Blog Milestone!

Sometime yesterday Coupons, Deals and More went over 100,000 site visitors!

Now, I know your first reaction is “No way, she clicked 52,831 times herself!” Actually, that was my first reaction too, but it says right here under blog stats: Just a note: we don’t count your own visits to your blog. So there!

This is actually even more exciting for me then just that number for a few reasons:

I set up this blog (ok, hubby set it up but I added the page links) on January 29, 2009 telling no one about the blog or that I was even considering writing a blog.

In February, I was busy adding content to the Printable Coupons Page, the Printable Rebate Page, the Organic Page, the Baby Offers Page and the Pet and Snail Mail Coupons pages. I also copied over all my content from B$ regarding Store Coupon Policies and the 2009 Coupon Insert Schedule. BTW, did anyone notice I put up the start of the 2010 Schedule a few weeks ago?

While putting up all this content and still telling no one about the blog, 15 lonely souls still made their way here. I’m betting they were spammers.

March rolled around and hubby was starting to get tough with me. He wanted me to quit moderating at Bargainshare and concentrate on the blog. Needless to say I was ambivalent. I had spent a lot of years on Bargainshare (over six) and before that more than two years on Fatwallet. Forums were all I knew. And, as I understood it, when you blog you have to show some personality!

What if I didn’t have a personality!?

Maybe ambivalent isn’t the correct word. Maybe terrified is closer to the truth?

So sometime at the very, very, VERY end of March I put my name up on a Mr Linky and low and behold! 534 people clicked to read my blog!

I consider April to really be the start of Coupons, Deals and More. April was where I finally quit B$ *sniff* and decided to concentrate on blogging. Nearly 10,000 people clicked on my blog during the month of April and I was ecstatic! I knew it was more likely to be one person clicking 10,000 times than 10,000 people clicking once, but I was still thrilled. Yes, yes I really do understand it was most likely a mix of people, some I’ve never seen again, and some came back (and still do) daily.

Moving on to May the numbers kept growing. And June built upon May’s numbers.

So here we are in July and already more people have visited Coupons, Deals and More than visited the entire month of June! YAY!

My hopes and dreams are to grow this blog even larger. I’d like to help as many people as I can to save money, like back in my days at Fatwallet and back in my early days at Bargainshare. I so appreciate all of you who come here to read, contribute, and tell your friends, neighbors and closest thousand friends about this blog via your blogroll.

With that in mind I absolutely must thank some wonderful bloggers for allowing me to post on their Mr Linky’s with absolutely no requirement that I link back to them. This non-requirement allowed me to link the same deal post on several sites rather than committing to one blog in particular. When I start the Target Mr Linky next week, I will have the same requirement; link to me if you like/can, but if you cannot it is all good too

Deal Seeking Mom has sent over 7,000 people my way via her memes and forums

Money Saving Mom has sent over 6,500 people my way via her memes

Those two blogs have far and away sent the most folks here via Mr Linky.

Others who have send thousands here over the last few months via their Mr Linky are:

Southern Savers and Surviving the Stores

Other folks that have run memes that I participated in are:

The Centsible Sawyer
Life As Mom
Being Frugal
Bargain Briana
Orgjunkie

I’d also like to thank the folks on my blogroll that have sent traffic this way, specifically Coupon Journey and Saving Sherry

Extra special thank yous go out to the following:

Couponers Wanted forum moderator Barb09 posted the link to my Printable Coupon Page in the CW coupon forum and in the wonderful Jewel Discussion forum. I’ve said it before and I will say it again: Couponerswanted has, hands down, the best Jewel Forum on the internet. If you are within shopping distance to a Jewel get thee over to CW! As a matter of fact, if you have any interaction with a SuperValu store, head over to CW. A lot of the Catalina deals are the same and Barb puts up information early.

Ginger over at Attention Target Shoppers deserves a warm thank you! Ginger is a very busy lady and yet took the time to point out some blogging etiquette, alternative affiliates and answered questions regarding blogging vs forum differences via email exchanges. She also is generous with credit and praise.

One person that has sent thousands of people this way is Cherry Picker and I cannot thank her enough. Why? Because I have no idea who she is! I’ve never had an email conversation with her, never requested to be listed on her blogroll, nothing. Talk about generosity of spirit! All the folks she has sent my way have come via her blogroll so I figure she must have a massive following. To add me to that roll… well mere words cannot express my gratitude, but I will try: Thank you so very much!

And my last extra special thank you goes out to everyone that has ever stopped on this forum. (Well, except the spammers.) Without you folks I’d just be blogging so my husband wouldn’t expect me to cook.

Now you are all sitting here wondering if this is like the Academy Award recipient that forgets to thank their spouse? It is safe to say this blog would not exist, or at least not exist in its current form, without my husband’s help and support. He’d been encouraging me to start a blog for three or four years before I finally did it. He installed wordpress, set me up on godaddy and nagg… er, encouraged me to blog in the beginning when I wasn’t very sure if this was something I really wanted to do. So, I suppose I owe him a word of thanks (either that or a swift kick in the pants for getting me into this). I love you sweetie. Thanks for always believing in me.

So what is on the horizon for Coupons, Deals and More? Well, I am apparently still a webhost hog. We’ll be moving shortly to a cluster server, basically as soon as I get my butt in gear and initiate the transfer. As I understand it a cluster server will server hop sites to distribute load so that no one server is overloaded. This prevents slowdowns (which this blog is again having) and shut-downs for being a webhost hog. *cough*

This post contains a bit of information about the blog design and name if you are interested.

More than 1,000 posts and 100,000 hits later, here we are. You won’t have to suffer through a post like this again until I have a million hits … a year or so down the road. ha! Hopefully you’ll stick around for the journey and the deals.

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