October is historically a terrible month for the stock market – thankfully the most important disclosure to investing is “past performance doesn’t guarantee future results;” in other words, history means jack.
In a month typically dominated by orange and black, there was an unbelievable amount of green. Stocks had their best month in nearly a decade, led by financials funancials.
Alexa
- Alexa as of October 1 – 198,796
- Alexa Goal – 175,000
- Alexa as of October 31 – 139,563
Boom shakalaka. Maybe I set the bar too low, but who cares…everyone likes to limbo.
I officially joined the Yakezie challenge on August 7th 2011, this is when my site traffic really took off. Since Alexa works on a 3-month rolling average (and my increased traffic began 3 months ago) I don’t anticipate any significant drops in my ranking moving forward. With that said, I will no longer put much of a focus on this figure – unless readers are curious and enjoy this reflection.
Visitors
Womp, womp, womp.
A small increase is still an increase, so I’m not entirely disappointed with this stat. Last month I faced a period of blogger burnout. There was a 2 week stretch where I didn’t think about the blog. This severely hurt traffic. Up to this point, a bulk of my visitors will come from reciprocation of my visits (via comments) to other sites. I still read a good number of your blogs (although I’ve trimmed significantly). By shifting this time to other activities, my daily routine has become much more manageable – and I should be able to prevent any future burnout.
SEO Baby
Where I’ve lost some traffic from my comments linking back to funancials, I’ve tried to pick up traffic elsewhere. I’ve spent some time researching SEO and popular keywords.
If you type “What’s the difference between interest rate and apr?” into Google, I’m on page 1 (right above Wells Fargo and Wikipedia). This has me ecstatic! Now I just need to continue this with every other commonly asked question.
Advertising
Ever since I dropped below 200k Alexa I’ve gotten many inquiries for advertising. I think there’s some sort of alarm that goes off that alerts advertisers whenever a newly-built site enters this territory.
I’ve agreed to a few deals, but still trying to figure out what pricing will be mutually beneficial. Maybe in future updates I’ll get more specific on how much Funancials is bringing in monthly.
Final Thoughts
I appreciate all comments and feedback I receive on the site. If you ever have any suggestions, don’t hesitate to share.
Thanks for reading.
