Every month I like to focus set some goals so I figure I better get some out in the public so I can hold myself to them.  1st February is a short month 28 days and were on day 3 already so this is going to be a ruff month to get a ton done but lets see what can happen.  So far I am still pump and January was my best month ever.

Last month I did a post about goals and I listed some of my goals for 2010.  Below I going to comment and see where I am at with them.

My post about goal for 2010

My Goals for 2010

- Be more consistent (doing better here)

- 20 blog post per month for 1st 2 months of the year (challenge)
In January I ended up with 16 which is the most ever for me.  I would have been very close but spend the last weekend in the hospital with my 5 year old.  This is a short month but I will try to hit this Goal as I really think and am starting to see that more content = more traffic

- Run Contests and Enter other Contest
Monthly Comment Contest – THE MONEY CULT
I kicked this contest off need to wrap it up for Jan and do a better job with it moving forward. I expected more but figure I failed cause I didn’t promote it enjoy or make my reader aware.  I will raise more awareness around this for this month.

- Guest Post
I wrote a few guest post on the blog engage Blog, I will look to do more here and elsewhere

- Reduce Alex Rank to 100k by year end
I haven’t started to focus on this yet but I am studying and watching what others blogs do that are in this club.  My Rank is dropping as a result of regular content, increased traffic and the Alexa bar on my page.  I will be doing a bunch of post on this as some point along with some Alexa chain reviews.  Currently 438,123, and 143,821 USA I havn’t been watching this to know the trend, One one rank is dropping 3 month is increasing.

- Exercise 15 minutes a day period!
Did ok with this but not seeing the result I want.  I joined the YMCA Sunday and will be attending 5:45 AM Boot Camp 3 times a week for one hour plus whatever else I can do to loose some weight and fell better about myself.  Lets just say I can’t feel my legs today after the 1st day.  I want to be able to take my shirt off in April when I come to Florida for vacation in 3 months. I sick of looking like crap in vacation pics.

- Create 3 products or services
I decided on my 1st product is going to be a fun e-book with the help of my kids.  I posted about it last week Top Secret Fun Kids Food Recipes I already have this started and will be finishing and launching it this month.  A lot of my focus will be on this for the month.  I really just want to launch a product end to end so I can learn from the whole experience and share it with others.

Below are some of the idea I was tossing around these are on hold for now.

xx –tee-shirt

xx –Membership site

xx – Workshops

xx – Small Business Website Setup and SEO consultation

- Build 5 Kick Ass Websites for others
I am doing a website for my brother in law for his Farm and Auto Repair shop.  The basic goals of this are to do a simple site and make sure it ranks for local traffic for relevant keywords.  He is sick of paying for yellow pages and wants to move online as it is a way better value.

- Learn to make graphics
I am getting a little better learning a few things will see if I can ever become efficient at this.  I will be doing the graphic’s for the Top Secret Kid Food E-Book so lets hope that doesn’t slow me down or look to cheap work case I have my kids do it in crayons since it is a kid book.

- Give out more link luv
I did better here I know I hooked Extreme John up a bit and some others.  Look for more of this.  Another reason to comment here.

-Affiliate marketing Plan for each month
Last month I started with my Dick Tracy Tuesday’s then switch to promoting David Risley Blog Master Club for the 2nd half the month once I caught wind he was opening his doors again.  I really like what David does  I will do a more detailed wrapup on both of these.  Both program resulting in a fair amount of clicks and I did end up making $197 so far with David program so I will take that to kick off the year with some sales.  This month I going to be doing some affiliate post about webhosting mine is up for renewal so I will review my options and post about it.

-Update side bars every month
So far I been good with this, I actually just pulled down a few more to rotate them for the month.

What about You?

Anybody else out their still looking at there goals or has the new year buzz worn off already.

Wow, January is almost over. Been a crazy week and month and the last 24-48 hours I spend in the hospital with one of my little ones but all is well now nothing like a little scare to me you think about what really maters.

I was hoping to to a better more detail wrap up as this has been a great month for me probably one of the best cause of a couple things that happened as a result of my actions and plan but I will have to get in to that in another past as I only have about 15 minutes to do this.

I been wanting to tryout this plugin for some time. Instant Weekly Roundup is the plug in. Extreme John likes to use this and I couldn’t remember the name I see that he re-posted the name today and replied to my tweet where I asked him about it.

Thanks John you Rock as always!

So here how this plug-in works I pick a date range and check my categories. The intent for this one is to figure out how this plugin works and wrap up the month. I just enter my header and footer and click a bunch of buttons and see what happens.

Once again I thank everyone and look forward to next month need to really sit down and think as I have bigger plans then time when I think about everything I need to do this month. I hope to figure that all out tonight. Good news is I stayed on track and actually made some money this month and almost hit my posting target of 20 posts.

Please make sure to comment Best Blogging Monthly Comment Contest as this month comment contest went ok but could be a lot better.  I did a poor job promoting it so I will work to tweak this as it goes.  Looks like John will be the winner unless someone takes some action tonight.  The 2 winner I will announce later you must have 5 comments to be considered for that.  Details in the post above to the contest.

