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Weekly Roundup

Last Updated: October 1, 2014 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 7 Comments

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning I get a commission if you decide to make a purchase through my links, at no cost to you. Please read my disclosure for more info.

Happy Sunday everyone! This week was semi brutal at work, but only because I was super excited about the weekend. Not having to work until Wednesday will be nice! I can finally start catching up on everything.

We have our Christmas dinner at W’s family’s home tonight. We still have to buy presents for around 6 or 7 people, so we will be doing that today before the dinner. Wish us luck!

Posts from my blog this week:

Here are some posts that I loved this week:

Christmas on the Credit Cards on I Heart Budgets
2012 Goals My Alternate Life
Snowed In and Succumbing to Lifestyle Inflation on Club Thrifty
How to Give Yourself a Raise Next Year on Young Adult Money
My 2012 in a nutshell elle & ish

What are your weekend plans? Hope you have a great New Year!

Weekly Roundup and Update

Last Updated: July 21, 2020 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 10 Comments

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning I get a commission if you decide to make a purchase through my links, at no cost to you. Please read my disclosure for more info.

Hey everyone! Second post for today. Don’t forget to enter my giveaway that I posted earlier. This week’s roundup is a short one. I’ll be gone until next Thursday and just wanted to update everyone on the blog until then. Ha I know, it’s not many days but I am a crazy blogger and wanted to update you all.

I have several posts lined up for while I am gone. Thank you to you all who actually said yes when I asked! I hope everyone reads them, because I read through them and I think they are all very good and interesting. Hopefully you all start following them (if you haven’t already) and enjoy the posts.

We have a fun couple of days planned and I’m super excited. Staying at a nice all-inclusive hotel, have a kayak snorkeling trip planned and will relax a ton. WOOHOOO!

Also, I have been thinking about ways that I can improve the blog a lot lately. What do you like seeing? What do you not like seeing? Be honest and give any opinions!

I took part in Frugal Portland’s awesome gift exchange. I recently received my present and who would have guessed that Jordann had me? I was super happy and she bought me some awesome tea (I could drink tea ALL DAY LONG).

In case you missed it, here are posts from my blog this week:

$975 in Weekly Extra Income and Life Updates
iPad 3 GIVEAWAY
Buying a House at 20 (How I did it)
Our Vacation Plans for the Next 12 Months
Financial Evolution of the Christmas Gift
Maintaining a Minimalist Wardrobe

Posts I loved:

The Financial Perks of Being Childless by Choice Money after Graduation
Use Credit Card Rewards To Pay For Christmas Money Life and More
How to Answer the Top 10 Interview Questions One Smart Dollar
One Unintended Perk of Writing a Blog Frugal Portland

Hope you all have a great weekend!

I’ll of course be checking in on my blog when I’m gone 🙂

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Weekly Roundup And Giveaway!

Last Updated: December 8, 2014 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 42 Comments

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning I get a commission if you decide to make a purchase through my links, at no cost to you. Please read my disclosure for more info.

Hey everyone! Hope you all had a great week and have an even better weekend.

I don’t have much planned. I have some stuff to do to finally finish up my work certification (I’ve been working on this for OVER 2 years). So I plan on dedicating most of today to that. And then I plan on working on my blog a little bit too.

I have a giveaway today so you can just skip reading and scroll to the bottom if you’d like!

And as you can see, I finally brought “interesting searches” back to my Saturday posts. The first one is funny so that is the main reason why I brought them back 🙂

In case you missed it, here are posts from my blog this week:

Posts I love:

Your Net Worth Isn’t Your Self Worth @ Money Master Mom
Massive Cash Back – American Express @ Money Life and More
The Last Bobby Pin Effect @ Plunged in Debt
How to be a blogging superstar @ L Bee and the Money Tree
Taking Personal Finance Blogs with a Grain of Salt @ Mo Money Mo Houses

Interesting Searches:

do i need to worry i broke into a house but didn’t take anything
do my homework for money craigslist
i don’t want him to make more money than me
i make him clean
i like egyptian pyramids

Giveaway

And on to the giveaway!

I’m sure most of you have heard of Aldi. I tend to shop there whenever I get the chance. The prices are great and I find that the quality is better than the grocery stores around where I live. I especially go to Aldi because their prices on fruits and vegetables are insanely cheaper than what I would find at my normal grocery store as well.

