This is my first entry into my progress journal for my new blog, Gnarl'd. I registered the domain gnarld.com on July 18, 2011, so it's a little over two months old.

Since I didn't start this blog with the MDBP, let me backtrack and tell you the history of Gnarl'd. At first, I had the idea of a news aggregation web site, and was brainstorming web site names with "news" in the name of all different variations. My wife told me those were all too long, and I needed something short and easy for people to 1) remember and 2) spell and 3) a .com domain. We spent about a week thinking up a name, then one day she said, hey gnarld.com is available. She had just been typing in variations of words and came across the name. I slept on it, and the next day made the decision to use that name. No keywords, just a variation of a word that had no relation to anything.

Topic. Well, the news aggregation idea didn't sit well with me because as I did more research, the more I found that aggregation is treading the fine line of stealing content. I didn't want to steal anything, so I scratched that idea and just started writing about anything I thought was interesting and sharing some funny youtube videos. Needless to say, I didn't get much traffic.

That is, until I wrote a post about the Google + real name policy being illegal in the UK. The G+ real name policy was a big deal amongst users at the time, and no one had written on this angle. I got a nice surge of traffic, but my blog wasn't ready for this traffic. It was half set up, with no about page, and only a few articles. So that traffic came and went, and I continued to post on whatever I felt like writing at the time.

Then MTV had it's 30th birthday, and my wife wrote an article about it. It was a great article, but didn't generate a lot of traffic. The next day, I decided to make a Spotify playlist of the top 100 songs of 1981 in commemoration of MTV's birthday. I shared it on Google + and received good feedback, people like it!

I decided to expand on the playlist idea and created playlists for every year of the 1980's, then the 1990's as well. People liked them, and shared the posts with their friends.

I decided to use this as a marketing/brand awareness tool. I put my url in the name of each playlist, so every time someone opens the playlist, they see the name of my site!

Additionally, I targeted traffic with my Google+ profile. How? It's really easy, I wanted to target people for my Spotify tips and playlists that I was sharing. So I used the built in search function in Google+ and searched for "Spotify". Google then provided me with a complete list of people interested in Spotify. I followed all of them. A lot of them checked out my profile, and followed me back.

I think this is a great method of targeting traffic using Google+. You can use this method for anything you'd like. If you have a wedding blog, you can search to find out who's talking about getting married, or who likes Starbucks coffee. It's amazing how easy it is to target an audience with Google+. But I digress, let me get back on track with the story of this blog.

I had a small following with my Spotify posts. I was also posting other random things I found interesting, reviewed a book, some electronics, etc. Then I posted something about Google TV that apparently a lot of people were looking for.

My visitors increased instantly from 40-50 per day to 150-200 per day! What did I do? I optimized the page getting all the traffic with internal links to other pages I though they would be interested in. This lowered my bounce rate by about 12%. Also, I wrote more about Google TV.

Now I'm thinking my blog has a theme, and I've been in the process of reorganizing it to fit my new topic. My blog has changed from being my random blatherings, to being about digital entertainment. It's about smart tv, and streaming music. My blog just became this, I didn't plan it.

I'm glad I used a word with no meaning for my domain name, because it would be impossible to shift gears and entirely reinvent my blog in this way had I used a domain name like "superworldnews" or something. I like the flexibility in the way I named my blog and I'm glad I didn't go the traditional path of using keywords in the domain name. I have my own word. It's pretty much mine, and I can make it mean what I want. I can build it into a brand.

The last few days I've been getting between 400-665 visitors per day. I'm working to make my blog easier to navigate and realign the categories more to the new topic of the blog.

My goals for this coming month are to complete the category changes I want to make, add new content on a daily basis, and continue to tweak adsense in order to make more money.

Speaking of money, let me make this post note. I made about three bucks from adsense in the month of August. For September so far (today is the last day of Sep) I've made about $35 from adsense, and $10 from an affiliate. My goal for September was $30, and increase of 1, 000%, and I'm happy that I reached that goal.

I'm setting my revenue goal for October at $100. I'm using this number as I feel it's attainable, but still something I will have to work at if I am to achieve it.

That's all for this first entry into my public accountability journal. I'll be back in a month for another update. Maybe sooner if I find something worth talking about. If you made it this far down the page, thanks for reading!