Final Blog Stats for 2008 (a preview)
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.
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December 30th, 2008 at 2:18 pm
[...] rate my own blogs every month. No offense to the sensitive ears, but google pagerank can bite me http://www.damienriley.com/blog-stats-dec2008/ I love personal blogs but only your friends and family can rate those. I am here to rate your [...]