Damien at the Speed of Life

This is a monthly feature here at my personal blog where I measure my blogs’ progress toward goals. You can browse current and past entries in the CAN… category. CAN stands for:

Circulation: Incoming links.
Analytics: # of visitors (Measured in the graph above)
Net: Money made and key takeaways. (Because money isn’t everything.)

I often use shorthand in referring to my blogs:
Psych Blog: Postcards from the Funny Farm
Personal Blog: Damien at the Speed of Life
Teaching Blog: Dynamite Lesson Plan
Podcast: Damien Riley’s Podcast

Below are my CAN results for the time span of 11-26-08 to 11-27-08:
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Psych Blog:

C – 18

A – 10,099

N – $68.50

Personal Blog:

C – 22

A – 564

N – $30

Teaching Blog:

C – 7

A – 251

N – $25.01
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Notes: December marked the time I broke the 10,000 monthly visitors mark with my psych blog.  This extremely exciting for me since I have been working on traffic for that blog for 2 years.  I noticed a chunk of that traffic comes from my Crazy Quotes static page.   This teaches me that a dedicated page with search friendly tags and description can lift a blog’s analytics considerably.  For this reason I will continue to put quotes about being crazy and other psychology stuff on that page.  An interesting question is this: “Is there a better way to monetize just that page?”  If any mmol seo types out there have a suggestion I’d appreciate it.  My blog domain has a Google PageRank of 1/10 and yet that quotes page has a 2!  Go figure.  I am quite hopeful in the next PR rollout my blog will increase notably.  I have set most paid links to nofollow when it is ok with the paying advertiser.  That affected a lot of links so we’ll see how much if at all my PR improves.

Another thing I learned in December is that Google weighs inbound links against the number of outgoing links.  If you have a lot of inbound links on a regular basis, that helps your rank.  If you have a lot of outgoing links however that negates the effect of your inbound links.  You can check your inbound links at any time on Google by entering site:(your url) and doing a search.  I don’t know a way to check ones outgoing links but I’d like to find out.  You will find I am linking out less and less and using nofollow on all links unless I want to give a special site link juice.

I have really been slacking in my guest blogging.  I want to do more of that this year.  The best ones for me are the “regular gigs.”  I have two of those and then several open invitations if I get an idea.  The first one is: It Might be Love which is owned by Chelle.  She has become a great friend in this blogging business and I really appreciate her blog concept.  The other is the FuelmyBlog blog.  I am fortunate enough to manage their monthly and sometimes biweekly blog carnival.  Kevin and Sylvie are a couple of really gracious people.  Apart from those two, I want to make myself available to bloggers out there.  If you ask me to guest blog, you will get a great post of 300 words or more with pictures and a solid inbound link from my blog.  Let me know if you are interested.

Now, the last thing: “Analytics.”  How I achieved that 10,099 number is the mystery of the universe.  I’d like to think it was due to my amazing writing.  I think we all know that isn’t the reason.  Traffic is the result of strategic activity.  I have been working really hard this month to test and set in place a traffic generating plan for 2009 and I think I have actually done it!  Here is a bullet list of the items I will use to drive traffic in 2009 (not in any order):

• Stumbleupon networking (by far the best)
• Other social media
• Specific Social Networking: Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Wordpress.com, Blogger, Technorati, FriendFeed, Ping.fm, Last.fm, flickr, LinkedIn, and YouTube
• Blog Directories: MyBlogLog and Blog Catalog
• BlogCarnival.com
• Maintain organic Google Reader Feed Subscriptions and commenting often
• Keep to a weekly posting schedule as a minimum for posting to all three blogs
• Continuing to experiment with my Podcast.

I will publish the official numbers in 6 days when December is officially over but I hope you enjoyed these results.  You might say, the future’s so bright, I gotta wear bamboo shades. If you’d like to follow my journey in 2009, I encourage you to subscribe via FEED or EMAIL.