WalletRehab - Ways to save money

In my last post, I wrote about one of the big problems I had with blogging. I felt like I was writing to no purpose, and people weren’t reading anything that I said. Or that is, few people were reading what I said. As a writer, someone who wants to communicate what he hopes are his unique and precious thoughts, there is nothing more gratifying than knowing that he is being read.

And I did not get that feeling. Not enough of it as it turns out.

My problem was that I was only counting the number of comments that were posted on my blog. I had no real way of knowing how many visitors were coming to my blog until the end, when I was just starting to roll with the information about the WR challenge.

As I was studying and learning about different techniques to use for the challenge, I realized that I had no real good measurement tools set up for this blog, and would need them for the WR Challenge. So about that time, I added Google Analytics to WR.

Of course, having set it up, I was able to see exactly how little traffic I was getting. What was particularly frustrating was the small amount of traffic that I was getting from search engines (and yeah, I’m looking at you Google). Using other tools, I had discovered that the vast majority of what I had written was not indexed by Google, because of various mistakes I had made in setting up the blog.

Wallet Rehab is my first real (i.e. non personal) blog, and running it has so far taught me a lot of lessons. I had not set up WR to be indexed efficiently by Google, so that it was impossible for people to find my site.

On the internet, if Google doesn’t like you, no one does.

I stopped. I felt like I was working hard and being mocked for my efforts by a lack of traffic. I was unable to reach out to the greater internet audience because of some errors I had made when I first setup this blog. The Internet can be an unforgiving place.

Even though I stopped, WR was still hosted, and Google Analytics was collecting statistics. Sometime during my hiatus, a miracle happened, and Google started liking WR. (I want to say “Google started liking WR again,” but I think it is only coming around now.) I only know this because I recently cracked open the WR statistics information accidentally, while reaching for the stats for the WR Challenge site (which incidentally is almost a month old).

I expected that there would be no traffic, and that WR had shriveled up. On the contrary, the site still was going along, with enough traffic from search engines to keep it alive.

We here at WR at thriving yet, but I figure the hardest part is over.

I have my fingers crossed.