Muahahaa!! Today I woke up to a pleasant surprise. My Alexa ranking is now 108,727! That is a major 50K jump since my last update!

Its great, and it ties in very much with my plan. Yesterday I spent my whole evening planning out exactly what I am going to do next year to start earning money from my blog, and it is a very challenging and exciting journey to take.

I think it is important to know that the essence of blog marketing is that it is a very powerful traffic generation tool. I’ve discussed this before why Google likes blogs and stuff like that – however, unless you do something to generate revenue for your blog, the traffic will be lost and you won’t make money! Well, to be frank with you the traffic for this blog is good, but its not been bringing me the income I wish.

I could go ahead and place more advertisements and affiliate links, but there really aren’t many products out there that I truthfully believe in – many are super hyped up products…. marketing talk, and that is what Internet marketers are good at. I am currently developing my own eCourse for blog marketing – which I plan to launch in 5 days time… and this course documents the key steps I took marketing this blog – getting this blog listed on the 3rd page of Google for a super competitive keyword “Blog Marketing” in 3 months!

So… it will really be an exciting December holiday season for me, and I’m really looking forward to it so much. Its hard work everyday, doing my best to position myself as the top blog marketing trainer in Singapore, but I believe at the end of the day, my efforts will be worthwhile!

Haha… really. I took a break from this blog yesterday, going on a short holiday with my parents to Batam, only to come back and realise I’ve been called an SOB!

Liz Strauss was the one who called me an SOB! And its thanks to the post on work at home mums. Thanks Liz! I’m really flattered by the award. This blog is barely 3 months old – I couldn’t even get it approved for PayPerPost!

Anyway, its really a very different experience and perspective when you keep receiving emails telling you’ve got new comments on your blog! Its exciting! Plus, I think it really adds quality to the blogosphere, because now you’ve not got an opinion – you’ve got extended opinions from many people!

Liz advised me in that post on how to bring comments to conversations… so I really want to let all you readers know that it is really okay to talk a lot on my blog! Go ahead and post your comment, discuss, feedback, tell me what you think! It doesn’t even matter if you feel that your stand may not be right, its in conversations that we learn from others!

The only rule is to be nice! You can be not right, but still nice! 🙂 And I know 99% of the people in the world are nice people. So, come on, join in the conversation!

Phew! Its really motivating! 🙂

I wonder if anybody out there is as crazed as myself in tracking Alexa traffic updates, but yeah… Alexa rankings up again! Heh! Maybe I’ll stop when I reach 100,000!

The past few days have been great as I start to see some very popular websites starting to link in to some of the articles that I wrote. I noticed that my “reporting news” pages are more popular than “blogging tips” – which isn’t too good a thing! I guess I need to work harder to produce better articles that I am doing today, so people will find more value to link in.

My traffic doesn’t click. Or rather, doesn’t click enough! Well, unfortunately my Adsense clicks are not going up as significantly as my traffic for the blog – which isn’t quite good news. It could mean several things though.

1. Blogging traffic really don’t click, especially for blogs like mine, because my readers are more Internet savvy people who already know what Adsense ads are and are kinda “blind to them”. I remember reading this somewhere, but I don’t remember who.
2. I’m getting untargeted visitors, which is likely too, because my article topics are pretty wide (on this note, I think I should be more focused in the future
3. My ads are not seen – which is also probable, because I love this blog too much to put the ads right on top 😛

However, I still appreciate people dropping by to read. Thank you readers! Anyway, my daily traffic is still 45 times less than Problogger! Haha! Still a long way to go, I know!

Time for another Alexa Ranking update! This time, I’ve dropped below the 200,000 range! Wow!

No updates on page rank though… 😕 Not yet?

I’ve also bumped in a problem – a problem that I’m more than happy to handle! My bandwidth for this site has already hit 40%, and its only day 9 of the month! Wheeee~! Time to get more bandwidth! Its a good thing that I started with a reseller account, so I can do whatever I like. 😉

Anyway, I’m still really really happy, and really really thankful for all my mentors for your advice, for you fellow bloggers in my daily reads whom I get my daily dose of tips from, for all my visitors for reading and commenting.

Thank you so much! To make this a little special and sincere, here is my hand written “thank you”.. just for you today!

Oh by the way, Christmas is just around the corner – just about 6 weeks away~! Have you all got your goodies yet? Got all your Christmas cards ready? Christmas is one of the more celebrated holidays in Singapore, and I’m really looking forward to it!

I’m actually quite reluctant to post this (because I think too much of ranking updates might let the cat out of the bag and portray how vain and egoistic I am :D), but I really want to log my blogging progress.

My Alexa Ranking has gone up in 2 days, the jump this time is more than the previous jump! This time, Alexa has finally given me my screenshot!

Its really so exciting to be blogging and then knowing that you are doing the right things! Its really encouraging!

There are a couple of things I know I haven’t done yet though.

Things like:

1. Adding an email subscription for my RSS feeds – I’m testing out a couple of RSS to Email services to see which is the best! There are many out there!
2. Creating an email newsletter/course to capture email addresses (which might be the same one or different from the RSS feeds subscription)
3. Exploring the future pings thing which I was talking about a couple of days back.
4. See if I could do some Vlogging here to spice things up further – I found the FLV player and the WP-FLV plugin a while ago, but still haven’t gone down to doing it!
5. I also want to explore more Photo Blogging stuff – more for my other blogs
6. Read my 5 new books and talk about them here!

I also owe the Blogosphere a couple of things!

1. Reviews for blogs by 3M, Harrahs, and Sprint
2. My blogging book!
3. A better way to sort those 1000 Corporate Blogging feeds and URLs by Easton at BusinessBlogWire

So… that’s the plan for these few days! I guess I will take them slowly, one at a time. Blogging is meant to be fun right?!

(Singing song by Sheryl Crow)
I’m… I’m gonna soak up the sun~~, Gonna tell everyone to lighten up!
I’m gonna tell ’em that I’ve got no one to blame,
For every time I feel lame I’m looking up.
Oh I’m gonna soak up the sun~!

Have fun bloooging blogging~!