OK here is deal.  Falling behind on my post here once again but really wanted to say a few things before the day was over.  I was hoping to add a weekly update to my task list but I am behind already so this is a mix of stuff that I wanted to post but haven’t found the time.

A couple of things that are going well.

Weekly Word Challenge! 

(This is my bi-weekly guest post on Blog Engage Blog)

 I must say I really like running this it has been a blast.  I am making all kinds of new blogging friends.  If you haven’t checked it out you might want to.  11 Entries last week. (Gold Star Week)

Guru News’

Some new you should know David Risley is about to launch The Blog Master Club.  If you plan to buy any program this year this is the one.  Some of the reasons I like David is he is the real deal.  He been running a small online business for a long time and a lot of valuable content to offer.  Even if you don’t want to buy a program be sure to down load his free e-book and audio.  This is one of the best pieces of free content available.  I have listened to a many times and have pages of notes.  You can learn something almost every time you listen to it.

Comment Contest Update!

The Money Cult Monthly Comment Contest This could be going better but at least it is launched and started.  Everyone still has the month to comment.  You need to leave 5 comments over the course of the month to win.  I think this will get better as the month goes one.  2 prises, 125×125 ad on side bar.

Brian Tracy Tuesdays

This is a affiliate marketing plan I put together post one article using some great Brian Tracy Articles from his site that are available to affiliates with links to his products.  I will post one article for week for next 4-8 weeks.  So far bunch of clicks but no sales but it is only week one.

Personal SEO Developement 

I seem to be getting a lot better with this.  If I spend the time to do the research and use some basic SEO Best Practices than I can usually get to page one within a couple days.  It is a lot of extra work to do this but not really.   In the long run this will help I need to get better about making sure I have the time to do this but can’t let it slow me down either.

Alexa Rank

One of the things I have as a goal this year is to reduce alex rank to under 100k.  I added a widget at bottom of page to help track it I think this will drastically drop as a result of my page for the 1st quarter.

Dam! I forgot about the Bad oh Well I guess it all good then.

1st let me say Happy New Year and thank everyone for their support this year.

Closing the door and an incredible decade

I must say as I look back all the way to 2000 it is pretty amazing what can be  accomplished in 10 years or less.  Google was a baby didn’t really exist, twitter, facebook what were they 10 years ago nothing.  The list of multi-million dollar companies is really extremely long.   People and companies that were nobody and because of an idea and some serious planning and action idea’s become money makers and then companies grew around them.

Even with  myself I look at where I was and where I am now.  10 years ago today I was a bartender partying like a rockstar with my soon to be wife and a bunch of friends at  the beach in Florida.  Now today I sit at home in Buffalo, Husband, Dad, Father of 3 wonderful kids working a nice corporate job living he middle class dream.  Looking forward towards the future at the wonderful thins to come.  I have learned a ton about myself.  I know that I can do and accomplish whatever I put my mind to.

So who’s going to become the 1st new  millionaire of this decade?

Will I know I will not be the 1st but I would like to say if everything goes according to my vision when I write my year end post in 2020 I will be talking about this new decade as the one where I made my 1st million.  What are your dreams and goals for the new decade?  If you were to write a post to recap the years 2010-2020 what would you like it to say?  Think about that one for a while you might just be the next google you never know.  That’s whats great about this country and the internet.  You can take idea’s and dreams and turn them real business.

Best of luck to everyone in their ventures this decade.  Looking forward to hearing about them and telling your story here as I find them.

Jared

Wow, hard to believe it been eight months since I launched The Money Cult.  For those that are new and haven’t seen this before each month I take some time to review the previous month and recap what I learned, accomplished and how I am feeling about my site before the next month begins.

First I would really like to say I am sorry to everyone and myself for slacking the last two months but I am officially out of my funk.  I am not sure exactly what happed but basically I stop putting in the time and effort and my blog almost died.  Enough with that lets move on to review which will be a little on the negative side but you can’t always report the good.  This should help me document my mistakes and finally put this behind me so I can move on.

So here is what happened after working early morning and late nights  everyday for the last 6-9 months I just stopped doing everything.  If you looked at how I was finding time to spend on my business it wasn’t something that was sustainable.  I would get up at 5:15am and work on things till 7:00am got to work and then be back on them at 9:30pm till 12:00pm most of the time. This wasn’t everyday but most of the days I would spend at least 2-3 hours on this stuff.

This is not something that anyone can sustain for a long period of time the only result will be burnout which is exactly what happened to me.  So what am I going to do differently.  I going to limit the time I spend and try to have more a a schedule for working on this blog.  I hope that the results will be that I can accomplish more by being more focused during that time.  I not going to push myself so hard and just realize that with consistent efforts and time good things will happen.  I think part of my problem was I had some unrealistic expectations.

Lessons learned from last month that still hold true.

I don’t have much to say here other then I learned a lot about the effects of burnout and what can happen to your blog if you stop.  Take my advice and learn from me on this.  Make sure you have some content stored for a rainy day.  I lost a lot of traffic and readers which I hope I can recover by taken a unplanned break.

