Blog Stats and Updates For The First 12 Weeks

We're Making Progress...

On Saturday May 5th my baby (I mean my blog) was officially 12 weeks old. And today I wanted to share with you how it's doing.

I am quite happy with the progress it has made and what I have accomplished with Tackling Our Debt.

I initially began this blog thinking that I would use it to track our spending habits and to work on changing our habits from spending too much to actually saving money.

Attitude

While we haven't made huge strides in saving money, or in tracking that information on this blog, I do know that my mindset has definitely changed and my attitude towards spending money has definitely changed.

I believe that making serious changes all begins with our mindset and our attitude.

For me, for example, I use to look forward to going grocery shopping each week. I would shop without a list and I would buy anything that caught my attention. I rarely worried about the price or the grand total, except for the fact that groceries are very expensive where we live and sometimes we would walk out of the store upset because only 3 bags of groceries cost us over a $100.

When I began this blog I created meal plans and grocery lists because I noticed a lot of other PF bloggers were doing that. Each week I stuck to the meal plan and grocery list. I checked the grocery store flyers for sales on items that we used most often and if there was a spectacular deal, I would buy a few extra. Otherwise I just bought what we needed for the meal plan. I was happy with that.

I Didn't Want to Spend Money!!

But last week when we went grocery shopping for breakfast and lunch items, with our grocery list in hand, I found that my mindset had changed again. I didn't want to be there. I didn't want to spend any money at all. Imagine that! I didn't want to spend money!! Just the thought of spending more money on anything upsets me.

I am not the kinda girl that goes to the mall once a week to buy new clothes or new anything, but I use to enjoy getting my hair cut and dyed for $150 a pop and getting my eyebrows dyed and waxed for $32 a pop.

Well guess what? I now dye my own hair (started last year actually), I am letting it grow longer than it's been in several years, and ladies I actually plucked my own eyebrows so that I wouldn't have to go to the mall and spend money to get them done. I almost took an eye out...ouch...but I survived.

Since I am rambling here I may as well also share that somehow we have managed to reduce our monthly utility bill by approximately $60 a month. It use to be $336 for water, gas and hydro and now it is $278.46.

Some may quickly think well that is because it is summer and you don't have your furnace on. Sorry, but it is still on. As a matter of fact it snowed here again last Saturday and I was freezing. I tend to wear bulky sweaters around the house, but sometimes I still feel very cold.

Site Statistics for the First 12 Weeks

Okay, let's move on and talk stats for a minute.

These are the stats for Tackling Our Debt for the first 3 months (which includes the first week of May).

Pages represents the number of times that a page on the site is viewed. It is the sum of all visitors and visits, and does not include bots.

Hits mean the number of times a page, image, file, etc., on the site, is viewed or downloaded.

Avergae visit duration is 4 minutes and 7 seconds.

Bounce rate is 58.40%.

Last Monday Google released new PageRank values for websites. This blog went from having a PR of 0 to a PR of 2.

The Alexa Ranking continues to drop on a daily basis. As of Saturday it was down to 127,657.

The most popular post on this blog in terms of hits is These Tiny Houses Fascinate Me. As well, individual pages may have a different PageRank than your home page. I checked this page and it has a PR of 3.

When I first wrote Tiny Houses I didn't have any idea of how popular it would become. The next most popular posts are the posts in the weekly series known as Let's Talk Money. Again I am very happy with how well those interviews have done and how well they have been received by everyone.

In my opinion a blog is only successful if it has a strong following of readers, and I would like to send my thanks out to all of the people who visit, read, and  comment on my blog. I know that without your support this blog really wouldn't be doing as well as it is.

 

Source: http://tacklingourdebt.com/2012/05/08/blog-stats-and-updates-first-12-weeks/

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