This month has been all work & no p(l)ay. I redesigned my two major blogs, had a lot of work to get done in the offline world, but still managed to update this blog almost every day. It’s been a very successful month for me. Monetary wise this month has been a draught, even though I did make 100$. The funny part is that I won that amount at a contest over at psdfan, and that those 100$ are at the wonderful envato sites. So it’s actually no real cash, it’s a gift for useful stuff.

At my personal blog I ended up deleting all the old and useless content, redesigning it from scratch and writing a few articles. (No mentioning of the url here as I want to keep the projects apart.) It’s been well worth the effort, even though I fucked with the search engine traffic as I deleted a few targeted articles that generated hits. Not that I would have made a lot money out of those, so I have no bad feelings. I love the design and enjoy updating it again, which has more value than a slowly dieing site that has no fresh content. Uncluttering old things is a great experience, it refreshes energies. Everyone should do it every once in a while.

Smashill received a face-lift as well. All green and grassy It’s been quite a lot work re-designing both sites, but it’s been fun and I like the new looks. The new smashill look is inspired by the thought of growing creative capital like grass grows in the spring.

Project Stats & Earnings

Istock
4 files up and running, I uploaded one file, still I have the goal of 10 files… but I decided to add more value to this sites and added loads of freebie textures. Those textures add more value to this site and will probably give me more value than those stock photos.
Zazzle
As with istock, I just added 1 items to my Zazzle Gallery, this month I did not sell anything, but who cares… I didn’t put much effort into it, but it’s important for me to do this within the next months.

mygall.de
I can leave the sentence I wrote from the last month here: Nothing uploaded or sold this month. Totally neglected this one, nothing new and nothing sold. This is actually one of the places that I will probably leave, as I don’t like it. It feels amateurish and I don’t like to attribute my works with that tag.

flickr
Repeating last month’s words: Wonder if I will use that service more often in the future. It sure looks like a great community, but I have not been taking part in it too much.

twitter
Twitter is a great tool, generates some traffic towards this site, but moreover the conversations I had over the last weeks were well worth the time and distraction twitter creates. As long as it does not kill my work-flow I will keep it.

Site Stats

Since February 11. 64 Posts and 44 comments were written, I’ve hit the publish button more than enough and slowed down a bit at the end of the month. Taking part in the 31 day challenge and writing posts that I would read myself helped to get more comments & repeating visitors.
Traffic wise it’s been a great ride, as there came more than 700 visitors ending up on over 900 visits! The traffic has been increasing, the referrals going up and the bounce rate going down. Nothing spectacular compared to some big players, but exactly how it should look like.

Sandbox has not kicked in, yet. Even if it would do I probably would no even notice as search does not deliver many visits so far. The few that come by are well targeted and hopefully the content I produce within the next months will attract more & more visitors. Let’s have a look at the analytics stats.

Big ticket items

It’s been a great month, which is a pretty fluffy piece of information. Let’s reveal some details:

1. The most popular content post has been how creatives benefit from twitter followed by 33 ways to creative capital. The texture posts generated some good overall traffic, but it hasn’t been necessary to write content for them as the textures spoke for themselves.

2. Top referral has been lost and taken where my textures have been featured in a weekly roundup.

3. re-branding my old blog - done

4. redesigning smashill - done

5. working on my art site - 70% done, should be finished around the middle of the month

6. marketing this blog - did this through comments, free textures & the 31 day challenge

7. Smashill hit pagerank level 2, which is decent for a 2 month old blog.

8. Most important thing to learn this month: 1 link from a related site drives more traffic than 10 comments.

Outlook for May

My bouncerate went down, which is probably due to some great articles and the amount of textures I have been adding. As I am slowly getting regluar visitors and know which content is working, and which isn’t the time to making adjustments has come. Cracking 1000 visits and what’s far more important, I finally want to get more subscribers!
Old goals I have not accomplished so far are 10 files being approved at istock, where I lack 6. Another one are the 5-10 designs at Zazzle. Create more more more more more more. That’s what I am going to do.