I get a mere 15-20 visitors to this website each day, and it is no wonder - I rarely update.

For now, I’m going to put this website on a little hiatus for the summer. I plan to do a lot of traveling around the country in the next couple of months and plan to start a blog detailing my adventures. (I’ll post the link later if anyone is interested). Of course, I will also be keeping my regular money-making site(s) updated. (The power of a laptop and wireless card…)

Perhaps when I return and settle down, I will actually start blogging here regularly.

However, there is always the chance that I will never settle down, and never come back. And if I don’t, just remember: it IS possible to accomplish your dreams and goals. I can offer this advice for budding web entrepreneurs/bloggers:

1. Choose your subject wisely. The more controversial, the more traffic you will probably get.
2. Don’t copy other people’s hard work. Only the most original and clever ideas get really popular, not copycats!
3. Don’t send link requests to bigger sites asking them to add you before you add them. Also, try and tailor each link request to the site you are sending it to. The more personal you are, the better chance you have of them listening.
4. Don’t spam other blogs by putting links to your site in their comment sections. This really pisses off site owners.
5. If you will be starting a blog, select a subject that you are truly interested in and have some knowledge of. Trust me, it is very tedious to write about something day in and day out that you can care less about but only selected because it is “popular”.

Someone pointed out to me the other day that I am now, in fact, a six-figure blogger. Meaning, I earn a six-figure income from my blogging.

!!!

I mean, I knew I was making some serious dough these days. I knew I just started bringing in five digits per month - last month in the teens, in fact. But it didn’t REALLY occur to me until pointed out.

It’s astonishing, if you think about it. I never, ever thought I’d earn a six-figure salary, especially not by doing something I loved. (Well, I’ve actually fantasized about it over the years, but I never truly thought I would do it). I never thought I’d earn that kind of living by sitting in front of my computer, at home in my pajamas.

Believe it or not, since realizing this, I’ve been confused and out of sorts. Am I really doing what I should be doing? Can I keep this up? What should I do next? Of course I want to continue earning this kind of money, and even go up to a higher level. That’s a given. Not to mention the fact that I still have a LOT to do before I can really “relax” in the finance department. I just got a major portion of health stuff taken care of last/this month. But there is more to come. I still have some debt to pay off. Braces. A car. Some other things as well.

Anyway, I’ve had the last few days to sit and think about what to do. I got oral surgery Friday, so I couldn’t really leave the house all weekend because my face was swollen pretty badly in two places. I have been on percocet, which tends to either knock me out, or keep me up pondering life. (Weird?) So after lots of in-depth thought, I’ve decided on the following plan to both keep up my income, and bring it up even higher:

• Get a total of 10 blogs up and running. (Which will include my “popular” site).
• Figure out a plan to get a certain amount of traffic to them.
• Figure out a way to earn income from ALL of them.
• Start an official blog network for my blogs.

Believe it or not, I already have 20-something blogs up and running, but most of them just “sit” there. I tend to ignore many of them because I focus on my “popular” site. So, my goal is to get 10 of them running and keep them updated regularly from now on.

I’ve already selected 7 of the 10 I’ll be using, and spent the weekend revamping some of the themes. I need to decide on the last 3.

My next step is to sit down and plan out a traffic and income goal for each of them. Then I need to schedule when I will begin regularly adding content to them. (And possibly hire someone to help me with adding content). And decide which ad companies I will use for each.

Hmm, it sounds like my 3-hour workdays are over.

It’s going to be a lot of work, but I’m looking forward to it. After all, I’ve gotten this far. Let’s see how much farther I can go!

I’ll keep you all posted on my next steps and how it’s all going.

For the month of April, I set a new record on both visitors and revenue. I averaged $444.86 per day in revenue, for one thing. Which is absolutely mind-boggling considering the fact that I usually only work between 2-6 hours per day.

My “popular” website got mentioned in the London Times this past Sunday, and I added several new link exchanges to my blogroll - and I’m talking other high-traffic websites that get over 20,000 visitors per day EACH. Like many of you, I get many link exchange requests each week from various other sites, but I don’t always want to add them. If their content is too generic, or their “link exchange” email sounds like a robot typed it up, or if their site is completely unrelated to celebrities, then I will not add them.

In other news, I’m getting $2000 worth of oral surgery done this Friday. It’s going to be a miserable weekend recovering, but I’m thankful that I have the money to shell out - for once.

Also, my web expenses are going up again. I will have to start paying a photo agency to use their pictures on one of my websites. More on that later.

