Damien at the Speed of Life – DATSOL

In addition to posting my blog stats each week with tips, I also offer paid services in blog building, coaching, and freelance writing. To hire me visit my freelancing site. Let me explain how I review blogs. First, the acronym:

C: circulation (or Google backlinks)
A: analytics (# of visitors last month)
N: net Amount of dollars made on all blogs combined.

Now the review formula: I have put it in the form of a 3 question quiz.

1. The number of your Google backlinks is between: (tip: to get this number, type link:http://url into a Google search)

A. zero or unknown
B. 1 – 100
C. 101 – 200
D. 201 – 300
E. 301 – 400
F. 401 or higher

2. Your visitor count last month was between:

A. zero – 500
B. 500 – 15,000
C. 15,001 – 25,000
D. 25,001 – 35,000
E. 35,001 – 45,000
F. 45,001 or higher

3. The amount of money you made blogging on all your blogs combined:

A. zero – 100 dollars
B. 100 – 200 dollars
C. 201 – 300 dollars
D. 301 – 400 dollars
E. 401 – 500 dollars
F. 501 dollars or higher

Where A=0, B=1, C=2 and so on up to F=5 respectively, add up the total value of the three letters in your answers: ie; B,C,D would equal 1+2+3=6 Then divide by the total possible(15) to get your can percentage: 6/15= 40%

Then assign your percentage a CAN Blog rating based on this scale:

0 – 16%=CAN0
17 – 33%=CAN1
34 – 50%=CAN2
51 – 67%=CAN3
68 – 84%=CAN4
85 – 100%=CAN5

The example score of 40% is between 34 -50% so it earns a

After I show your CAN “grades,” I give you a few minor yet valuable notes on what I liked and what you might work on to improve your CAN rating.

Thanks for previewing my rating system. I recommend setting your own goals for your blog. These parameters work for me but certainly they are not universal. Since I started using them I have seen stats as skinny as as if it took a double dose of Solo Slim turn much fatter. If interested you can follow my own blogs’ CAN BLOG RATING progress.

This is a monthly feature here where I measure my 3 blogs’ progress. My goal with this series is to provide 100% transparency. You can browse current and past entries in the CAN… category.  First I list the CAN data for each blog.  Then I reflect with a few notes.

Legend:
C = Circulation, or backlinks
A = Analytics, or number of visitors and feed subscribers
N = Net, or the amount of money earned by the blog

1. Postcards from the Funny Farm, a psychology and inspiration blog

Circulation
Google Backlinks: 224
Yahoo! Backlinks: 6,884

Analytics
from 12-01-08 to 12-31-08
Visitors: 11,531
Page Views: 15,536
Feed Subscribers:  110

Net
$68.50

2. Damien at the Speed of Life, my online diary

Circulation
Google Backlinks: 36
Yahoo! Backlinks: 272

Analytics
from 12-01-08 to 12-31-08
Visitors: 603
Page Views: 1,520
Feed Subscribers: 17

Net
$30

3. Dynamite Lesson Plan, a teaching blog
Circulation
Google Backlinks: 224
Yahoo! Backlinks: 6,884

Analytics
from 12-01-08 to 12-31-08
Visitors: 217
Page Views: 503
Feed Subscribers:  14

Net
$25.01

NOTES: December was a great month for traffic.  I had close to 12,000 visitors which is a record by about 5,000 visitors.  So what happened?  Well, my static “Crazy Quotes” page has gained the 5th place on a Google search of those 2 terms.  I have been getting 300-500 hits on that page a day!  This has really helped the normal traffic and boosted the totals immensely.  A special post or page can carry your blog without a need for traffic driving methods.

You may recall last month I decided I was done with empty clicker traffic such as Entrecard.  It hurt me at first but very soon my other methods far surpassed Entrecard.  I just feel that the quality of blogs there is not high and most people who came to my sites just clicked for their points and took off like a bat out of hell.  I chose to work with Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks a little more.  You will see attractive buttons in all three sidevars linking to my profiles on the social networks I am working with.  Please add me to your lists!

My net suffered this month because I didn’t bother much with it.  I decided to put my mental health above straining over sponsored posts.  I did make a nice chunk of change without trying hard at all.

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t note my recent Google PageRank increase on all three blogs.  They used to be 1, 0, 0 and last night after the roll through, they became 2, 2, 2. This will enable me to get more paying posts and potentially more advertisers.  I am a very happy camper as you all know I have been working very hard to bring my PageRank values up.  Still though, I believe the future is going to be based on 100% pure transparency of stats and not on any dictator of value like PageRank.  That’s the reason I will continue to post CAN stats on all my blogs through 2009.

As always, I want to be open to your questions and comments through this series.  The comment box is waiting for you.  You’ve seen my results read my notes, what do you have to say? Is there something I missed you’d like to discuss?  How were your CAN results last month?

