If you weren’t aware, I am an accountant and income tax preparer in my ‘day-job’ and the first half of the year is always more concentrated for me .. for instance:

February – I do most of my client’s T4/T4A/T5/WCB reporting
April 30th – Deadline for personal income tax
June 15th – Deadline for Self-Employed personal income tax
June 30th – Final Deadline for Corporations with December 31 year ends.

Although you don’t have to file until 6 months after the corporate fiscal year end, most covenants by banks and lenders request to receive their financial statements within 90-120 days after the year end. Also, sometime before I can complete the T4’s and file personal tax returns, I need to actually complete company’s year ends first .. so, you can imagine how busy it can get!

Well .. this year was one of my busiest. However, for blogging purposes – I think I survived. Thankfully, I have a great team of bloggers in the Battling For Health series of blogs (which I hope to expand upon over the next couple of months) and help with my PetLvr blog this past week by Ruth .. and April 2008 was only a slight set-back.

Surprisingly, when I look back at the same period, February 2007 to May 2007 .. the traffic didn’t really slow down as much as I remember it did – although, the numbers is much less 🙂 At least I can say that after a year later.

Meanwhile …work-ethics-wise .. I’m still beat, and finding it tough to get back into the ‘blogging’ arena again. I averaged about 2.5 hour sleep per day for April, and that includes getting the odd 6 hours once every 3 days ..

I am burnt out. I still have lots of work that should have been finished April 30th. I still have lots of work planned and scheduled for post-April 30th.

A) 5300

Yes .. that is apparently true … 5300 MySQL daily backups is the limit! (in case you were curious)

I’ve used up 6.666 GIGS of Google space allotted on one of my gmail accounts that I use strictly for my daily backups. Thanks goodness that I have never really had the need to actually restore any of these backups, but it’s nice to know that if I needed it – they were here. Normally, when I do major wordpress upgrades, I keep an EXTRA copy of my MySQL database on my own Harddrive – where I know where it is and can view the file and see if it is a good backup – in addition to the gmail backups.

You can click on the image below to see that it took me approx. 5300 daily MySQL database backups to use up the 6,660 MB of space, and it prevented me from sending any new backups.

As of this day, except for the last week .. I have now deleted all of these backups and will start again.

So, What Exactly Am I Doing?

I’ve got a lot of blogs and have installed the WordPress Database Backup Plugin in each of them. I have scheduled daily automatic backups of all of my blogs to be emailed directly to one of my gmail accounts, dedicated for just the backups.

On certain of my blogs that have a MySQL database too large for emailing, it backs up the database and stores it in a backup folder on the server under the wp-content folder, and periodically I have to go in and FTP it to my local computer and delete it on the server, to free the space. For instance, the MySQL database for my PetLvr blog is about 40 MB’s and after a few weeks .. it starts to add up! It’s my largest database, but I have a lot of plugins and database tables included .. for a variety of statistics – not to mention the actual content, which is almost reaching close to 4000 posts soon.

I’ve been cautious about upgrading to the latest wordpress version 2.5 because it breaks my new template and causes some of my favorite plugins to not work. I also don’t like the interface – but, I will get used to it. In the meantime, I have converted only 3 blogs in the HART-Empire Network to wordpress 2.5 until I’m sure everything is working fine. And, in my case – finding the time to figure out some of the benefits of this new upgrade.

The New WordPress Picture Gallery

There is a new Flash Uploader now with wordpress 2.5. In the WRITE screen, there is a little icon where you can upload images, and other media. When you click it, a flash window pops up.

Click the button to browse files on your computer

The nice thing about this, is that if all your pictures are sorted in the same folder on your computer, just hold down the CTRL button and click various files to upload multiple files at once.

Now, after I uploaded all of the pictures, there seemed to be a whole lot of error messages received. I think one of them is directly related to my Pmetrics plugin and I haven’t figured out why I get the others – yet. I just know that the pictures are there. Feel free to add any description to the picture. If you notice the one shown above, I added a description – and it appears on the original site as a caption beneath the picture.

Once you have added all of your descriptions and comments – don’t forget to save all changes! This adds the description permanently and associated with the picture in wordpress.

In the Flash Uploader screen .. click the “Gallery” tab. All the picture thumbnails are there now – and all you have to do is scroll down to the bottom and click “Insert Gallery Into Post” button.

What happens, is that it inserts a one-word code into your wordpress post – (excluding the quotations and space) – looks like above .. (so when I upgrade to the 2.5 version it won’t disappear in this post). The image is from my PetLvr blog – before publishing.

“[” gallery “]”

And Voila!

See this in action over at PetLvr Blog

* I’ve been keeping track of my HART-Empire Network Earnings Online ..

