Table of contents for CAN Blog Stats 2009

1. Blog Stats January 2009
2. Blog Stats for February 2009
3. Blog Stats March 2009
4. Blog Stats April 2009
5. Blog Stats May 2009
6. Blog Stats June 2009

Click on image to view the Excel spreadsheet.
This month’s theme: “Automation.”

Here are the textual results:

Postcards from the Funny Farm – PFTFF
9,651 Backlinks
8,630 Visits (in June ‘09)

Dynamite Lesson Plan – DLP
3,123 Backlinks
2,030 Visits (in June ‘09)

Damien at the Speed of Life – DATSOL
5,376 Backlinks
1,422 Visits (in June ‘09)

Net for all blogs= $207

Sources:
Backlinks-Yahoo
Visits-Google Analytics
Net-PayPal

Notes: Last month I used this word: “automation.” I suppose if I were putting out a CD I’d call it that. That’s the name of the game these days for my blogging life. I have just about everything automated to produce money and traffic. Backlinks are a little harder to produce that way but I’m working on new ideas every day. As a teacher who is getting more responsibility at work every day, I don’t have the time I used to devote to blogging.

Automation methods:
Backlinks: The only automation I can think of for these is submission to Article Avenue and the like. Many of my backlinks however are the result of people linking to my articles or blog because they like them. This would lead to the ultimate automation technique: “Write good content.”

Visits: In my experience, Stumbleupon and other social media has produced the largest increase in traffic. Find classy ways to ask people to read your work through social media. The following sites are the ones I am leveraging for traffic-

• Ping.fm – Choose the services you post statuses to and send a status and a link to your blog out to all of them with one click.
• Twitter – Ping.fm can take care of this one.
• Facebook – This is often a small group of a hundred or so friends. I usually use Ping.fm to drive my Facebook statuses but there are other features you can use on Facebook other than statuses to promote your blog.
• MyBlogLog -
• Blogcatalog – Send bulk messages to members of your community.

Net: Automation methods are Text-Link-Ads. I am making over $20 a month with my 3 blogs with this service. Google Adsense has made me very little money, but it is always increasing. Getting Adsense on a site is a good idea. The more traffic I get, the more Adsense will make for me.

These are the automated methods I use to make passive income. It is a small percentage of the total I make monthly but they are a substantial chunk. The rest of the pie consists of hard work writing and doing sponsored posts. I never do 2 paid posts in a row. Every other one is a rule I have for myself.

I encourage you bloggers out there to use the services and methods I have talked about.  Also, remember that each blog is its own animal.  What works for mine may not work for yours.  The thing that makes bloggers great, in my opinion, is their ability to create and innovate ideas that work for their blog.  I will continue to look for ways to automate my backlinks, visits, and net. Your comments are warmly invited.

Everyone has been telling me since my kids were born that one day they would rebel.  Looking at some “then/now” pictures of Amy Winehouse on a blog tonight really made that fear a reality.  Click on the image above to see the “after” pictures.

Here is a hugely talented girl with the world as her oyster who in just a few short years has destroyed her voice, body, and mind with drugs.  Can she recover?  I sure hope so.  I enjoyed her music in the early days of her career.  She may or may not pull out of the mess she’s fallen into, but I am more concerned with the lesson for dads out there:

Don’t let your kids do drugs.

Another thing people have told me forever is that kids will not listen to me and they will do what they want no matter what they say.  Like I told my wife tonight: “By the time my girls are in college, I’ll be close to retiring so I can follow them everywhere.”

Poor Amy has made rehab her “hit,” I hope she gets beyond rehab to reality before too long. I read that Kelly Osbourne recently for rearranging her “evil” furniture. She moved chairs, sofas, and kitchen rugs in a psuedo Feng Shui style. My thought is, “why did Kelly ley her stay in her house?” But I guess stuff like that happens with the overly wealthy. I just can’t help but wonder where her father is in all this. That’s not a judgment, just a wonder.

