rambling insomniac thoughts

My sleep schedule is getting out of whack again. Yesterday I worked 1:30pm to 9pm. Came home. Had a medium intensity fight with my spouse. Then made up and had some excellent make up whoopie. Then, around midnight, I got on the puter and started looking at my e-mails, my Tweet Deck, etc. Proof-read a post I have scheduled to go live at 12:01 am EST tomorrow. And then I got involved in the Blog Catalog forums, the CMF forums. Ended up reading lots and lots of older posts. And next thing I know, now it is 6am and I am faced with the equally disagreeable choices of going to bed and sleeping all day or staying up and trying to accomplish what I'd planned on for today, despite running on empty. (sighs)

Several weeks ago, I decided I'd had enough of the Entrecard "drop 300 cards every day" treadmill and cut Way way back on my dropping. My traffic went down significantly, as I knew it would. (Just btw, this in reference to my primary blog The Thin Red Line, rather than the blog you are reading just now.) But I noticed something odd when I checked my stats last night. While I have gone down from an average of 300--500 unique visitors per day to about 125--150 uniques/day, my page views are way up. Where my 300--500 uniques with all the EC junk traffic (those who remember this thread on Blog Catalog will note the large serving of crow I am eating) generally produced a very similar number of page views, yesterday's 135 unique visitors racked up more than 500 page views. This suggests to me, that while I am not getting as many visitors as before, the visitors I do get are taking the time to read more than one post and explore the site. Which suggests to me that even as my Alexa has gone back up (14x,000 at the moment), I am getting more readers who are genuinely interested in the site content.

I'm also feeling just a little bit of a need to eat still More crow for this thread in which I stated emphatically that I had a plan and expected my site to produce meaningful income within two to three years. Now that we are about to that point I've cleared a total of 10 dollars on the site last year and am earning a small amount of money from my new favorite place, CMFads. Glad I didn't quit the day job. But I do genuinely enjoy writing my book reviews and I have learned so much over the past two and a half years. It remains to be seen if I will find my way into earning a real income from my writing and blogging. But I have to say that despite having learned just how hard it is to honestly earn a buck online, that I have no regrets and would do it all again in a heartbeat. I continue to meet and make new friends on CMFads and on Twitter (which Turnip bless his heart suddenly made Really useful to me by helping to understand the right way to use TweetDeck).

If you'd like to learn about CMFads and how it stacks up against other blog advertising services, be sure to visit The Thin Red Line tomorrow.