Traffic to this blog has skyrocketed over the past couple days due to multiple plugs of some of my posts. First I had a post in this week’s Carnival of Personal Finance which is being hosted at The Writer’s Coin. My post “Five Radical Ways for the U.S. Government to Raise Revenue” is the very first one listed which leads to a lot of traffic. The Carnival wasn’t as large as usual this week either which probably also led to more traffic for my post. Next, my post “Five Things You Should Get for Free” was featured on the MSN Smart Spending blog which resulted in a huge surge of traffic. With both of these combined I’m likely to receive about as much traffic in two days as I usually get in a month. My site seems to be handling ok though.
I’ve also received some negative publicity and negative comments. BA posted “The limits of frugality” which is in response to my “I’m Frugal So Why Am I Poor” (part 2), (part 3)series of posts that I wrote shortly after I began this blog. I’m glad to see someone is reading my old posts and I’m pleased to expose them to new readers since I didn’t have many readers when the post was first published. BA is critical of the results of my frugal efforts in the post. For the most part I agree with him. The series was meant to be a critique of the shortcoming of frugality efforts to that point in my life and determine what I needed to change. I don’t agree with his criticism of my future. I’m not sure if he understood that it wasn’t my plan to continue with the same behavior. Also, my definition of success is not the same as most people’s definition. The get married, have 2.5 kids, and work until you’re 65 life is not one I aspire to. I plan to work for myself, have a great relationship with my wonderful GF, and live a life of semi-retirement.
I wrote that series of posts almost two years ago so it is the future now. I like to think I’ve made great progress since then. I have almost two years of expenses saved. I’ll be graduating law school in May. I’ve been dating my GF since last April and I think we will be together for a very long time. I plan to go on a five month hike after I graduate. The difference between this trip and trips in the past is that even while hiking I’ll be making almost enough to cover my expenses. The hike should cause only a small decrease in my savings if it causes a decrease at all.
The other negative thing is that I think people might be fraudulently clicking on my ads. Even with the increased traffic the number of clicks on my ads is absurdly high. I’m wondering if one of my posts has angered someone and they’re trying to cause me to lose my Google account. I’ve removed my Google ads for now and I’ll put them back when my traffic is back to normal levels. Oh well, I guess you have to take the good with the bad.t
Congrats on getting featured on MSN and carn. of PF. I did like your article about the “Five Radical Ways for the U.S. Government to Raise Revenue”.
The clicks are high because MSN users are very clicky. Congratulation. Just sit back and relax.
I really don’t understand “fraudulently clicking”. Don’t you want people to check out your sponsors and isn’t that what they want too? No disrespect I just don’t understand.
And I’m really happy for you on your new found success!
Andy, I experienced the same traffic surge from a post included on MSN Money last year. Pinyo and I had articles mentioned in the same post and our traffic surged for 2-3 days. MSN readers liked to click out on ads and not one signed up for RSS. Interesting.
Pinyo and Passive Dad- Thanks for the info. I was concerned because the click-thru rate was very high. The number of clicks was out of proportion to the increase in traffic. If that is typical of MSN traffic then I guess I have nothing to worry about. Although my clicks were by far my highest ever for a day it still wasn’t my best money-making day for Adsense. There must have been a lot of nickel clicks.
SonyaAnn- I do want people to click on the Google ads if they are generally interested in the ads. My concern was that one person or group of persons was generating all the clicks for some malicious reason. If Google thinks you are fraudulently generating clicks they will close your account and that would be a big loss of revenue for me. I hope that makes sense.
Thanks for the explanation.