I hope everybody enjoyed their Christmases and also any new year’s eve parties they might have gone to. For a lot of bloggers the Christmas period is a time in the year where they will see a slump in income and traffic as people are busy or on holidays.

OK, so let’s get straight down to business.

Page Impressions & Visitor Count

As I said, the holiday periods tend to see a drop in income and traffic, but for some reason this made me even more determined to increase those two fields. I spent more time blog commenting, posting on forums, publishing posts and generally creating a bit of a buzz about the blog.

The unique visitor count for December stands at 899, which is a very nice jump of 214 from the month of November.

The page impression count for December stands at 1,486, which again is a healthy jump of 258 from the month of November.

This means that each unique visitor looked at 1.65 pages.

Google’s search engine accounted for 21.47% of my traffic. 47.24% of my traffic was from referring sites and 29.03% was from direct traffic.

Money Money Money!

4d18ent = $7.57 (New)
Adbrite = $0.87 (+$0.09)
ADSDAQ = $1.01 (-$0.17)
Adsense = $5.75 (+$4.57)
Adtoll = $2.12 (+$0.55)
Info Links = $0.56 (New)
Kontera = $0.25 (+$0.21)
Reviews = $105.00 (+$30.50)
Paid Tweets = $5.48 (-$1.33)
Smowtion = $0.48 (+$0.04)
Social Spark = $2.40. (-$1.68)
TLA = $12.25 (No Change)
Tradedoubler = $0.97 (+$0.61)
UnderDog = $0.11(New)

Total = $144.82 (+$31.51)

- I know I said I was getting rid of Kontera but just as I was about to do it they started coming up with decent click amounts and this month I have received the most I think I’ve ever had with them. Might put them on my smaller blogs and see what happens.

- The review company that I mentioned last month are still holding onto around $80.00. Linkworth are also dragging their heels slightly on the $65.00+ that they owe me but they promised that by the 10th of this month.

- 4d18ent is a new advertising company that I’m using. They may have a silly name but they do seem to pay well. Although they do tend to insert audio ads and pop ups from time to time.

- Info Links is the replacement on my main blogs for Kontera, as you can see I have earned almost double in one month what I have earned with Kontera in about a year.

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. earn money paid to tweet
2. my plans for the future
3. ? need dofollow site
4. ptc advertisers
5. need for discipline

Popular Posts Of The Month

1. Poll: Would You Pay For Extra Blog Reviews?
2. 19 Blog Review Networks
3. Get Paid To Have A Merry Christmas
4. Fancy Writing A Guest Post?
5. Blogitive – Nice To Add To Your Collection

5 Top Site Referrals

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

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

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If you find this article interesting you might like to check out ways of making money with Twitter with companies such as Sponsored Tweets and Magpie.

Twitter sure has exploded this year. I remember when I first stumbled across it and wondered why people would use it when it was pretty much just the status update feature that Facebook, and many other social network sites, offer.

As with anything, as Twitter became popular people started to wonder if it would be possible to use it as a platform to make some money. But with so many people using Twitter to make money these days it can become almost impossible to make your tweets heard among the other tweets.

I’ve listed some ideas on how I think you can increase your chances of standing out from the crowd.

Custom Design

I’m in the middle of doing this myself. If you look at the big money makers on Twitter they all have their own custom background design. There are hundreds of thousands of people, just like you, trying to make money and this kind of thing will help you stand out.

Talk With Twitterers With Big Followings

A neat little trick that I have used in the past to gain followers is to find a Twitterer with a big following and engage them in a conversation. If you do it right you’ll find that some of their followers will start to follow you.

Advertise Your Page On Your Site(s)

You obviously have a web site or a blog so why not advertise your Twitter page on it? If you have more than one web site or blog then advertise it on all of them. It is called free advertising.

Run Contests That People Enter By Following You

Next time you think about running a contest, instead of asking people to join your mailing list just ask them to follow you on Twitter. I know a lot of people might just unfollow you as soon as the contest is over but hopefully you will have hooked them with your updates by then.

Place URL In Forums & E-mail Sigs

If you use a message board (forum) then why not put a link to your Twitter page in your sig? This can really make a difference if you are part of a very popular message board. Also, how many emails do you send out a day? If you send a few then why not stick your Twitter page link at the bottom of them?

Drop It When You Guest Post

If you guest post on other blogs then the blog owner normally allows you to have two links to your site in the post as a thank you. You can leave one for your chosen web site or blog and the remaining one as a link to your Twitter Page.

Commenting On Other Blogs

You may have heard that commenting on other blogs in your niche is a great way of receiving traffic (and receiving backlinks if they are do-follow), well next time you leave a comment drop your Twitter URL instead of your site or blog link.

If you have any ideas of your own feel free to leave them via a comment.

One of my close friends has followed in my footsteps and has bought himself a classic car. He has bought himself a VW and I have to say that I am incredibly jealous and will be pestering him to let me get under the hood at some point.

He is not really as big a car fan as I am but I like to encourage him, and it is far better than his deep sea fishing hobby. I already hooked him up with a number of reliable web sites that specialise in selling classic VW accessories, so he won’t have the kind of headache I had.

I wonder how his wife is taking the news? When my wife found out about my love of tinkering with cars she wasn’t best pleased, especially when she would turn over at 2am and I’d still be out in the garage playing away.

I’m quite surprised cars don’t cause more trouble in marriages than they do!