Somehow, I forgot to post December traffic. Here is an update with both December and January traffic counts.

December 2006

January 2007

My website www.mikesmind.com is the only site out of the three that doesn’t have AdSense ads running on it. Based on traffic count, I should get busy adding them to the site!

One way to ease in to working from home is to leverage existing skills. This can be done by consulting on a contract basis. The internet makes it possible to work from almost anywhere. Because of this, there is a boom in contractors and consultants.

My areas of expertise are Project Management, Information Technology, Meeting Facilitation, Training, and Retail. I expect that I could leverage any or all of these into consulting engagements.

If you are just starting out, it helps to have a third party handle the payment details. RentACoder is a well-respected and established marketplace to connect buyers who need professional software develop to people with the skills to do it. Elance is a membership site that allows contractors and consultants to sell their services to interested buyers.

All that is needed is to “hit the pavement” and line up that first contract. This is a great option to continue doing what you’ve been doing and be able to work from home, at least part of the time.

Here’s my monthly update on traffic. Free to Farm continues to decline in traffic. Mike’s Mind and Daddy Work @ Home are picking up again. Regular posting is important. I need to keep up on that. I have plenty of ideas for writing, but need to plan time to do it.

On a related note, Jonathan Leger has an interesting series called “A case study on the traffic-building power of article writing.” I’m going to give this a try for my websites. Time is the main issue.

November has been busy! I will be trying to get back to posting regularly. In the mean time, here are my page views for October.

Obviously, my lack of posting has hurt my website traffic. This is an important lesson!

One thing that I really like to do is write. It seems natural then for me to work out a way to make some money from my writing. I was inspired by an article I read about a blog called Dooce. You can browse over and read about it for yourself. The part that inspired me is that this family makes their living from their blog because of the traffic they generate for their advertisers.

I already had a blog, www.mikesmind.com. I had also started another blog, www.freetofarm.org. Finally, I have started this blog, www.daddyworkathome.com. These three blogs are the basis for my AdSense income. My efforts started by reading a great ebook called The Blogging Cash Machine by Danny Warner. Then I purchased AdSense Videos by Michael Cheney. Both of these resources helped me get started.

While I haven’t made any money on AdSense, yet, I believe that I am off to a good start. My basic blogging platform is WordPress. I chose WordPress because I became familiar with it through my blog, www.mikesmind.com. It is also a great platform because of all the themes and plugins that are available for it. The final benefit is that it is free software. This means that you can use it for free, you get the source code for free, and you are free to modify it to suit your needs (within the terms of the license agreement). They will even host your blog for free!

I have been writing content for my blogs. My goal is to become consistent in my posting. The next step is to build traffic to all three sites. I have been reading on the email lists of Jonathan Leger, Dr. Andy Williams, and John Reese, trying to learn as much as I can. Right now, traffic is mostly a trickle. Here are my stats (page views) for last month, September 2006:

www.mikesmind.com 2,583 pages

www.freetofarm.org 595 pages

www.daddyworkathome.com 3,767 pages

I am publishing these stats in order to establish a baseline before starting serious work in building traffic. As a reader of my blog, you will see my progress too and I will share what worked for me.