A post on Awesomeology hit the front page of Digg a few days ago (thank you to whoever submitted it!) and we had a crazy spike in traffic.

Awesomeology has now been around for about 6 months, and in that time we’ve had a total of 527,746 visitors look at a total of 845,793 pages!

Take a look at the stats…

What’s Up With The Traffic?

As you can see, it started off pretty well and then in November some of my posts started becoming popular with Digg and StumbleUpon. As you can see, though, there was a big dropoff in traffic in January. That’s when I switched Awesomeology from a self-hosted WordPress site to be hosted at WordPress.com.

Unfortunately, when I did that I was forced to change my permalinks around, so all of the traffic that I had been getting resulted in 404 errors and my traffic almost completely dried up.

The reason I made the switch was because I was getting way too much traffic and I don’t make any money from this site. Hosting was getting to be too expensive.

But you know what? I didn’t care that most of my traffic went away. I really enjoyed publishing Awesomeology. I usually posted 1-3 posts per day (usually funny videos), and it didn’t take all that much time.

As you can see from the chart…I’ve just been plugging along with hardly any traffic for the last few months, when all of a sudden it’s getting picked up by StumbleUpon and Digg again.

The #1 Benefit To Having A High Traffic Site

Even if you don’t make much money from it, for me the best thing is that it can drive FREE traffic to other projects that DO make money.

For example, on the day last week that I had the huge spike in Digg traffic, I was able to drive 7,209 visitors to The Coolest Gifts by just putting an advertisement after the Awesomeology post. Clearly, the people who clicked through liked what they saw, because they looked at a total of 19,935 pages. I made quite a few affiliate sales that day, and probably dropped a whole bunch of 45 and 60-day cookies, which means that additional commissions may still be coming.

Again, I got 7,209 visitors in one day (up from 155 the day before!) and I didn’t spend a single dollar to generate them.

That’s the power of a high traffic site.

Go Start A Free Site On Something You Love

I love finding entertaining videos, pictures, stories, etc and telling other people about them. I could do it every day for the rest of my life, and that’s what Awesomeology is. It doesn’t matter if I make money from it, I’ll still do it. I actually have LOST money from Awesomeology over the last 6 months (before switching to the free host).

If there’s something that you love (and I’m sure that there is for everybody), go start a blog about it. Get a free one on wordpress.com. Post something (or a few things) every single day. Don’t even try to make money from it. Keep it up for at least a year. I think you’ll be very surprised at the results.

Earnings Breakdown

AdSense: $2.80
Commission Junction: $2.71
NeverBlueAds: $4.20
Project Wonderful: $6.87
Network Marketing: $995

TOTAL: $1,011.58

Again, all numbers reported here are net figures (after expenses).

The AdSense came from John Chow Graphs, the NeverBlueAds came from the Pure Play Poker ads on Awesomeology, and both the Project Wonderful income and the Commission Junction income came from Power Dropping. The network marketing income, as usual, is from Carbon Copy Pro.

I’m not exactly thrilled with how February turned out, but I guess any month that you make 4 figures online is something to be happy about, right?

At this point, when 99% of my income comes from two sales, I really can’t say that I’m making money online. If just a few things went differently, I could easily be sitting here reporting about $10 worth of income. That’s not acceptable, and here’s what I’m doing to change it…

I mentioned in my last post that I was quitting regular posting on this (and some other of my sites) to focus on The Coolest Gifts. For the past two weeks, I’ve been having a custom theme designed, and it’s about two days away from being released. I’m extremely excited about it. It’s pretty much exactly as I had pictured it. I really think you’re going to love it. It’s going to look like an ecommerce site, but it’s powered by WordPress. So cool.

Anyway, while I’ve been waiting for the new theme to be finished, I haven’t done much with the site. I haven’t promoted it at all. I have been publishing two posts per day, but I’ve been writing a bunch of other posts to try to determine what kind of posting schedule I’ll be able to consistently keep. I think I’m going to start at 2 posts per weekday (M-F), and gradually work up to 4 or 5 posts per weekday. With the new site, it’s going to be very important to me to stick with a posting schedule.

That’s enough about the new theme for now. When it goes live (some time on Friday) I’ll post about it here along with all of the little details that only you, my fellow bloggers, will appreciate

Because I’m essentially starting from scratch (The Coolest Gifts only has 10 RSS subscribers!), and because I’ll be focusing all my time and effort there, I really wouldn’t be surprised if my income drops below $100 for March. But I’m focused on the bigger picture. I love the niche that I’ll be blogging about. I know that the niche is profitable (this gadget blog made over $50k in December 2007). I have a great URL. I’ll have a cool and unique look to my site. And I’m determined.

60 of my 365 days may have already passed, but I’m feeling better than ever about my chances of meeting my goal.

Check back in a few days for the details of my new theme!

Okay, my second month of attempting to make money online has now ended. I actually wasn’t sure if I would beat my November income of $120.56, and it turns out that I made over 10x as much…

Earnings Breakdown

AdSense: $19.72
Kontera: $11.40
Affiliate Sales: $117.59
Network Marketing: $1,350.00
TOTAL: $1,498.71

To break down the affiliate sales even further, $40 was from Double Your Dating, $44.36 was from BANS, $1.05 was from Think Geek, $9.80 was from Solostream, $2.70 was from Santa Speaking, $14.68 was from Wear Your Beer, and $5 was from Snorg Tees.

All of those affiliate sales came from affiliate links on Awesomeology except for Solostream. That, surprisingly, came from a small link at the bottom of Coolest Gifts (it says Get This Theme). I say surprisingly because I haven’t really had any traffic to that site yet…in fact the only place I’ve even mentioned it is here at 365 To Freedom!

As for the Network Marketing, that came from a program (Carbon Copy Pro) that I joined in November. I made 2 sales with them in December (my first two), resulting in $1,350 net to me. The best part is that it didn’t really cost me anything to generate the sales. I started a Carbon Copy Pro blog which has managed to get some high organic search engine rankings and driven traffic to my opt-in-page. I haven’t spent anything promoting it. Frankly, I haven’t even really spent any time on the content. Seeing as how the program is actually working, I should probably focus more on it in 2008.

Goals for January

It should be an interesting month. I plan on making some one-time income from eBay (more on that in my next post), I’d like to try my hand with some PPC affiliate marketing, I’m experimenting with some pop-under ads on Awesomeology (which I would never do on this site), and I’m going to continue to develop Coolest Gifts which I expect to really pay off at the end of 2008 during the holiday shopping season.