It's once again time for my goal project update. August was a bona fide ball tearer for swollenpickles.com in terms of both revenue and traffic. I also edged closer to achieving a couple of my other goals.

1. Develop Swollen Pickles into a website that can generate $200 per month.

For the first time is Swollen Pickles history, this site has generated more than the target of $200 for the month. In August, swollenpickles.com raked in $203.04USD, up from the $80.28USD in July.

The breakdown by revenue source was:
Adsense: $26.91
AuctionAds: $0
PayPerPost: $28
Text-Link-Ads: $8.13
PayU2Blog: $140

As you can see, PayU2Blog came through big time this month, without it, things would have just been average. This site had one of its biggest Adsense months which was a positive. AuctionAds performed less than impressively in August, and Text-Link-Ads still hasn't really taken off. The post level link on the highly visited "Paris Hilton camel toe" page continues to go unsold.

This month I found that I have over $300 in PayPerPost referrals that aren't converting due to people signing up and then not following through with a post. If all the people that joined via my affiliate link decided to post tomorrow, I'd be on clover!

I joined up with Commission Junction in August, but am yet to see any results.

2. Develop Swollen Pickles to the point where it receives 15,000 unique visits per month.

8,781 kind unique visitors stopped by swollenpickles.com in August. This was up on the 5,620 in July. Whilst this is a big improvement, it is still well under the target.

3. Develop digitalburn.org into a website that can generate $30 per month.

Digital Burn, my electronic music blog had a good month in terms of both Adsense ($18.95) and AuctionAds ($14.39). Total revenue from DigitalBurn.org in August was $36.42, the first time in its history that it has passed its target (and up from the $12.68 it made last month). The site has recently been accepted into the Text-Link-Ads system, and it will be interesting to see how it goes, particularly as a lot of the content could be considered "niche".

4. Develop digitalburn.org to the point where it receives 7,500 unique visits per month.

This site is really struggling to achieve its traffic goals, with 1,488 unique visitors in August compared to the 1,637 unique visits in July. I need to set aside some time to work on a traffic building strategy.

5. Achieve my goal weight of 80kgs, which would give me a BMI within the “normal” range.

Low fat snacks are the order of the day.

6. Buy an Xbox 360 (yes I know, counterproductive to no.5, but I need one!).

Unchanged, I have highlighted the release of Halo 3 as my trigger point for buying the 360.

7. Write and record three new songs including lyrics and vocals.

I did not plug the electric guitar in once during August, and played around with Reason 3.0 sparingly. The acoustic got a workout, but nothing came of it. I simply haven't been able to find the time for this one.

In summary, August was the best month monetarily in the history of both key blogs. I'm nervous though the swollenpickles.com relied heavily on one revenue source to achieve its target, but hopefully traffic continues to build and the other streams kick in to contribute a little more.

If you want an overview of all the monetization programs I have tried to date, check out the money page, aka. the lazy guys guide to making money online.