surpass the site’s first go-around 7 years ago.
Can I consistently reach $100pm? Well, I’ve streamlined my amazon links, got rid of the dud links (there were quite a few), and am now experimenting with different formats for ads/products. Adsense only accounts for 25% of the income but the RPM is poor. Compared to my original placement (I use automated placements), this isn’t so hot. So I’m wondering if I should go back to placing ads myself.
Feedback?
We’ll see… Thanks for sticking around. If you have any thoughts about my achievements, challenges & goals, I’d love to hear them!