Julie from Above the Norm jinxed me yet again. First off she said I’d hit 1,000 Twitter followers when I reached 500. Next thing I know I did!

But when I wrote how I had no Follow Fridays last week, she said this Friday she might have to get involved in all that FF business.

I do believe Julie is a jinx for me –in a great way.

She did do some FF shout outs and threw a couple my way –which I think is what broke the zilch spell for me. I ended up with 25, not counting a few that were RT FFs in nature.

Julie, thank you. I know you didn’t mean to be a jinx, but I’m serious. I really believe you are!

Well, I knew it was coming. I had myself psyched up for it. But it still sucked when I was snapped back to reality.

Last Friday I had no Follow Fridays (a.k.a. #FFs) on Twitter. Zip, zero, zilch.

I did have someone RT one of my FF shout outs, and I had a few people thank me for including them on mine FFs, but I didn’t make anyone’s FF shout out list this week.

Bummer.

But, like I said, I did know it was coming.

It sure was fun while it lasted. And it just might happen again someday. Something to look forward/aspire to.

Last week I was all excited because I had 15 Follow Friday (#FF) shout outs on Twitter. When all was said and done it actually turned out to be more like 17.

I thought that was totally impressive and it blew me away, but this week’s #FFs annihilated last week’s number. It set a new record. One I’m not sure will be touched for quite a while.

33!

SHAZAM! (And that wasn’t including the few people who for whatever reason #FF’d me more than once, or RT’d other #FFs that had @HauntJaunts in them.)

What happened to make it spike so much? Do I even know? As a matter of fact, I do.

I was well on my way to at least getting close to last week’s number on my own. I had 12 #FFs when I checked early on in the a.m. But when I checked back later around noon…whoa. I saw a slew more. And my followers number had leapt up too!

All because Autumnforest had shared her contact with me at Ghost Adventures. (I used to actually have a contact there, but I didn’t follow up with them and ended up losing him. It was actually serendipitous Autumnforest was as generous and selfless as she was to share her contact like she did, and I’ll be forever grateful to her for doing it.)

Anyway, the GA contact sends out advanced info for bloggers to blog about. Then, if you send him your link, he’ll Tweet it.

With something like 14,000 followers following GA on Twitter, that’s pretty decent exposure.

Autumn had suggested I make it something snappy. Something to make people want to click. Because when she does it, she sees a HUGE spike in her numbers.

Well, easy for her to say “clever.” She’s insanely clever. (She did a funny one about a song, “Sunglasses at Night” and how it should be Zak’s theme song. It was really good.)

So…I did the best I could and came up with a short quiz about what does Ghost Adventures and Princess Bride have in common to tout the extended version of the Poveglia Island episode that was on last night. Then I gave clues in the form of quotes and a picture.

Ghost Adventures did Tweet it, and my bit.ly stats for that link also set a not-likely-to-be-topped-anytime-soon record: 536! (I average about 6-10 clicks per bit.ly link. In the teens is good. Above 20 is great. Once I hit 50 something and that was the record holder.)

So that’s how I know it was the GA tweet that helped me so much. (That and a lot of my new followers have GA twibbons on their avatars.)

But it also didn’t hurt that A&E (as in A&E on cable TV) included me among those they gave #FF shout outs too also.

So Friday January 22, 2010 will go down in my record books as an absolutely marvelous and fun, not to mention record-setting, Follow Friday!

I went to post something to Haunt Jaunts Facebook page last night and happened to notice the fans had increased to 39. And best of all it wasn’t even people I knew!

My dear friends didn’t leave me out there hanging with no fans in the beginning. Tracie and her mom and aunt, then Brenda, Kim Smith, and even Wayne signed up.

Then I ran the Halloween Blog Contest and got more fans that way. (FB has since revised their policies on such practices, so I won’t be doing that again!)

However, I think I got up to 17 then.

