My goal until April 15th is to fully fund my 2009 Roth IRA. I’ve stoppped contributing to my employer plan and will be socking away as much as possible until I hit the $5,000 mark. It was going to be close because I happen to get paid of the 15th of April this year and didn’t want to leave it until the last minute, but the $800 in tax refunds I’ll be getting should put me over the top and help me reach the Roth IRA limit.

Blog Traffic

Another month of unsustainable growth has gone by an increase in traffic of 111% and the statistics continue to surprise me. I’m sure some of the progress is due to the Alexa Challenge, and as that page makes its rounds on other blogs, I hope many of the readers stay.

Samurai Alexa Ranking Challenge

It’s been awesome getting to know everyone and being part of an awesome community, and the results have been fantastic. Everyone is moving up, and in the past month, my rank rose from 441,611 to 142,090! How great is that?? I’m definitely starting to slow down, but I’ve reached the front page of the Wisebread rankings and now I’ll start to enjoy many of the other benefits of being a member of the Yakezie.

Favorites

Personal Finance 101

Pay Down Variable HELOC or Fixed Mortgage?

What the Credit Card Act Means for You

The True Cost of Coffee

The Best Deal I Ever Got

Guest Posts

FiscalGeek - Why I Don’t Use Zero Based Budgeting

When I started blogging in September, I knew it was a long-term project. I didn’t think I would make a huge amount of money, nor did I realize how much work it would be to maintain a blog and post 5-6 times a week for many months. So far, I’ve learned a lot of lessons from blogging, and this one shares a strong connection with personal finance, so I’d like to share it with you all.

Nothing Comes Easy and It Takes Time

When I started, I didn’t think at all about making money. I don’t have ads on the site, I don’t do sponsored posts, and I don’t get free stuff in return for positive reviews. Recently I found a few easy ways to make a small amount of money without loading the site with ads. If you tell most people that they have to work for 6 months for free and after that they’ll start getting paid a few cents per hour, they won’t dream about taking the job.

If any moneymaking idea was easy and took little effort or time, there would be a lot of very wealthy college students. But anything rewarding requires a lot of serious effort, and more people are turned off by that. If you’re able to set a goal and keep working until you reach it, the results will come. The results always come if you work hard enough.

Sometimes it takes a long time to be promoted, to make money off of a business venture, or to learn new skills. Still, the time and effort is worth it, whether you’re rewarded in skills that help get a new job in a field you’re really interested, a promotion to a position you deserve, or your first positive cash flow month for your business.

It takes a lot of time and effort to achieve your goals, but the effort if often rewarded. Put your mind and heart toward your goal, know that there are few easy paydays in life, and keep that original excitement and passion going hard until you reach it.

I hope all of you read Financial Samurai’s post yesterday. I figured since the point of this challenge is to encourage each other and to grow as a group, not just individually, we should be spreading the love around more. I think that if we make the Alexa Rankings Challenge page a traveling page that can switch hands every two weeks and give lots of people a chance to host, we would be better off as a group. I’ve gotten a nice bump because of it and you will too! And who knows, maybe 6 months won’t be enough and we’ll want to continue the effort!

The time commitment is actually very small, especially because I spent several hours this week automating (almost) the entire process. Now, the rankings update automatically in the spreadsheet, and the work required is minimal (less than 30 seconds a day!) The big reason to automate is so that we can get daily updates, which aren’t delayed!

Once you are done hosting, your responsibilities don’t end there. After your week, you should take down the rankings but leave the page up with a link to the following week’s page.

Thanks everyone for your wonderful ideas and critiques. I love the feedback and I think we’ve made some nice improvements over the past week. I’ll keep it here for the next week until we see that everything is working smoothly and then we’ll start getting this page on a bunch of other blogs!

Also, congratulations to Planting Dollars on landing in the top 100 on Wisebread’s list! You’re motivation to the rest of us to keep going. Fiscal Fizzle, Monevator, MBA Briefs, and I are right behind!