Here is the link: HART-Empire Network Earnings Spreadsheet Document

The earnings are on an “Accrual” basis, where I’m documenting what I’ve earned, but monies will usually come in the following month, or (if ever) when I reach the minimum threshold for release of my earnings for payment. The expenditures are on a “Cash” basis, as I pay something related to my online earnings, I just load up the spreadsheet and modify it.

Summary of Gross Earnings 2007/2008

* January 2007 – $344.61
* February 2007 – $372.37
* March 2007 – $492.41
* April 2007 – $491.85
* May 2007 – $620.99
* June 2007 – $632.47
* July 2007 – $672.66
* August 2007 – $701.78
* September 2007 – $706.09
* October 2007 – $801.12
* November 2007 – $859.20
* December 2007 – $863.36

** Year-To-Date Gross Earnings (Jan-Dec/2007) – $7,558.91
* Average (YTD) $20.71 per day or, $629.91 per month

* January 2008 – $981.88
* February 2008 – $1,076.12
* March 2008 – $1,596.30

** Year-To-Date Gross Earnings (Jan-Mar/2008) – $3,657.47
* Average (YTD) $40.19 per day or, $1,219.16 per month

Reflection

March 2008 was a good month for me .. I think I might finally have extra cash left over in my Paypal account after paying all of the bill! Not bad – up 48% over last month!

* This is cool. If you look at the table below, I am $7.53 SHORT of how much I made two years ago for 2006 .. That’s right! I’ve grossed in 3 months this year what I had grossed in 12 months of revenues online in 2006! And, it’s also about half of what I earned for entire year of 2007! That’s pretty amazing to me. So far – my estimates for April may not be 48% growth again, but I see it being a little higher!! Revenues are growing. I just have to keep up the traffic flow as well.

* I picked up a new media sponsor, but will not be getting paid until 100 days (3-1/2 months) later. I am still looking for something/someone new to sponsor the Battling For Health blogs.

* Sitemeter traffic still shows growth in March 2008 over February 2008.

* I did note one thing though – I was prepared to let about 12 domains lapse this month and did NOT renew them when they because do. Unfortunately, my domain registrar certifies guaranteed renewals and I signed up to do that all last winter – and this month about 9 domains automatically renewed themselves.

I am pleased again that March traffic is still on the rise, overall – in the HART-Empire Network.

* I’ve been keeping track of my HART-Empire Network Earnings Online ..

Here is the link: HART-Empire Network Earnings Spreadsheet Document

The earnings are on an “Accrual” basis, where I’m documenting what I’ve earned, but monies will usually come in the following month, or (if ever) when I reach the minimum threshold for release of my earnings for payment. The expenditures are on a “Cash” basis, as I pay something related to my online earnings, I just load up the spreadsheet and modify it.

Summary of Gross Earnings 2007/2008

* January 2007 – $344.61
* February 2007 – $372.37
* March 2007 – $492.41
* April 2007 – $491.85
* May 2007 – $620.99
* June 2007 – $632.47
* July 2007 – $672.66
* August 2007 – $701.78
* September 2007 – $706.09
* October 2007 – $801.12
* November 2007 – $859.20
* December 2007 – $863.36

** Year-To-Date Gross Earnings (Jan-Dec/2007) – $7,558.91
* Average (YTD) $20.71 per day or, $629.91 per month

* January 2008 – $981.88
* February 2008 – $1,076.12

** Year-To-Date Gross Earnings (Jan-Feb/2008) – $2,058.01
* Average (YTD) $34.30 per day or, $1,029.01 per month

Reflection

February 2008 will be remembered doubly for me

* The first month I broke $1,000 gross revenues. Adsense revenues have only picked up slightly although traffic has been increasing each month.

* The first month my sitemeter overall statistics exceeded 100,000 page views traffic. 100k! WooHoo!

I am pleased again that February traffic is still on the rise, overall – in the HART-Empire Network. There are a few sites that I still am neglecting, as my busy “offline” work is starting to interfere with my time availability. My pre-posting sheets help me visually watch out for things that gets too far out of hand, however .. and – YES – I’m aware that these 100k statistics represents traffic on about 30-50 blog or however many I have currently~ So, it’s not great when you look at the individual stats. I do look at them by the way.

Analysis Of Revenues

I thought I would keep up the side-by-side comparison to see how many months it takes me to exceed 2007 year-to-date revenues 🙂

As I have been saying each and every month so far .. Where is the money?

Analysis of Expenditures

I will not be publicly analyzing my expenditures in 2008, although if you look at the public google document you will be able to see where my profits are shrinking to .. 🙂 And, in February 2008 a little had to do with me catching up and paying my EVDO (laptop PC card hi-speed internet access) 4 months at once. Me bad.

