January 2011 Monthly Review & Weekend Reading – A lot of Snow Edition

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It’s been a pretty amazing week. On Tuesday morning, my nephew was born. On Tuesday night, we got 20 inches of snow. For six hours on Wednesday, I shoveled just enough to get out of my house. As of Friday morning, most of our residential roads have just enough room for one car to get through. On Sunday, I’m hosting my first Super Bowl Party. The theme is that every dish must contain giardiniera or “hot pepper relish” for those not from Chicago. Life is crazy, but good. (:

Anyways, time for me to share some stats on how Gen Y Wealth is doing and link to some great content this week.

Active Subscribers

 

The most important statistic that I track is newsletter subscribers. I ended 2010, with 495 subscribers. Five short of the goal I set for myself of 500.

At the conclusion of January I had 567. It’s getting harder and harder, but my goal is always to improve 10% over the last month.

If you’re not signed up, I would love for you to join. Subscribers get a 10-Day course on personal finance called The Financial Freedom Blueprint and access to unique newsletter only content.

Website Traffic

 

December

• Alexa Rankings: 265,562
• Absolute Visitors: 17,127
• Page Views: 84,030
• Average Time: 3:55

January

• Alexa Rankings: 307,209
• Absolute Visitors: 9,896
• Page Views: 36,931
• Average Time: 2:42

For the first time in Gen Y Wealth’s existence, I was unable to increase traffic by 10% a month over the previous month. Actually, traffic from December to January fell  around 50%.

Although these numbers seem discouraging, I’m really not to disappointed. The site’s traffic is way ahead of where it was just three months ago.

Other than Google, the top traffic sources for Gen Y Wealth for January were:

• Get Rich Slowly
• The Simple Dollar
• Reddit
• Facebook

I see January’s stats as a wakeup call, to realize the quality of content that I must produce in order to now surpass December’s stats. I’m excited as to what’s coming in February. A lot of content that you’ve never seen before, including some videos.

Weekend Reading

A lot of great links this week. All personal finance related.

• Consumer Alert: FICO Scores Dropping Authorized User Accounts
• You Don’t Have to Pay It (A look at alternatives to paying a 6% brokerage fee on real estate transactions)
• What kinds of purchases are appropriate to negotiate price in the United States?
• Cash Isn’t Your Enemy
• How Much Does Your Credit Score Matter?
• There is No Perfect Month

Blog Carnivals

• Carnival of Personal Finance at Control Your Cash
• Best of Money Carnival at PT Money

Tagged as: links, stats., weekend reading