Though I started Earth and Money with an inaugural introduction post in mid-February of 2012, March 3rd was the date of the site’s first real post – Air Miles Cash – Deal or No Deal?  That means Earth and Money has now been up and running for three full months! When I first started this blog, I wasn’t sure how it would go. Would anyone read the blog? Would I gain any followers? How much work is it really going to be? The results have surprised me in some ways, and not in others. To answer the third question, it has been a lot of work. In March and April, I put a lot into the blog and that led to some really great early success that I have been able to sustain in May. The blog hasn’t really grown much in May, but that is because I have been really limited in the amount of time I have been able to put into the blog, what with all the wedding planning!

But what’s really kept me going are the answers to the first two questions – people really do read the blog and I really do have followers. And so to all those of you who read and follow Earth and Money, I want to take this opportunity to say a HUGE THANK YOU! You are what keep this blog going, and I’m hoping that in the last three months, you have learned something new that you can use in your every day lives.

On March 23rd, I joined the Yakezie Challenge. At the time, my Alexa ranking was 21,639,161. At last check, my Alexa ranking was 298,724. That means that I’m well on my way to hitting my goal of getting down to 100,000 by my one year anniversary. Inspired by Emily over at Evolving Personal Finance, I decided to keep track of my Alexa ranking on a day-to-day basis and plot it out. My curve looks pretty similar to hers. Alexa is a really a measure of how many other bloggers are visiting the site, as most non-bloggers don’t have the Alexa toolbar installed in their browsers. So I’d like to thank all the other bloggers out there who have been supporting Earth and Money by visiting and leaving comments.
In other news, now that the site has been live for 3 months, I’ve started to gain some rankings. My Google Page Rank is 3, which I’m thrilled with given how young the blog is. My MozRank is 3.69 – I’m not as familiar with the MozRank scale, so I’m not quite sure how significant this is, but some of my other favorite blogs are in the 5-6 range, so that seems like a good value to start with. Here are some of the blog’s traffic stats for the first three months.

Statistic	March	April	May
Visits	142	600	538
Page Views	317	1182	968
Pages Per Visit	2.23	1.97	1.80
Bounce Rate	54%	57%	61%
Average Time on Site	2:08	3:10	2:35
RSS Subscribers	4	14	20
Visits From:
Referring Sites	80	271	256
Direct Traffic	59	194	234
Search Engines	3	135	48

Overall traffic is down a bit in May from April, but I am happy to see that direct traffic is up, which means I am converting some readers into followers. The reasons for traffic being down is mostly the result of me not being able to do as much commenting on other blogs because of time restrictions, resulting in lower referral traffic, and also a big drop in search engine traffic. One of my articles, Navigating the Ontario Trillium Benefit, accounted for almost 70% of all search engine traffic to Earth and Money in the first three months, but that has really dried up with the end of tax season, which accounts for the big drop from April to May.

Twitter is doing well – I’m up to 62 followers through three months. Facebook is not doing so well, as I haven’t put any effort into gaining followers. I don’t really use Facebook for blogging myself, so I’m not sure how much traffic there really is to gain from Facebook. That said, its something I want to work on in the future.

The top 5 viewed articles on Earth and Money in the first three months were (page views in parentheses):

• Navigating the Ontario Trillium Benefit (316 – thanks Google!)
• Stop Price Shopping for Groceries Now! (98)
• How NOT to Make a Financial Decision (71)
• Comparison of Foreign ATM Fees at Canadian Banks (59)
• Planning a Green Frugal Wedding – Venue (57)

The top 5 referring sites to Earth and Money are (visits in parentheses):

• Modest Money (84)
• Young and Thrifty (68)
• Canadian Money Forum (53)
• Yakezie (39)
• Canadian Finance Blog (28)

As always, a big thank you to all the blogs that have supported Earth and Money, and to all the bloggers that have been commenting on my articles! You can see the top five commenters on the left-hand sidebar.

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