That time of year again … for what seems like a day or two (to me) seems to have somehow mysteriously stretch out to a week – or longer!

The problem with having these “stress release” moments (between jobs, while new coffee pots are brewing, while printing, while multitasking, etc) is that there is not enough time to do the actual work. I surf a little, read a little, socialize a little, and so on and so on .. and then have to get back to work. I completely forget to actually do blogging work!

So – I guess it’s time to start this use spreadsheet again!

* 1800HART.com/stuff/1800HART_preposting_blogging_schedule-WITH_NAMES.xls

By the way – that’s a free excel template from 1800HART.com/blog/ for the taking, if you want it – help yourself. Just delete my own blogs and add your own. Just add to the first date, and the rest increments to the next day. It’s just a simple template.

I have finally signed up to Pubmatic.com .. at least for the beta period .. to test.

I have currently selected only 1 blog to test because I think it is a lot of work to switch the code all around. The blog that I have selected … is 1-8-0-0-H-A-R-T .. and I have only setup my Google Adsense account with Pubmatic. The theory, is that *before* .. I only made $15.34 in adsense in the month of January 2008 on this blog .. and hopefully *after* the test period is over .. it will be – more.

The problem with testing things is, that things need to be tested and worked out. There will probably be a lot of crappy looking ads on 1800HART blog for a while, as Pubmatic is in learning mode .. and it is trying new things automatically. I mean – that’s its job, right? To try things and test things out to maximize the monetization.

Well .. at least I believe that’s what it is supposed to be. So, for now – I will just let it sit on auto-pilot.

Yes.. I remember this post:
Mar/2007 – I have no intention of twittering thank-you very much!

Okay. It’s Feb/2008 and I have resurrected my twitter account “PetLvr” and trying it seriously for at least the month of February 2008. I am using an application called Twhril v0.6 which required me to also install Adobe “AIR” (which I hear can be a memory hog)… but, so far so good.

So – if you feel like watching me virtually “pee” or “eating” or “posting ridiculous stuff” on twitter – feel free to follow me along 🙂 I’ll probably include new posts from around our network as well 🙂

Apparently .. betweem 3:45pm CST and 4:26pm CST our sites were offline today, because we apparently reached 150% of our CPU usage. I wouldn’t have noticed, if it hadn’t been for my alerts from Montastic.com – the free internet monitoring service.

I just set up a whole bunch of alerts and have them email them to my Gmail account when my sites are down. I contacted my host provider – determined what the cause was – and reboot was up shortly.

I highly recommend you try that service out!

Now comes the future questions for the HART-Empire Network … It looks like I will have to be upgrading our RAM on the dedicated server from 2GIG up to 4GIG … but then the question becomes – What next?

* I’ve been keeping track of my HART-Empire Network Earnings Online ..

Here is the link: HART-Empire Network Earnings Spreadsheet Document

The earnings are on an “Accrual” basis, where I’m documenting what I’ve earned, but monies will usually come in the following month, or (if ever) when I reach the minimum threshold for release of my earnings for payment. The expenditures are on a “Cash” basis, as I pay something related to my online earnings, I just load up the spreadsheet and modify it.

Summary of Gross Earnings 2007/2008

* January 2007 – $344.61
* February 2007 – $372.37
* March 2007 – $492.41
* April 2007 – $491.85
* May 2007 – $620.99
* June 2007 – $632.47
* July 2007 – $672.66
* August 2007 – $701.78
* September 2007 – $706.09
* October 2007 – $801.12
* November 2007 – $859.20
* December 2007 – $863.36

** Year-To-Date Gross Earnings (Jan-Dec/2007) – $7,558.91
* Average (YTD) $20.71 per day or, $629.91 per month

* January 2008 – $981.88

** Year-To-Date Gross Earnings (Jan-Jan/2008) – $981.88
* Average (YTD) $31.67 per day or, $981.88 per month

Reflection

A good start for 2008 .. 981.88/863.36=118.52/863.36 = 13.7% increase over December revenues. I thought I would break $1,000 in January but “oh well”. I have found out that my adsense earnings are finally kicking in .. and I really haven’t been promoting the new template except on the “Battling For Health” series of blogs.

I think there is great potential for increase once the template is finally distributed to more sites over the next few months .. starting with the “And You Will” series of blogs.

Analysis Of Revenues

I thought I would keep up the side-by-side comparison to see how many months it takes me to exceed 2007 year-to-date revenues 🙂

As I have been saying each and every month so far .. Where is the money?

Analysis of Expenditures

I will not be publicly analyzing my expenditures in 2008, although if you look at the public google document you will be able to see where my profits are shrinking to .. 🙂