I just keep breaking records with my “popular” website. According to my sitemeter stats, the site received over 63,000 visitors yesterday. Unfortunately, my regular web server stats, such as AWStats and Webalizer, just aren’t working correctly. I’ve complained to my web host about it several times but they can’t seem to fix it. The log files are getting too big (too many visitors?). So I’ve had to rely on Sitemeter for my stats.

I am planning on hiring a friend/tech guy I know to help me with server stuff that my web host seems not to really care about. I’m hoping this guy can help me with the occasional MySQL errors, server issues and stats problems.

In other news, I am now boycotting Myspace. My chicklitbooks account got hacked and the idiot sent multiple comments to tons of people in my friends list. I took it kind of personally that people thought it was actually ME doing it. Honestly - if a site as big as Myspace.com cannot stop accounts from being broken into and private data being posted all over the internet, why should I bother with them? Come on, they are a multi-million (billion?) dollar company. I have always been disgusted with the constant errors and poor performance of the site, but now it’s gone too far. Thankfully I’ve never needed it to get additional traffic to any of my sites.

TylerCruz.com inspired me to write this post. He is challenging himself to do a 40-hour work week - where he actually works for 40 hours in a week’s time. I know from experience how difficult this can be when you are working for yourself at home.

Now, I’m not going to do the same, because I would fail. Badly. For the first time in 10 years, I am enjoying my life not having to work in a stuffy, miserable office, and damn it, I want to continue it. But with all this freedom comes massive laziness. Yes, it’s true.

I’ve gotten a lot better with my work ethics over the past several weeks. But before then, let me tell you how I would spend a typical day:

10am - Roll out of bed
10am-12:30pm - Work on site stuff, which consists of: approving user comments, deleting spam, answering emails, doing new posts, checking stats, etc.
1pm-12am or so - hang out with boyfriend, friends, drink a LOT of alcohol, laze around playing games on the computer, etc. I lived in a building full of people who literally partied 24/7. I have since moved, which has helped my schedule enormously.
1am- Shower, than go to bed.

Unfortunately I did a bit too much drinking and wasting of time. Thankfully it didn’t affect my website much. BUT. The past few weeks, I have gotten a little better. Now, my schedule is:

2pm: Get up, coffee, breakfast (I have a terrible day-sleeping pattern I am trying, with no avail, to break. I cannot fall asleep until the sun is coming up.)
2pm-6pm: Work on site stuff
6pm-10pm: Either go out with friends for dinner, etc, or go to an AA meeting, or stay home and do more work.
10pm-4am: Waste time on the computer playing games, or reading a book.
4-5am: Work on website (do the first part of the next day’s posts)
5or6am - 2pm: Sleep

I really, really need to fix my sleeping schedule - it really screws everything up. But I cannot fall asleep before dawn these days, especially now that I rarely drink alcohol anymore.

But I do get a lot more work done nowadays, it seems. However, I still have days where I literally don’t go near the computer. The past week was kind of like that.

I just discovered that I earned more in March than I originally thought.  Try over $11,000…

The confusion came about because one of my ad networks pays me either by ad impression, or amount of clicks - whichever is greater.  I forgot to look at ad clicks because of the fact that I had over 5 million impressions, which equals $5,000.  Well… turns out that I had over 12,000 clicks last month, which actually means over $6,000 because they pay .50 cents a click.

Awesome!

So, I asked around on the Sitepoint forums how to increase my traffic, which already stands around 40,000-50,000 visitors per day.  Nobody really had an answer for me, unfortunately, except to suggest that I expand my site.  So, I’ve decided to add forums.  I ordered some vbulletin forum software and have installed it.  I just need to customize and tweak it a bit.

People are already leaving multiple comments on my blog posts (on my “big” site) so I know for a fact they will enjoy a forum.  The only problem is that I will have to moderate it heavily.  It will be a bigger time challenge than I already have.  I guess I don’t mind, though.  I’m planning to buy a laptop any day now and will take it with me wherever I go.

I am happy to say that for the first time in my life, I actually have a balance in my savings account that is bigger than my checking account.  I am saving for some upcoming oral surgery, new contact lens prescription and glasses, a car, and a laptop.  Not to mention a couch for my semi-new apartment.  (Moved in here in Feb).  I used to spend money like it was going out of style, and now that I’m making a LOT more of it, I’m actually saving.

