Taking the Next Step

Today was a monumental day for The Red Stapler Chronicles. I no longer consider myself in the infancy stage of blogging–you can now call me a toddler. As of today, I am no longer using the “pacifier” of what I would call “untargeted” traffic. I believe that when you first start off blogging, you need to get traffic in any way that you possible can. As a result, I posted my blog’s address on any type of money-making message board that I could including Myspace, Google Groups, MSN Groups, and Yahoo Groups. In addition, I joined programs like Traffic Swarm, Blog Soldiers, Blog Mad, ASD Cash Generator, and Clickthru to get me even more hits. Yes, I got thousands of hits using these techniques, but they were definitely not quality. I was happy to get an occassion comment or subscription via this traffic, but this is certainly no way to build a successful blog.

Now that I have ads on this site, I had to end my participation in any traffic building program as it is against the terms of services (see wordpress, I do read them) of the advertiser’s sites. It’s going to be a little hard for me to log at my statistics and see much lower numbers. Still, I will be able to take solace that everyone who does visit came for a reason other than to earn a credit or two.

My submission to the Carnival of Personal Finance was a big hit for my web counter–I have already received 225 hits from my post. I will be submitting to many more carnivals in the future!!! Today I spent a about an hour playing with different wordpress plugins. Thus far, the best one I ran across was the Share This plugin which allows my readers to submit any post to popular social networking sites (like Digg, Reddit, etc.) by clicking the Green logo at the bottom of each post. Feel free to try it out Does anyone have any favorite plugins that have really helped their blog?? I also added a couple of pictures I took with my new digital camera (that I got free from My Coke Rewards) to my Payment Proof page.

One last thing, did you arrive here after doing a search for money? I have been getting some decent traffic (about 20 hits per day) via the search term “money” I would like to know what search engine you are using (I checked I am not in the top 20 pages of Google )

UPDATE–I was included in the Festival of Frugality #128 with my post, Preparing for a Disaster
The Festival of Frugality is hosted at No Debt Plan this week. Head on over and check it out.