This is truly a good day to be me! Read more details at my blog Postcards from the Funny Farm.

• Entrecard Time Tracking
• Entrecard after a Month

I titled this post the way I did because I don’t mean to draw extra attention to Entrecard for good or bad. While I find their service quite good for certain bloggers, I am not convinced it is the best way to promote blog posts. This is what I was using it for. That’s the real point I am making, it depends what you use Entrecard for that determines its value to you. Since I need it to promote my blog posts, that’s where my review is coming from. There are other things you can do at Entrecard besides that. I have no interest in them.

To summarize my “real estate” on the web: I have three blogs. The one you are reading now is my general/personal blog where I write about blogging and my life. The other two are niche in nature: self-improvement/psychology and teaching. I used the widget for almost 4 months and saw no significant increase in traffic via Entrecard. Incidentally, I saw most growth coming from Stumble-upon. I recommend getting friends there and doing mutual Stumbling when you like each others’ posts. Entrecard traffic did come to some degree only when I spent a lot of hours a week “dropping” my card. This is a devil’s paradise that left me cross-eyed every time. It just isn’t natural to visit 100-300 blogs a day. With Entrecard, that’s one of the main ways you gain clout and theoretically: traffic.

I tried my hand at their marketplace and found it quite fun. It was also laborious though. You gain clout there by doing “tasks” for other bloggers as a means of a service. I got tired of doing that pretty fast as well.

So, with no real benefit to promoting my posts, I decided to be a “passive” Entrecard member. I have heard they occasionally ban people who speak ill of them so I want to make it abundantly clear I am only speaking about my experience. I definitely don’t want to be banned. I do believe Entrecard can and does work to entertain and promote many bloggers. It just hasn’t worked for me. You might ask yourself how many times you click on their widget? As for me, in truth it is next to never. If my experience is common to the blogosphere what you are doing there is working to get credits to put their widget on your blog. My question is why when you yourself don’t click on their widgets?

I already know a few friends who are going to take me to school about this post. I recommend you don’t. I remain a member of Entrecard and will use their services but for the time being, their service is not meeting my need of promoting blog posts. Because I know some of my mentees read this, I’ll just throw out who I am finding traffic with. If you want to know how, that’s what the comments box is for. I’d be happy to explain:

Main Stuff that works for me to promote blog posts:

Email lists
Ping.fm
Twitter
Facebook
MyBlogLog
BlogCatalog
Stumbleupon
Your recommendations?

I ran across this.  It reminds me of the apple carving my dad did for us when we were kids.  For the life of me I do not know how the artist did this one.  I don’t think it is Photoshopped.

Blogging is not Facebook, Twitter, and microblog platform blogs. As a blogger, I do these things but they are not the special content reserved for blogging. My blog posts are published by me on a platform I tweak and control (Wordpress self-hosted). Nobody is up 24/7 working to improve my blog apart from what I do for it. It’s not a social network though I use them to promote it.

Bloggers are:

Writers who have a vision for their work. Specialists in their field who write quality content intended for an audience. They are rugged individualists who are ever crafting their art, hoping to gain readers for their content and style. Bloggers always study what they do to note what works and what doesn’t. It’s a whole different world apart from microblogging. It’s closer to authoring a published novel than participating in fun toys like Facebook or Twitter. I just wanted to make this clear where I stand on the subject. I have a shortcut to all the big social networks but when I blog a post of 150-500 words, I get in my “artist” mode and it’s no longer mundane snippets cast out to the nothingness as microblogging so often is. I take my blogging as seriously as I take the doctor or my wedding or a funeral or a sunset or something scary in uncharted territory, revealing, evolutionary, and wonderful like that. When you visit my blog … you aren’t reading something trivial, you’re hearing my take on life and death and the time in between.