Today I have a great giveaway. Aldi has generously donated 2 gift certificates worth $25 each! Now as some of you know, $25 can be a lot of groceries at Aldi. I tend to spend around $50 there and can buy a lot of food.

There will be two winners, with each person winning a $25 gift certificate. Just enter via the Rafflecopter form below.

Thanks again Aldi for allowing me to have this giveaway!

Weekly Roundup

Last Updated: October 1, 2014 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 17 Comments

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning I get a commission if you decide to make a purchase through my links, at no cost to you. Please read my disclosure for more info.

This was the dessert table on Thanksgiving at the Boy’s Grandma’s. So yummy!

Hey everyone! Hope you all are having a great weekend.

I’m loving having all of these days off in a row. Sad that it’s already Saturday, but I’m still happy!

If you guys want to hear a sad tidbit about me that is extremely embarrassing, I finally got my ears pierced. Yes, I know, very sad especially for a girl like me who loves clothes, being girly and everything else.

I’ve always put it off and then eventually I felt so old and too embarrassed to get it done. Haha okay commence the making fun of me!

Anyways, now that you’re hopefully done laughing at me, we decided that we are most likely going to go out of town in December for 3-4 days.

We don’t know when the boy’s next vacation will be, so we decided to use this time wisely. We are thinking either San Juan again or maybe trying St. Thomas since we haven’t been.

If you’ve been to St. Thomas, tell us what to do, see and stay! And if you think we should go to San Juan instead, also say that. I want all opinions! We are trying to save as much money as we can on this, so I am looking for the best deals.

The iPad Mini and CASH giveaway is still happening just so you all don’t forget! Only a couple days left so get your entries in 🙂

Also, I’m going to start up the Reader Question series again, so if you have any questions that you would like to to research and answer, please leave them below, tweet them or e-mail me! Also, if you have any questions about my extra income and earning money online, ask them also. I plan on including as many as I can into a post that I’m drafting.

Posts I love:

Coping with Debt @ Freedom Thirty Five Blog
Google PageRank, Not Just About Links @ Modest Money
Unfrugal Confessions of a Normal Spender in the PF blogosphere @ Money After Graduation
I got a new job! @ 20s Finances
Life is What You Make Of It @ Living Debt Free Rocks!
How To Fake a More Expensive Christmas Gift @ Plunged in Debt
Buying Land and Building a House @ Monster Piggy Bank

Did any of you go Black Friday shopping? How did it go?

Weekly Roundup and my Giveaway

Last Updated: October 1, 2014 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 10 Comments

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning I get a commission if you decide to make a purchase through my links, at no cost to you. Please read my disclosure for more info.

Hope you all are having a great weekend. I’m pretty excited for tonight. My friends are coming in town and we’re having a girls’ night. WOOHOO! And we’re also running to the mall to find some cute outfits. Promise I won’t spend too much but I do want some new clothes 🙂

If you haven’t yet, please run over to my Passive Income post and let me know what you or if you do anything for passive income. I am very interested in what you have to say.

Also, thanks for all your emails and kind comments on my post about how I made $3,700 last month! Check out my post if you haven’t done so yet 🙂

We’re thinking Miami for our short trip in December instead. This is for many reasons, mainly because I want to finally see my grandfather. That is for another post soon though.

Favorite posts of the week:

How To Have a Cheap European Holiday @Eyes on the Dollar
SEO Like a Pro: 5 SEO Tips @ThisThatAndTheMBA
My personal philosophy at age 31 @Frugal Portland
7 Home Upgrades I Want…Someday @Young Adult Money
Getting the Rental House Ready – Almost “Real” Landlords!!! @BITFS
Dogs with Allergies Are Expensive! @Money Life and More
Alexa Rank @Ashlee Nikol
My Minimalist Christmas @My Alternate Life
Is Traveling Overrated? @ Prairie Eco-Thrifter
Do you Reply to Every Blog Comment? @My Money Design

And you’re probably all sick of hearing about my giveaway, but oh well 🙂

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Improving your Alexa Rank and Weekly Roundup

Last Updated: October 1, 2014 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 31 Comments

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning I get a commission if you decide to make a purchase through my links, at no cost to you. Please read my disclosure for more info.

Hey everyone! It’s finally the weekend and I’m excited.

I finally decided on a costume. I’m going to test my craft skills and try to make this Pocahontas costume. I bought a plain brown shirt and already have fringe boots, blue necklace and a braided headband, so I am pretty set! Cheap costume and it’s exactly what I wanted to be anyways.

