Ah, the beginning of another month, and time again to do the housekeeping. I have some real-world housekeeping I should do as well, but that seems to be much easier to procrastinate on. I have decided to another section to this post regarding the progress I am making towards my goals for 2009 so be sure to check that out at the end of the post.

Top Commentators

There was a major improvement in the number of comments since last month (almost 3 times as many!) so thank you all. I’m only filling 8 of the 10 spots that I allow in this post this month because there was a 5 way tie for 9th place and I didn’t want to expand the list to 13. My apologies to those who commented and aren’t linked to here, but leave a few more comments this month and make the list next time around.

Dennis Edell - 19 comments
Andrea - 19 comments
Martin - 17 comments
Tammy - 11 comments
Derek - 9 comments
Roman @ FinancialJesus.com - 6 comments
The Blogger Source - 3 comments
Mitch - 3 comments

Thanks you guys for sharing your thoughts on my site here. For those of you who didn’t get the free link this month, you can see how easy it is to get so try for next month!

Advertisers

PerformancingAds hasn’t necessarily been performing for me, but I’ll leave them there for a bit longer yet. The system seems to be working to the point that my site is actually showing some exchange ads and I like the variety in banners that is provided by the system. The one drawback I notice from time to time is that they seem to kill my page’s load time. I haven’t had any complaints yet, so I think I’ll leave it for a while longer to see if I can get anyone to purchase :)

Also, Dennis has decided to start advertising and promoting his personal site and in doing so has acquired a 125×125 in the rotation for those top 4 spots.

Goals For 2009

I’ve had some moderately mixed results in my progress towards my goals for the year. My readership has increased so that’s a positive improvement. Feedburner reports that “on average” I have 33 subscribers and Analytics shows 1,015 visits (which divided by 30 = right around 34 per day) so there has been some improvement since the beginning of the year. This is as much your doing as mine, so thank you all!

I had 22 posts in January which means I’m well on my way to my goal of 250. 22 x 12 = 264 so as long as I keep going at about the same rate I did in January I should be just fine. I know I slowed down a bit towards the end of the month, but I’m trying to budget my time a bit better to be sure and have posts as well as trying to write a post as soon as I get the idea rather than jot the idea down and try to write it later.

In regards to the rest of my goals, I have come up with and began some preliminary work on a new site. I mentioned this previously, but haven’t really done much since then. I was hoping to get a bunch done over the weekend, but that didn’t quite happen…at all. I’ve also done a little bit of research and additional planning (nothing too intense, but more along the lines of keeping track of the little thoughts I have) regarding the additional personal sites I am planning. As far as the income is concerned, I still have a very long way to go before I reach $200 per month, but to be fair, I really haven’t been focusing on that a whole lot yet this year either.

Thanks to all of you for making January an outstanding month and let’s make February even better!