If you’d like to host, shoot me an email: DanielPacker@SweatingtheBigStuff.com and I’ll explain the process in a little more detail. Thanks!

I have been giving updates on my budgeting each month, but as my spending becomes more regular and I have less fluctuation to report, it becomes less interesting, so I am going to change the focus to my net worth, which is a long term goal as I reach for decreasing my debt, increasing my savings, and reaching 0.

January was a great month for both my net worth and for the blog. Let’s start with my financial progress. My bank accounts got a nice boost because I received the second half of my signing bonus at work and completed my orientation period. That comes with a small salary increase which I’ll see in future paychecks. It’s always nice to get a raise and receive recognition for doing a good job.

Net Worth

I was able to increase my net worth by $1,510, up to -$15,975. This includes fully funding my emergency fund, starting my IRA, and paying down student loans. This brings my student loan debt down to $22,587, with the average interest rate being a low 2.79%. Since I’m paying just the minimums due to the low interest rates, this won’t be decreasing quickly, but my other accounts will definitely show sizeable increases moving forward.

Blog Traffic

In terms of the blog, traffic increased 158% over December numbers. The great increase in visitors was likely due to several guest posts, which explains the increase in subscribers as well as return visitors. While these increases are beyond what I would ever have expected, I don’t think the trend will continue. However, I would like to continue growing at a 20% rate, which is definitely possible if I continue to guest post and get my name out there.

Samurai Alexa Ranking Challenge

Personally, I have been doing very well in the Samurai Alexa Ranking Challenge. When we started 12 days ago, I was at 682,918, which was my average ranking over the previous 3 months. Obviously, as I grow, my ranking increases, so even then, my 1 month ranking was just 371,965. Currently, my 1 month rank is 213,551, and my 3-month rank is 441,611. As long as I keep my 1-month number below my 3-month rank, I will continue to build toward my goal of breaching the 200,000 mark.

Favorites

Here are my favorite articles from January, as well as my list of guest posts that went up, in order of referral traffic generated from each post.

Mailbag: 5 Steps to Get Out of Debt

How to Avoid Paying $900/Month For Your iPhone

How to Use a Windfall

Impressing Your Friends Can Cost You

Maybe Phone Insurance Would Have Been Worth It  (Lauren’s Guest Post)

Guest Posts

Money Relationship – Why I Don’t Stress About My $23,000 Pile of Debt (Jan 14)

Budgets Are Sexy – Who Cares If You Saved Money By Spending Money? (Jan 14)

PT Money – Simple Negotiation Boosts Your Mood and Your Wallet (Jan 13)

You Have More Than You Think – The Pinnacle of Frugality (Jan 13)

PT Money – How I Saved $27.95 on My Taxes (Jan 29)

Today marks the one week anniversary of the Samurai Alexa Rankings Challenge.

For those who aren’t familiar, Financial Samurai wrote a post last week encouraging bloggers to improve their Alexa ranking, propelling them to reach the top 200,000 ranked websites in the world. He called this group the Yakezie (pronounced yah-kay-zee).

He laid out several ways of doing this, including installing the Alexa toolbar, but the most important thing to come out of the post, in my opinion, was that we would create a small community of bloggers to encourage, help, and motivate each other to continue growing and moving up the list of top websites.

The Samurai Alexi Ranking Challenge Page

Today, I am publishing the Samurai Alexa Ranking Challenge page on the site that will track the progress of the Yakezie group each week. My hope is that the constant reminder will add motivation and help retain the intensity that we all have now.

The page shows the Alexa rank of all participants at the beginning of the challenge, last week, and this week. Also, we see our current rank within the group as well as last week’s rank. Finally, the site with the largest week over week gain will be highlighted.

Congratulations to Engineer Your Finances for this week’s top mover!

Come over to the Samurai Alexa Ranking Challenge page to keep track of everyone’s movement and for some weekly encouragement. But here’s a peek at what to expect. Come back next week to see how we’re doing!