We plan on going on a haunted hayride pub crawl tonight. Sounds like fun right? Yeah, if only it weren’t only 35 degrees tonight 🙁

Then tomorrow we are going to a pumpkin patch with the boy’s family. It’ll be fun, I surprisingly haven’t been to one since I was really young.

Alexa Rank

Earlier this month I made a post on increasing your Google Page Rank. Now I would like to help you all decrease your Alexa! A lot of you have been e-mailing me about how to decrease your Alexa.

If you check my Alexa, I am currently at around 80,000. It has been dropping quickly ever since I switched to WordPress.

So what is Alexa? The lower your score, the better your website ranks. Facebook has a ranking of 1 and Google is a 2 if that gives you a better perspective. Blogs below the 200,000 mark are said to be in the top 1% of all websites/blogs/etc. out there.

Why does your Alexa ranking matter though? 200,000 and below is said to be when advertisers will start flocking to you. I definitely believe this is true because once I dropped below that, I received numerous requests.

1. Install the Alexa Toolbar.

Your Alexa score is mainly determined by how many people view your blog that already have the toolbar, so install it! Then having your regular readers install it as well will help also. It is said that you need to click around to more than one page when you do visit a website as well.

2. Increased traffic to your site/blog.

The more traffic that you have, then generally the lower your ranking. Creating good quality content which engages and entertains your readers is key here. You want people to keep coming back.

3. Increased specialized traffic.

Another way to have a lower ranking is to have a lot of traffic from people who have the Alexa Toolbar installed. If you have a lot of readers, but hardly anyone has the toolbar, then you will most likely have a very high ranking.

It goes without saying that to lower your Alexa traffic rank you would need more web traffic, but as the above references show, what you actually need is specialized traffic – traffic from visitors who have Alexa Toolbar installed.

Posts that I love:

Is It Possible to Reduce Your Monthly Grocery Bill with Coupons? @ Tackling Our Debt
Are High School Reunions Worth the Cost? @ My Money Design
Would You Be A Human Guinea Pig For Money? @ Call Me What You Want Even Cheap
Why We Have Separate Finances (Sort of) @ Edward Antrobus
Things I Couldn’t Do If I Had A Car Payment @ IHeartBudgets
What to do about a black mark on a credit report @ Frugal Portland

Have a great weekend!

Switched to WordPress and Weekly Roundup

Last Updated: May 23, 2013 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 28 Comments

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning I get a commission if you decide to make a purchase through my links, at no cost to you. Please read my disclosure for more info.

Hey everyone! I hope you had a great week. I’m glad it’s Friday and that I’ll soon be off work!

Work was crazy busy this week also. I definitely need to relax this weekend! I have a JDRF walk this weekend and then doing a little Oktoberfest celebrations as well.

The switch to WordPress went great. I prefer WP over Blogger much more! The only thing that makes me sad is that I lost about 700 subscribers in the switch, so if you subscribed via Google Friend Connect, please resubscribe! I know you want to keep reading my posts anyways 🙂

And sorry if my posts all showed up multiple times in your feed, a lot of people told me about this. It seems that a lot of them republished as new posts for some reason. I really hate that it did this, because I’ve seen this happen to others before and it’s definitely annoying.

I’m sorry for all of the sponsored posts this week as well. I know it was most likely extremely annoying. They all came in at once. Won’t happen again!

Oh yeah, and I recently found out that someone I know blogs. I have been commenting on her blog forever and have been dumb and did not realize it was her until just the other day! AHHH So much for being anonymous. And my friends were talking about her last night and how they think blogging is weird.

So I definitely will not be telling my friends about it anytime soon. Oh well, their loss. They just don’t understand how addicting it is!

Also, don’t forget to enter my $100 cash giveaway!

What are your plans?

Posts I loved this week:

Why Being Out of Style is Cool @ Club Thrifty
Stretched too thin or just whiny? @ Money After Graduation
How learning to manage my finances has helped my health out @ Bog of Debt
How I Moved Across the Country in 3 Weeks @ Blonde on a Budget
Being Able To Say “Fuck You” Is The Ultimate Financial Luxury @ TeacHer Finance
Breaking the Bank in Search of Everlasting Beauty @ Mo Money Mo Houses
Paying Down my Loan @ Add Vodka
Why I Write @ So Over This
I Need To Start Exercising Again! @ Call me what you want, even cheap

Hope you have a great weekend!