It’s been over a year since I joined the Yakezie challenge. I’ve done 53 Sunday Evening Posts, the goal of which is to help me keep track of my spending and my main goals for the year. But the high level look give short shrift to my goals as they specifically relate to this blog.

What are my goals for this blog?

Maintain a consistent blogging schedule of content posts on Tuesday and Thursday, What I’mReading on Saturday, and a Sunday Evening Post. For the most part, I’ve done pretty good. I’ve missed on Saturday, posted a couple Sunday Evening Posts on Monday morning, and gotten posts up every Tuesday and Thursday, though their level of content has been waning in the last few months.

Grow relationships with other bloggers by reading and commenting on their posts, and hopefully have them read and comment on mine. I will say that there are a couple other bloggers who I think of as friends, even though I’ve never met them, and many other I think of as friendly acquaintances, kind of like coworkers I really like but don’t socialize with outside of work. It is because of these relationships that I am going to FinCon12 in just over a month. I cannot wait to meet people in person.

Grow the readership of this blog through the consistent schedule and relationships. I’ve been hovering around 15-30 views of the blog a day for quite some time. I think I’ve done well with the consistency and relationships, but I’m stagnating. I need to do more. I’ve started to do a little more by trying to do some cross posting between this and my pet blog, and participating in events in the pet blogging world. I also participated in Women’s Money Week. At the same time, I haven’t done much else. There are carnivals that I could submit to that I haven’t submitted to. There are forums I could be posting on that I don’t post on. If I want to start growing again, I need to be more active.

Become a full member of the Yakezie Network through a combination of forming relationships and growing the readership. It’s August. A new membership application for Yakezie should be out soon. This time round, I think I have the required relationships (though I haven’t sat down for a count yet), but my Alexa rating is no longer under 200,000. In fact, it’s going in the wrong direction. I was under 200k before, but a couple of nights ago, I was at 227k and last night I was at 240k. If I want to become a member of Yakezie, I need to turn this around. Again, that will come from increasing my participation in the blogging world.

Make money from the blog via advertising. I am not looking to replace my income. I enjoy blogging, but I am no where near as dedicated to this as Andrea at So Over This, Crystal at Budgeting in the Fun Stuff, or even Jana at Daily Money Shot. I like my regular job. It more than pays the bills. I blog because I like writing, I like talking about money (and pets, and random bits of science, and even about writing itself). But I would still like the blog to pay for itself, maybe make enough that I could feel confident doing a giveaway or something like that. Right now, I only have Google AdSense on the side bar. I want to look into Amazon’s affiliate program, and I wouldn’t mind working with specific sponsors (though that’s more likely on the pet side of things). For now, I don’t want to place ads in my posts, but I wouldn’t mind having a bit more sidebar or header/footer space go toward advertising.

 

In addition to The Dog Ate My Wallet, I have Life by Pets and 100 Words On, which I’ve remained pretty consistent with. 100 Words On is now 6 days a week instead of 7 (no Sunday posts) and for now remains ad free.

I’ve stopped running my micro-fiction contest. I love micro-fiction, but it wasn’t gaining traction, and with such a small readership, it was one of the things that was easiest to throw by the wayside when I started feeling like I had too much to do. I don’t want to give up on micro-fiction on the web, but Fiction in 50 is defunct for now.

I also started The Prose Passage– meant to be a blog dedicated to the art of writing- whether it’s fiction or non-fiction, blogs, novels, or even poetry. I thought I’d be able to do a once a week schedule with that, but no, it’s also been quite neglected. I think, though, that The Prose Passage will stay, and that I’ll bring some micro-fiction to it. But I doubt I’ll do much work on it any time soon.

Because of these changes, I also need to update my home page, which hasn’t happened in a while, and probably still won’t happen for a few more weeks, but it’s something I’m thinking about.

 

So what’s my plan? To try and write better content than I have been recently, submit to some carnivals, and reengage with the blogging world over the next month or so. I don’t necessarily need to read more blogs (though I like finding new blogs), but I do need to more fully engage with the blogs I’m already following.

I want to work harder at cross posting between Life by Pets and The Dog Ate My Wallet– since for those of us who have pets, they certainly play a major role in our finances, and finances can often play a major role in the decisions we make for our pets.

I am also uncertain what I think about the current lay out for The Dog Ate My Wallet, and you may see that change again. I am even considering paying for a WordPress theme or maybe even hiring one of my blogging friends to help me get the look I’m really looking for. But that’s kind of low priority.

I also want to get myself some snazzy business cards for FinCon- which is really has nothing to do with actually blogging, but I love me snazzy business cards.

 

And that’s where we are, the state of blogging for The Dog Ate My Wallet and me in general. I do want to thank my blogging friends and readers who have been hanging in there with me, even as I’ve been kind of phoning it in the last month or two. I plan on making it better. I plan on being a better blogger and blogging friend. And you can hold me to that.