It’s been three weeks since I started my Thripp 2010 project. I’ve posted one photo weekday from before 2010 here, one photo per weekday from 2010 on Thripp Photography 2010, and one comic per weekday on I See a Fish. I have only posted seven compositions on Composer’s Journey because of the difficulty of composing music. My plan is to only post three compositions per week, so at the end of 2010 I should have 59 compositions.

Though this was not part of my plans originally, I have released the first updates to Tweet This since September 2009. This plugin for WordPress integrates Twitter with your blog, allowing your readers to tweet your articles with a click and allowing you to automatically tweet new and scheduled posts. Version 1.7.1 has support for OAuth, a new options menu design, and many fixes. The Tweet This page gets 50% more visitors than my blog home page, has more back-links, and has a Google PageRank of 6/10 compared to the Thripp Photography home page’s rank of 5/10, so this should help me meet my revenue and traffic goals. I am planning to release three more major versions of Tweet This this year (1.8, 1.9, and 2.0).

On Sunday, August 15, I set three objectives for these 20 weeks:
1. Get 50,000 absolute unique visitors in total for the three sites (track with Google Analytics).
2. Earn $2000 in Google AdSense revenues (including other sites such as Th8.us).
3. Increase the Alexa ranking of Thripp.com to 40,000.

The first one is a cinch. Google Analytics logged 8139 absolute unique visitors on richardxthripp.thripp.com alone from Aug. 16 through Aug. 31, or 508 per day. If this keeps up, I will end 2010 with 70,000 unique visitors.

The second objective is not going well. I made $172.87 in AdSense revenues from Aug. 16 through Aug. 31, or $10.80 per day. To meet my goal of $2000, I have to make $14.49 every day. To get back on track, I have to make $16.46 per day in September, or $493.67 for the whole month. My best month for AdSense so far was March 2010, when I made $452.40. Unless people start donating, I will have a hard time reaching my goal. I added an ad unit at the top of the each page below the header, but it hasn’t increased my revenues much. I tried AdBrite for a day. I received 2000 impressions and ZERO clicks, making 12 cents. Unbelievable. They might just be cheating me, not counting any clicks. I won’t use them again. I’ve even added a donation widget to my sidebar, but no luck. Perhaps I’m not providing enough value?

The third objective also looks hopeless. My Alexa rank has only increased 5K to 65K, and my rank for the past week is way down at 73K. If you look at my one-week graph, my rank spikes to 35K on Aug. 28, and then drops like a rock. It’s around 100K these past few days. I have no idea what happened.

I must redouble my efforts these next four months if I want to succeed. It’s not enough just to produce photos, music, comics, plugins, and writing. I have to promote myself. I’m going to start commenting on other blogs, networking on Twitter and Facebook, and sending out emails. September will be better.