To be honest I wasn’t going to do a monthly blog income report for January as I had done pretty much nothing with the blog for most of the month. But I thought that it would be unfair to only document the months when I actually do well so I decided to post one.

Page Impressions & Visitor Count

The unique visitor count for January stands at 866, which is a drop of 33 from the month of December. Which is not too bad considering I only published about three posts during the entire month.

The page impression count for January stands at 1,184, which again is a drop of 302 from the month of December.

This means that each unique visitor looked at 1.37 pages.

Search engines accounted for 22.86% of my traffic. 18.59% of my traffic was from referring sites. 58.31% was from direct traffic. 0.23% of my traffic was from ‘other’ which I have no idea what that is.

Money Money Money!

Adbrite = $0.27 (-$0.60)
AdsDaq = $0.12 (-$0.89)
Adsense = $0.79 (-$4.96)
Adtoll = $0.00 (-$2.12)
Infolinks = $0.08 (-$0.48)
Kontera = $0.10 (-$0.25)
Reviews = $74.94 (-$30.06)
Smowtion = $0.38 (-$0.10)
TLA = $12.25 (No Change)
Tradedoubler = $1.10 (+$0.13)
UnderDog = $0.08 (-$0.03)

Total = $90.11 (-$54.71)

- Linkworth paid me the money they owed me, BlogAdvertisingStore now owe me $96.00, just $4.00 more and I can cash out.

- 4d18ent seem to have shut up shop, which is a shame as I was doing well and had got over $30 before they went missing. This is one of the hazards with dealing with new companies though.

Top Five Search Terms

I like this part of the monthly income report. It is amazing how people find my blog on search engines.

1. blog review networks
2. lessons will be learnt
3. i need discipline
4. specticles
5.my plans for the future

Popular Posts Of The Month

1. December 2009 Blog Income Report
2. 19 Blog Review Networks
3. Blogitive – Nice To Add To Your Collection
4. Look What Hobbies You Can Have When You Work From Home
5. Get Paid To Have A Merry Christmas

5 Top Site Referrals

The top five sites that sent the most visitors to this blog.

1. forums.digitalpoint.com
2. intensedebate.com
3. forum.smorty.com
4. problogger.net
5. affiliateblogonline.com

This blog, and me earning money online, would not be possible if it was not for those awesome folk over at BlueHost. If you are looking for quality, reliable and cheap hosting then I urge you to check them out today.

At some point late yesterday evening Wordpress released the 2.9.1 update patch which has the fixes to the bugs that were found in 2.9, and trust me there were a hell of a lot of bugs found in 2.9.

It fixes a lot of problems but the most important ones are the blank page when leaving comments and the scheduling bug (scheduled posts not publishing when meant to).

It also contains security solutions that were spotted in the original release.

I’d advise everyone to upgrade as soon as possible.

Download 2.9.1 Here

2009 has come and gone, in what seemed like the blink of an eye, and I was sitting at my desk wondering what lessons I have learnt from the past twelve months. Even the most experienced bloggers will have learnt at least one thing a year.

Here is what I have learnt.

Don’t Rush Into Buying Sites

A couple of months ago I bought this blog, along with a collection of others, and to be honest the sale almost didn’t happen.

Earlier in the year I bought a web site from somebody who had written false information about the stats of their site and I believed them and rushed in and handed over the money for it. I haven’t made a profit on that site yet.

When the opportunity came along to buy this blog I was very cautious and went over every single aspect of the stats that the owner had given me, just to be extra sure it was all true. I was almost too cautious and someone else almost took the collection of blogs from under my nose.

If You Don’t Put In Effort Your Income & Traffic Will Suffer

I guess this is a bit of a simple thing to understand. But when I first started it was something that I thought people only said and that I never really happened.

There have been a couple of gaps where content has been very slow coming out of me and it shows in the traffic stats and, more importantly, in my PayPal and bank accounts.

What I’ve started doing is stock-piling articles for the days when I can’t write anything. That way, hopefully, there won’t be as many of these gaps as before.

The MMO Niche Is Full Of People Willing To Scam You

I have only been in this niche for a couple of years but it was not until 2009 that I really found out just how many people in this niche are happy to scam you, rip you off and generally talk a lot of rubbish.

They all have the same agenda: to sell you their product and wares. That is why I have had to scale down plugging my personal Twitter and Facebook profiles because people would add me and them spam me in the hope I’d buy their new e-book or product.

What have you learnt from 2009?