State of Mind

The last two months were difficult for me however I look forward to the future and upcoming year.  I am excited that get back at it and really want to spend the month of December doing the following.  I will finally get around to switching to more professional looking wordpress theme and recapping my 1st year of my attempt to become an internet marketer.  This should be a good serious of post most of what I have talked about to this day is really the last 3-6 months but before I started blogging regularly here I was doing a lot of learning and experimenting.  I think others that are starting out can learn from this so I will share.

Month End totals

Traffic is probably the most important thing for you blog.  If you have no traffic or not working to improve traffic then what’s the point.  The Money Cult had a nice steady growth in traffic over the last couple months.  Last month I had my first drop but I am the blame for that I stopped working on this blog/business and took a break.

My Goals for traffic is to get to the point where I have a 100 unique visitors daily before the end of the year.  How can I accomplish that 1st I need to get better get back on track with my posting.  I must post 3 times a week period.  I will continue to use the basic SEO tactics that I published in my 3 part serious on SEO.  These work they help get my on page one and two for targeted keywords overtime which result in a nice stream of continues organic traffic.

Lastly I need to continue with link building.  I have really dropped off with this.  I pretty much have only been bookmarking for the last month and half which is important but really you need to bookmark, submit your articles and build some links back to them via comments.  I was better about leaving comments on other blogs but have really started to drop off on that also so I need to continue this as my referral traffic has suffered.

A few things I would like to explore that haven’t but I would think would help is guest posting.  I would like to make it a habit to start doing some guest posting on some high traffic blogs at least once or twice per month.  I think you can really get some good exposure for yourself and that is really what traffic is all about.  The more you name and link are spread around the net then the more ways you have for people to find your site.

The other thing I haven’t done yes is any kind of article writing and submission.  I would like to here from others on this if they have tried it and had any success or not.  It is often talked about but not sure if it works as I haven’t seen any real world case studies on the topic to make a call on it.  Depending on feedback I am not sure if I will go down this path the other option is to build some TheMoneyCult branded products that I would offer for free with links back to this site or even submit to PLR sites for distribution.

In conclusion I believe I will get to my of 100 visitors a day in time it is just a matter of how much time.  If I follow my own advice here and follow thought I should be able to close in on that target before the end of the year.

Today I am going to talk about the topic of content for The Money Cult.  As part of my re-design and planning process I want to make sure I cover a few things here.  I want to better organize my topics and categories and tags.  I explored this a little bit when I first started but could really come up with a good list so I just start writing and picking and defining them along the way and now I somewhat of a unorganized mess.

It seems that the post that tend to get a lot of attention are interviews and personal ones.  I tend to share some blogging tips also not really sure if that is a good fit for the intent of this blog but I can talk though this and see if I can work it in.  Ideally after I am done with this post I should have a better list of topic’s and categories that I can focus on or make sure I am writing content to fit within that.   I am a big on streamlining processes so I hope to come up with some templates that I can use for posting which should help with creating consistent content faster.

I will first talk about what the purpose of this blog is so lets start with my tag line and some of my statements from my about me page.

A No B.S. Blog about money the tools and people trying to make it..

What’s This Blog About?

The Money Cult’s purpose is to be a bridge between Newbie’s and Guru’s in Internet Marketing.  When I started out I found a lot of crap and lot of good stuff but I really wasn’t sure who to trust.  I post about the good stuff and the good people I come across along my journey.  I also post about my experiences, and progress, case studies and tools I use.  My intent for this site is to provide a ton of value and offer a lot a free stuff so you don’t have to spend any money to learn the fundamentals  of internet marketing.

If you look at my tag line and the paragraph above it seems I should be making sure whatever I am writing fits.  I been pretty on target for the last couple months now that I reread this.  I would like to do more guru reviews and newbie success stories.  I need to make sure I am keeping the balance between my experiences and that stuff.  I think you can really learn a find encouragement from someone that just started and is having some success.  Those stories are the ones I like to tell.  Those stories are the ones I like to read.  If you have one of those stories and would like to share it please contact me and I can help you tell hit here.

What have I been Blogging About?

Now lets take a look thought my archive and see what I publish to date and what type of content I been providing and the response it has received.

If we look at my Categories I have the following Business, Getting Started, Internet Marketing, Personal, Product Reviews, Squidoo free (Needs to go), Tips and Advice.

Now for my Tags I have a larger mess I have a little too much detail here, I used names and details need to make this more generic.

Now I reviewed a few of my favorite blogs and their really doesn’t seem to be any sort of  standard but I will take a look the the ones that from those blogs and the ones here that I think I should keep and come up with my final list for this step of my revamp The Money Cult project.

Blog Posting Frequency

Lastly lets talk about posting frequency.  I know when I don’t post traffic goes down way down.  It seem that 3 times a week is a great goal and keeps a steady flow of traffic coming in.  Once in a while I might have some extra post.  That would mean about 12-16 posts per month.  I have been about to so 10-12 for the last 3 months so should be able to continue that.  Ideally I should or could fine a way to make it easy for others to guess post relevant content this would help cut down of the hours I need to spend on writing.  For some time I also wanted to do some guess post to help get my name out but haven’t made that happen yet.

Open Items

Publish final Categories and Tag list.