The Baltimore Sun mentioned our blog Strange New Products in their newspaper today under an article entitled, "Got time and money to spend? Click here"...

Strange New Products: For the person who has everything, there's Strange New Products. The emphasis is on the unusual, bizarre and downright wacky. Recent finds: DeepSea Water, bottled water from 3,000 feet below the ocean surface, SnoreStop anti-snore spray for pets for $15, and a fire extinguisher wine rack for 40 pounds -- that's money, not weight.

Overall, October was another good month for us. It was largely good in terms of traffic to our properties. Income-wise, it was lower than September. But this was due to the fact that the income we received in September was based on August performance, and August was a phenomenal month for us. September's performance was back to down to normal levels, and hence, October's income was lower.

But we still call October a good month, because we saw gains in traffic to many of our key properties.

Interment.net

First off, our flagship property, Interment.net, saw the busiest traffic since February of this year. Likewise, it made the most earnings ever on the Ancestry affiliate program, not counting last August, which again, was an outlier month.

Last month, I mentioned my project to redesign the index pages on Interment, trying to squeeze more performance out of AdSense. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to spend any time in October continuing this.

DoggieNews

Perhaps the biggest surprise to us among our blogs is DoggieNews.com. In October it managed to increase its visitorship by 30%. DoggieNews is our second-most popular blog behind Strange New Products, and second highest earning blog as well.

The increase in readership seems largely due to the refocused content that I mentioned in our September recap.

Biker News Online

October also produced a sharp increase in traffic to Biker News Online, a 50% increase. But it appears to be an artificial increase, in that all the traffic seemed to stem from a very popular Dutch-based motorcycle site that linked to one of our articles. Since then, referrals from that site have subsided.

I suppose we'll have to see what November brings BKO. I have plans to revamp the design of that blog, and to try to get back into using my own personal experiences with motorcycle riding, and hanging out with the clubs, to see if I can attract a more loyal following.

Family & Local Histories

The last week in October showed a surge in traffic to Family & Local Histories, doubling its daily volume of visitors. It seems largely due to improved referrals from Google, perhaps it got out of the sandbox. Interestingly, FLH is our third highest earning blog, behind DoggieNews and Strange New Products, but is one of our least visited blogs.

So I now have plans to get this redesign done and get back to blogging it regularly. FLH has some really great potential, and with this new found kindness from Google, I'm encouraged. I'll write more about FLH next month, and give you a solid grasp of what it's about.

Strange New Products

Our flagship blog increased its traffic from September, though slightly. It continues to be our highest earning blog.

Real Estate and How

Last September we refocused this blog as well, shifting the audience to the real estate professional. October didn't really see a change in traffic, nor a change in earnings.

However, I noticed more comments posted by our readers, all of it coming from other real estate professionals, as determined by the content of the comments. In that sense, we're reaching our target audience. We just need to attract more of it.

In Your Web

October was largely a ho hum month for In Your Web. The problem with IYW is that I haven't spent enough time publishing new material on a regular basis.

This is largely due to my mistake of not settling on what IYW is supposed to be about. When it first launched, it simply published articles about running a website publishing business. But then I expanded on that, going into SEO, webpage design, monetizing content, yada yada yada.

So here's the focus. IYW is about the business of running a website publishing business, on the standpoint of being an incorporated entity. It'll be all the "biz" stuff, and nothing about "better blogging".

Kelli Kammerlohr

Kelli is our resident writer. She was actually hired on a parttime basis last March doing some webpage work for us. We got her started blogging occasionally for Real Estate and How last Spring.

This October, we opened her up to Junk Food Blog, Cool Website Ideas, and Biker News Online. You'll probably see most of her blogging on Junk Food, since that subject seems to generate the most news.

She's also charged with publishing Interment's RSS feed, and publishing Interment's updates on Genealogy and How, a blog owned by our sister-network, Smoking Dogs Media.