Website Traffic Recap – November 2011

November was this blog’s first full month online, and I’m happy to report that this blog has been continuing to get a good steady stream of traffic with minimal advertising. According to Google Analytics, this blog received 2,480 visits and 5,031 page views in the month of November. When you consider that this blog wasn’t even in existence two short months ago, the numbers look a whole lot better. I know my numbers will increase once I start advertising my blog.

Out of all the traffic received for this blog, my biggest winner seems to come from referral traffic; people found me by a “shout out” on another blog, or even through my Facebook page. Here are my top referrers for November according to Google Analytics:

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Signup For SmartyPig To Save Money + Earn $10 Per Referral!

I started using SmartyPig almost two years ago as a way for me to save money towards some of my specific financial goals, and I wanted to make it easier on me by having money automatically transfer from my existing checking account to a different bank entirely. I thought that by having money automatically transferred weekly into another account outside my bank (that I look at balances daily) that I’d just forget about the money leaving my account and have it add up slowly elsewhere. If I didn’t see it, I’d have no temptation to spend it. Atleast that was my reasoning. Although there were times in the past I needed the money and had money transferred back into my checking account within a matter of a few days, I still love using their services to save my money.

Right now, I have a goal set up with SmartyPig for my 30th birthday which isn’t until April 21, 2015. I have $50 automatically deposited into my SmartyPig account monthly in hopes that I can collect up to $5000 by my 30th birthday. I figured it would be a nice way to celebrate a new decade, and if I needed the money then it was there. Of course, $50 a month isn’t enough to help me reach my goal, but what’s awesome about SmartyPig is that I can also have friends or family contribute to my account AND I can add more money when I want. What’s also nice about SmartyPig is that I can choose to either have the money I accured transferred back to my checking account, or I can put money on one of the many retail gift cards they offer. The benefit of transferring your money onto a gift card is that they give you up to 11% cash back AND you don’t have to put them all on one gift card! If I reached my goal of $5000 and put it all in the form of a gift card, that’s an extra $550 I’d get back! Makes me want to save MORE money!

Right now, I have 100 invites to join SmartyPig. It is FREE to join, and every member also receives a 100 invites to send to their friends and family. For every member you invite to join SmaryPig, sets up an account AND deposits money in it means you will receive a $10.00 SmartyPig electronic gift card! The best part – the $10 can be applied to any of your goals that you created! That’s up to $1000 just for referring members to join! Referral rewards are issued by SmartyPig 4-7 business days after your friends first contribution posts to their goal. Invites to your friends expire after 60 days. SmartyPig electronic gift cards expire after 90 days so use them or deposit them towards your goal right away!

If you’d like an invite, please leave me a message below and I will email you an invite code to use.

This is an unsponsored review.

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Blogging: A Dream Job?

When I first created this blog on October 2nd, my intent was to use this blog as a platform to track my spending and savings using coupons. What I didn’t expect was that I’d become a little obsessed with what I’ve been learning, and I found myself emailing friends and family on how much money they could save if they’d do the same thing. After a few lengthy emails, I figured that it would save me a little time and sanity by posting my findings on my blog and sharing my link with them instead. After all, it was getting a bit tiresome emailing people different deals and scenarios, because you know, not everyone is looking to save money on the same thing.

From there, I started updating my blog daily and even multiple times a day as I found cheap deals and scenarios through various online searches, ad previews, or even other money saving blogs. It just popped in my head that maybe I should purchase a domain name and it would make it easier for people to remember my website (since typing in moneysavinglisa.blogspot.com is a bit long). Somewhere between my continuous updates, sharing what I’m learning and posting what I’m spending on other blogs, my traffic has resulted in 1600 hits since this blogs creation, and most of the traffic coming in the first three weeks. Wow!! Talk about adding fuel to my obsession.

I decided that I wanted to experiment with increasing my blogs traffic, and see if I could possibly make money while writing about my obsession for saving money and finding good deals. Maybe it’s in part inspirtation because I am an avid John Chow.com reader since he started his, “Part Time Blogging, Full Time Income” experiment back in September 2006. I’ve always been interested in “working from home” and I love to write, but I never had anything passionate to write about. Well, that’s changed.

Since I’ve made this decision to run my experiment I have purchased web designing, signed up for a few different affiliate networks and have started looking into various means of advertising for this site and how to make money from it. I’m going to share my progress every month and see what happens.

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