I’m a bit late with this update for the third week of the about the Turn $100 into $2000 Challenge in 60 days.

I want to point out here that this is not the same challenge as the Quick Start Challenge . It seems from questions I have been getting some people are confusing the two.

If you have been following along you will know that I have been trying to do this Challenge while I was on a 4 week break in Spain and the end of the 3rd week coincided with us returning home.

We were out virtually all day on the Thursday, taking advantage of the glorious sunny weather, and there was a lot to do the day before we left as we don’t have the luxury of anyone to clean the place after we leave so I didn’t get time to write this post.

I did manage  a post this week about the sad demise of Google Reader as I wanted to try to post more than once a week to see if it helps with traffic.

I am back home now so I can really get stuck into this although there was a huge pile of mail to sort through and I have already been booked for day’s baby sitting for two of our grandchildren on Tuesdday.

Well, enough about all that let’s get on with the results.

Forum Posting & Blog Commenting

Although we were out quite a lot over Easter I just managed to put in my 60 minutes a day adding my helpful ( hopefully) comments to the threads on the Warrior forum and Website Babble as well as doing blog commenting although I am having trouble finding blogs that get a both a lot of traffic and comments and I can be one of the first to comment.

I am following some of my favorite blogs in Google Reader  and get my Google alerts directed to it but I often miss out because of the time difference between here and the USA. When they are posting I am asleep.

Others on the Challenge have seen their traffic drop over Easter but mine fortunately hasn’t. It’s been fairly consistent since I started this challenge although I had high hopes of it increasing.

I spent some time on the Digital Point Forum but your comments have to get 3 “likes” before you can have a signature and that can take some time.  Some members on there are complaining that they have been posting a lot of comments without getting any likes.

You also have to have 3 likes before you can like anyone elses post. I suppose they have imposed this so people don’t just spam the site with worthless comments just to get the required number of posts before your signature displays as they do on some other forums.

I’m not sure yet if it’s going to be worth my while but I will try for a bit a longer.

Traffic results

I continue to get traffic from the Warrior Forum & Website Babble. I noticed that I got some visits from Plurk which may have come as a result of the Fiverr Social Bookmarking Gig I bought the second week or a backlinks WSO I bought.

These came out of the $100 as I did not have to spend it on a domain or autoresponder service. So far I have spent just $24.

These are the figures from my Google Analytics for this past week.

4.69% Search Traffic Visits
62.50% Referral Traffic
32.03% Direct Traffic

If you don’t already know:

Referral traffic  is Google’s method of reporting visits that came to your site from sources outside of its search engine.  It can come from visitors that click a link on another site and land on your site. Referral traffic can indicate  social media marketing success

Direct Traffic is a term Google uses to describe traffic that they simply cannot accurately measure the source of.  It could come from someone typing your URL into the browser’s address bar, clicking on a bookmark, or  clicking on a link in an email.

Search Traffic  is of course search engine traffic that comes from visitors clicking on links on a search results page for any search engine.

The end result for this traffic is that I only got one sign up to my list and I did not make any sales from this blog yet. 🙁

Is Blogging Dead?

I was on a webinar the other evening and the presenter happended to say that 81% of bloggers did not ever make more than $100 with their blogs. I wonder how many of the millions of blogs there are online that actually try to make money from them?

I do make money from my detox blog but I have have been blogging on that for a few years. I don’t remember now how long it took before I made my first commission from it.

According to some free reports I got from Ryan Deiss promoting his Authority ROI course, blogging as we know it is dead and he suggests that we have to approach it a different way. It will be interesting to see if his ideas will catch on. His Authority ROI course has just reopened for 72 hours so grab it while you can here .

I have 5 weeks left to before the  end of this challenge so I am still hopeful that things will turn around for me soon.

Some of the others on this Challenge have already made some commissions which is encouraging.

Do you blog to make money? Have you made any money blogging.  I and my readers would love to know so please share your experiences with my readers in the comments.