I’ve been growing slowly ever since. Which is pretty cool. (And I didn’t even know it! I think I was at 20 something, like 22, last I knew.)

Twitter took off all of a sudden in December. I went from 400 to 500, 600, 700 to 850 followers in a month! But Facebook was just sort of stagnate.

Until recently. 39 fans? Okay, so it’s no 850, but it might as well be. People actually took the time to check me out. (At least long enough to hit the fan button.) Sweet!

Slowly, slowly, I’m growing more visitors. It’s all very exciting. And fun. I love living in the Internet Era! What a blast!

Ever since I got better and decided to go after Haunt Jaunts hot and heavy, I had it in mind I was going to make money with it. I’ve read of others bloggers doing it. A lot of the ones I’ve seen interviewed are making anywhere from $30,000 to $75,000!

I sure wasn’t making that at Families.com, but I was making something. And I knew they had to be making something because they were paying 20+ of us bloggers monthly, plus our quarterly bonuses.

I learned a lot at Families.com about the importance of including pictures with posts, SEO,  linking, and writing entertaining, informative posts frequently. I went from 1,200 hits my first month to between 40,000 and 50,000 hits/month when I left two years later.

Which was impressive to me, but the Superstars (as I liked to think of them) snagged 100,000+ hits a month. And since our bonuses were based on hits, well…it behooved us to get as many hits as possible!

Some people knew how to work it. Plus, they wrote about timely topics that naturally generated tons of hits. (Think Britney Spears, weight loss, etc.)

Then during my brief stint with Examiner.com I learned about embedding videos and polls, the importance of links/lists to Google rankings, and a little more about Digg.

When I started to really put all that together with Haunt Jaunts, I noticed I did okay with hits on the blog.

But let me back up a sec. I had BIG ideas about having a Haunt Jaunts website that listed haunted places. I planned on having affiliate links, like Travelocity, Amazon, plus Google AdSense that would help me earn money.

However, that was a LOT of work to compile the lists. I also quickly realized my blog was (a) more fun and (b)  getting more hits. Also, there were other sites similar to mine, most with better graphics and set ups. But none of them really had a blog.

Hmmm…here was my niche. But could I earn money with just a blog?

Naively I thought you just throw up an AdSense link and that’s that. The bucks will come rolling in.

Not so. There’s a lot of tricks to it. The ones I’ve found to make the most difference so far include:

1. Having “above the page/above the fold” ads. (Ads near the top of your page/post.)
2. Ad size. The bigger the better.
3. As many ads as possible. (Google currently allows 3 per page.)
4. Color. Ads that blend in with a site’s color scheme do better.
5. HITS! This is the most important. More hits translate into more page impressions which translates into increased page per hit percentages. Oh, and if people click on those ads, BINGO! You can score big!

Amazon hasn’t worked for me at all. Problogger and my friend Chris V. say they’ve had luck with that. That hasn’t generated any funds for me –yet. I did recently redesign my Amazon ads so we’ll see what happens with those.

The biggest revenue-generator last year was from a company who wanted me to write about a link and include it in a post. That’s all I had to do! It was a fun assignment and easy money. I’d like to snag more of those gigs!

I also signed up with a new company, ReadySite, that I put on HJ today. As well as I revamped some of my Google AdSense ads and shuffled around some of my widgets to give HJ what I hope is a more pleasing visual feel. (In my efforts at the very end of last year to retool some things I felt I was getting too commercially-feeling. I wasn’t liking it.)

Because yes, I want to make money and entice clicks, but I also want to have a nice site with good info. If it’s all cluttered and visually distracting, who’s going to (a) notice the links to click, or (b) and most important, visit in the first place?!

So, we’ll see how I do going forward. The great thing is, nothing’s written in stone. Things can be changed any time.

It’ll be fun to see what happens from here on out. If I learn some new tricks or anything that works spectacularly (or fails spectacularly) I’ll post here to try and help others avoid my mistakes!