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.

My C.A.N. results on all three blogs in August 2008 are detailed below. Some things could have gone better, but that is an “as always” thing. More things went right than ever before. I am very happy about these results across all three blogs.

Check out how I did in August 2008.

As always, I welcome questions in the comment section. Please feel free to leave a comment or question.

An explanation of the C.A.N. blog rating system can be found here. I maintain 3 blogs. This post combines all their results in one place.

Postcards from the Funny Farm

1. Circulation: 10 incoming links(below). Goal was 4. Percentage= 250%

2. Analytics: 3376 uniques. Goal was 5000. Percentage= 68% :(

3. Net: $410. Goal was $250. Percentage=164%

4. Overall Rating: 268/300= 89%

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Damien at the Speed of Life
1. Circulation: 1 incoming link. Goal was 1. (Thank you Katelynjane!) Percentage=100%
Blogging on a Postcard
2. Analytics: 787 visitors for the month. Goal was 600. :) Percentage= 131%
3. Net: $40. Goal was $20. Percentage= 150%
4. Overall Rating: 300/300= 100% :)

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Dynamite Lesson Plan
1. Circulation: 1 incoming link. Goal was 1. Percentage= 100%
2. Analytics: 634 visitors for the month. Goal was 300. :) Percentage= 211%
3. Net: $0. Goal was $0. Percentage= 100%

4. Overall Rating: 300/300= 100%

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Subscribe to this blog via and Watch how I do in September, as-I-do-it!

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Okay, now for the important stuff: Goals for next month!

1. Circulation: Well, last month I had a low goal of one because I just started the online diary. Matters got more interesting (difficult) when I bought and transferred a domain. This blog is now www.damienriley.com (in case you didn’t know – do change your bookmarks. There is no need to change your RSS feed). Okay, enough blabbering. I am going to go big here and try to get 10 incoming links. Probably 5-6 guestblogs so if anyone out there is interested, hook me up … I always hook up back ;)
2. I knocked this one out of the park. I have learned that you guys are interested in my online diary! Social media helped me get the word out and a couple ezines interviewed me which brought in a lot of traffic. I have a daily “surfing system” in place that I think is going to double my analytics in September but I am not going to go too crazy just yet. It was 780 last month and my goal was 600. How about I double the difference and add it to the 780: 1140 unique visitors for the month.
3. Net: $50

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Postcards from the Funny Farm

1. Circulation: I had over 10 incoming links last month and it was relatively easy. With the 2 newer blogs I really have to knock on doors to get those links but Postcards seems to generate them automatically. For that reason, I am going to challenge myself by doing guest blogs and links from other sites. I’m stepping up the circulation goal to 20 in September. Here goes nothin’!

2. Analytics: I missed my visitors goal by 32% last month. That’s when you have to get real and set a more realistic goal. I always have a feeling PFTFF will go huge any day now. I imagine it being up there with some of the big hitters. Alas, it hasn’t happened yet. For now, I will scale back the goal to a cool 4000 visitors in September.

3. Net: I beat my net goal by over $160. With a few other income opportunities through various means, I think I will go yet higher in September. Nonetheless, I don’t wan’t to get caught up in the “hard” money when I should be focusing on content and passively making the “easy” money. There will be a time to push up into the 700’s and higher but in September, we are not quite there yet. So, my net goal for September will be $400.

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Dynamite Lesson Plan
1. Circulation: This month I think I can get some interest in what I do at DLP. I am going to try and get friends to do that. I am also going to try and find avenues where my posts are read more and possibly “quoted” ergot “linkback” ed. Despite the blog only being one month old, I’m shooting for a bold 3 incoming links. Help me out if you read something worth linking to! ;)
2. Analytics: My goal was 300 and I beat it. This is a tough blog to get people to, moreso than my other two. However, I am going to try and find some educational forums and linkback. I will also use the normal traffic building services you find in my sidebar. Still, my goal is a conservative 500 visitors in September.
3. Net: $40

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Subscribe to this blog via and Watch how I do in September, as-I-do-it!

1. Get out the yellow pad and a pencil.
2. Analyze and rate the important progress (Will vary. For me, the C.A.N. stuff)
3. Swim to get ideas for engaging prose.
4. Walk.
5. Work out. (I myself don’t do this but it is a good idea)
6. Roll around on the floor with your kids (or dog).
7. Think about their blogs’ niches like mine on education.
8. Surprise your wife with breakfast (lunch … dinner) in bed.
9. Watch the news for blog ideas.
10. Call friends or relatives for blog ideas (but keep the confidential; stuff confidential). ;)

Care to add to this list? I sure would appreciate it! My internet goes down from time to time and I need all the help I can get.