My Other Blog
Thanks to my readers here at Damien at the Speed of Life (DATSOL). I’m excited to tell you about my “other” blog today. Around July 2008 I launched a teaching-oriented blog entitled “Dynamite Lesson Plan.” (DLP) It’s grown since then to have about 200 RSS subscribers.

A Community
The comments have been enlightening and educational to read and it feels like a community over there. I hope you can help me spread the news about this blog. If you are a teacher or if you are interested in education and teaching, I invite you to visit DLP:

SITE: Dynamite Lesson Plan

-or try the feed for a while to see if you like it-

RSS FEED: Dynamite Lesson Plan FEED

Guest Post Authors Invited!
I hope my articles there continue to be informative and interesting to teachers and all readers. In addition, I had the special opportunity to host a guest blogger twice. She is a wonderful writer and I am interested in hosting more from her and others of you out there. If you are interested in a guest post spot on DLP, please get in touch with me at:

EMAIL: rileycentral at gmail dot com

Here’s to a great summer 2009 for all of us!

-Damien Riley, Author of “Dynamite Lesson Plan”

Here’s basically what the handouts said:

Homophones are words with the same sound but different spellings and different meanings.  Two commonly misused words are the homonyms:

to, two, and too -and- their, they’re, and there

to=a preposition, or a a directional type of word:  ”I am going to the store.”  It is also a form of an infinitive verb such as “to run” or “to play.”

two=the number

too=a modifer meaning “in excess.” (This one’s easy to remember because it has an “extra” o, as in an “excess” o)

there=a place

they’re=a contraction … “they are”

their=possesive pronoun: “their car … etc”

Well, I’m sure my old worksheet was much better but that’s the basic run-down.  I make typos all the time but I know the proper usage of these words.  Do you?  Another great resource I recommend for common errors and helps with writing is Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style.

Table of contents for This Much I Know About Blogging 2009

1. Got a Blog Routine? Blog Tip #1
2. CAN Acronym – Blog Tip #2

I’ve noticed that blogging draws people for a million reasons, it isn’t just the desire to share your life online anymore. But whether you are looking to make money or  just experimenting with  a journal, there are three areas you’ll want to increase.  I use the acronym CAN to identify them.

C stands for Circulation. This is the number of references to your blog in the form of links. It is known by several names: backlinks, inlinks, blog reactions, linkbacks, and sometimes trackbacks (though those are falling out of use). Here are a few things you can do to increase circulation:

1. As you read, save links for speedlinking, or linking out to them in your posts. This by itself will not increase your circulation but people will stop by your blog if you reference them most the time and most the time, they will reference you back. It’s a great way to make circulation friends quickly.
2. Take “Nofollow” off comments. In the same way, those who see their comments are linking back to their site will be noitified and this is likely to get them back to your site as well as returning the favor of linking to their site. You can find out how to do this in a simple Google search of your blog platform. In Wordpress there are plugins.
3. Submit articles to Article Avenue and the like.
4. Submit your guest posts to social media. When you do a post somewhere other than your own blog, make sure you submit it to as many social networks as possible. This can (and does) ultimately lead readers back to you

A stands for Analytics. This is the traffic of visitors to your blog. Here’s what you can do to keep that number rising:

1. Do a series post like “Blog Tip of the Day” or other “…of the day” or your choice to keep people coming back.
2. Ask a few friends to announce them on their blogs.
3. Blog-Hop and comment intelligently as much as possible.
4. Stumble your best of the week (or ask others to).

N stands for Net. This is simply the amount of money your blog makes. The more I blog, it seems the less I care about this number. It seems to grow so I don’t look at it as much as I used to. To me, it’s all about influence and I think if you’re showing that on the internet, compensation will follow. Having said that, here are some practical steps to making bucks with your blog:

1. Check for opps. with the companies that pay you to blog.
2. Work on C and A more.
3. Be faithful to the opps you get.
4. Do quality work.

I hope that helps you out with your focus. Blogging is a fun journey and I hope you enjoy it as much as I have.  Remember this phrase with regards to blogging: “I CAN!”