Art Of Money

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Time for a year-end wrap for 2006, which was the first year of ArtOfMoney.org.

There are three things I’d like to accomplish with this post:

1. To give you guys a chance to see behind the scenes and get a big picture snapshot of this blog on a few different levels.
2. For me to take a look back and analyze what’s gone on for the past year or so.
3. To set some benchmarks as a way to measure next year against.

General Site Goings On

I made the first post on this site on Monday Feb. 20th and there are currently 202 posts and 459 comments, contained within 27 categories.

That works out to a post every 1.55 days and on average 2.26 comments per post. Both numbers are actually better than I would have guessed [I'd better update my self image, as I feel like I post much less than that, and I also feel like I receive very few comments - although I do respond to people a lot in my comments, so it may be more like an average of 1.5 comments per post if you don't count me.]

The Akismet spam blocker has protected this site from 11,241 spam comments. YIKES and thanks to Akismet!

RSS Subscribers

An interesting chart as you can see that subscriptions really peaked in July and began to plateau in September. It isn’t obvious to me why this happened, except that for the last half of the year, I have felt a bit lost with the direction of this site. One other factor is that I just discovered that when I moved servers in November, I forgot to re-enable the Feedburner replacement plugin, which may have caused some subscriber numbers not showing up in these stats.

No fear though as I’m fine with a “work in progress” type of atmosphere. I realize that this does not lead to big stats or fame in the blogosphere, but that’s okay.

Traffic

Traffic levels have continued to improve throughout the year, although they are still far from what I would consider a successful blog. Many tops sites would receive in a day, what this site receives in a month.

Thanks to the resent influx of visitors from Google there has been a nice boost at the end of the graph, with November seeing about 3600 unique visitors or about 120 per day on average. Those 3600 folks looked at about 9000 pages or about 2.5 page views per visitor.

Alexa

My current Alexa ranking is 106,113 which I find fairly impressive. There has been a nice trend lately [with Alexa the lower the number the better] and it looks like that I will soon crack the 100k mark, which is a bit of an Internet status symbol. You can visit
my Alexa page to see the graph and more detail stats.

Newsletter

Despite the fact that I have decided to mothball and re-invent my Passive Income Tips newsletter, I’d have to call 2006 a pretty successful experiment in list building.

I ended up with just over 200 subscribers; not too many whom unsubscribed in response to the 19 editions I sent out.

Many people replied the newsletter and I’d say that my hypothesis that a newsletter is more intimate than a website was proven out.

Summary

Overall I would say that I was happy with how the year went here on Art of Money. There was a lot of fun and I really enjoyed the interaction with you guys and the encouragement and support you provided.

The biggest disappointment for me continues to be what a couple commenters have called an identity crisis.

This is pretty accurate description, although it’s not really my identity that I’m struggling with; it’s yours!

Not clear who my audience are and therefore what my purpose is with this site. If you think of the entire group of people you know, everyone from soccer moms to computer programmers and then you try and talk to them all at the same time…tell them the same story; that’s what I struggle the most with.

If I just tell stories to the soccer moms or the computer programmers exclusively then I know I’ll get bored, but I know that on the web, success comes from a clear intention, so I know that I will need to strive to find the magic point of connection between all my diverse interests.

To Be Continued Tomorrow

This post is the first of three part wrap up of 2006 and a look ahead for this site and my Internet businesses in general. Tomorrow, I’ll be presenting Best of Art of Money 2006 in which I dive into some of the best stories of the year and figure out what made them work. On Friday, I’ll take a look at what’s ahead for 2007.

In general, I recommend as part of your goal and direction setting activities for 2007 to take a snapshot of where you are currently at, it can be a great tool for measuring what is working and coming up with ideas for the year ahead.

Jon Symons