I really need to do a better job of keeping this blog updated. Anyway, this post will mostly just be caffeine-infused rambling. I’ve been up since 5:30am in an attempt to change my sleeping patterns. Lately, I’ve been going to bed at 7am and getting up at 2pm or 3pm. So last night I filled up on Tylenol PM and forced myself to go to bed at midnight. I got only about 3 hours of sleep though. Blah. Right now, I’m dying to go back to bed, but I’m going to force myself to stay up. Maybe a workout on my stationary bike will help.

Anyway, onto my post. The final numbers are in and I made just over $9500 for the month of March. Yay! The increase in revenue was mostly caused from one particular ad network I use. I got well over 5 million ad impressions with them in March, which means… $5000 from them. On the downside, one of my higher paying ad companies has bottomed out.

My website was mentioned in a major women’s beauty magazine, bringing even more visitors which caused the server crash discussed in the last post. Funnily enough, it wasn’t the most flattering of mentions… but a mention all the same. Apparently everyone and their great grandmother reads this particular magazine because even people I knew in person started telling me “omg your site was mentioned in ____ magazine!” Plus, several people mentioned it in either the comments section of the site or via email to me.

It was the April edition of the magazine, so hopefully it will continue bringing more visitors this month.

More later… I need more coffee before I fall asleep on my keyboard.

OK, some of you will think I am extremely annoying for complaining about having a high-traffic website. Honestly, I am extremely thankful for having a popular site and love it. Even the problems. But it really is high-stress…

Let me tell you how much work it truly can be when you are managing everything on your own. Today, (Tuesday) the sh*t hit the fan in a bad way. I’ll start with a brief history of my web hosting situations:

When I first started my “popular” website, I was using Hostgator’s Baby hosting plan. Which meant at the time, something along the lines of $9.99 a month and 70GB of bandwidth a month. (I may be off a little with the estimates - it’s been a while. They have since increased their bandwidth in their plans). All was fine until my site started getting a few thousand people a day. I was using quite a bit of bandwidth and needed a new solution.

My next step was a bad one… I had a few different websites, so I decided to get a Site5 account - their deal was something like 5 accounts, 200GB of transfer, for $24.99 a month. After a couple of good months with them, things went downhill quick. My site was down way too often. Site5 ended up being a complete and utter nightmare. My site was down for - on average - a half hour a week. UNACCEPTABLE. I won’t even get into the whole nightmare story behind their hosting my site. (Search the internet - you can find many horror stories about their hosting reputation).

Anyway… I went back to Hostgator - to their Swamp plan, which was 100GB of bandwidth per month. Things were good - I had little to no problems. But then my web traffic increased yet again, and one month, I came up to like 97 GB of bandwidth. It was time to find yet another new solution. So I switched to Hostgator’s semi-dedicated plan at $75 a month.

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Ugh, I can sure be a lazy person at times. This blog hasn’t been updated since November…

Things are going pretty well in my WE world at the moment.   I got over my previous bout of laziness, buckled down, and I made a whopping… $8,100 last month in ad revenue.  I originally had thought I’d made about $7,500, but then I recalculated. One of my ad companies didn’t have automated reports and I had to wait to get the check a month later. Now, finally, they are automated. I also now keep meticulous records of what I make from each company and update it every few days. This month I will make a little less - as of this moment I’ve made just over $7,000 for the month of February.

You might be wondering how I managed to get my revenue to jump like that. Well, it took a lot of moving my various ads around. Plus, a certain popular CPC text-ad company emailed me and helped me optimize my ads, which pretty much tripled what I was making with them. Also, there is this one ad company (more like a blog network) which pays depending on ad impressions. For instance, if you get over 2,500,000 ad impressions with them in a month, you will make $2500. Well, I moved their ads around so that they now show on every single page of the site, and the impressions have skyrocketed. In fact… next month, I will likely get over 5,000,000 impressions with them, in which case I will make $5,000 from them alone.

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Sorry it took me so long to get around to doing another post!

This entry will be about the ups and downs of my life now.

People hear what I do for a living and they immediately start gushing: “Omg you are so lucky” and “You have to teach me how to do that” and “I hate you!”  I have to admit that I am content with what I do and yes, wouldn’t trade it for anything else right now.  I absolutely hated working for other people, hated always having bosses breathing over my shoulder, and hated having to get up early in the morning.

However, there are ups and downs to this business.   We already know the ups: being my own boss; no set hours so I’m free to do what I want, when I want to; freedom; I can update my site in my underwear if I so choose; not having to go to a day job and get yelled at.

My ex boyfriend knows it’s not all roses, however.  (I used to complain to him).  Here are the downsides of being a freelance Web Entrepreneur:

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