Another Month Bites The Dust

Two months ago I joined the ranks of the narcissistic bloggers and launched Derek Semmler dot com. In that time, I’ve had the excitement of winning a contest where I created the most Evil John Chow and continued my effort to be a flipping rich t-shirt whore.
As a recap of the goals that I had set forth for the 2nd month, I wanted to achieve the following:

• Technorati rank of 75,000
• 1000 visitors and 3000 pageviews
• 50 RSS feed subscribers

Rankings
While I did not attain my goal of reaching a ranking of 75,000 at Technorati, I was able to improve my ranking from 147,958 to my current rank of 85,833. As you can see, I did not miss my revised goal by too much but I am even more excited by the increase that I have experienced in the number of favorites that I have received.

As the first month for this blog came to a close, there were 10 people that had graciously favorited this site.
Through my involvement in Stephen Fung’s Favorite For Charity promotion to the Technorati link train started by Gary Lee, I’ve seen the number of favorites jump up to 46.
If you’re not one of those 46, it’s not too late to add me as a favorite!
Another exciting development as far as rankings go is that this site is now a PR4 after the latest round of updates from Google. I’m actually quite amazed with the jump from a PR0 to a PR4 and I have to thank all of you for helping make that possible. Without your involvement here and adding backlinks to my site, this would not be possible!
Visitors and Pageviews
With a goal of 1000 unique visitors and 3000 pageviews for the 2nd month, I have to report that I have missed this goal as well. For the month I received a total of 792 unique visitors and 1702 pageviews, which is a nice improvement over the 568 visits and 1429 pageviews from the first month.
All of my traffic data is from my Google Analytics report and I noticed that there was a dip in traffic during the week that I was in Atlanta for business. During that week, I was not posting as frequently nor was I visiting my regular blogs and being active with my comments.
While it is unfortunate that I did not meet the goal that I had set forth, I cannot be too disappointed to see that there were 224 additional visitors to this site.
RSS Subscribers
Much like the Chicago Cubs on a warm summer afternoon, I came up empty on my 3rd goal as well. My goal was to reach at least 50 RSS subscribers but according to my Feedburner statistics, the high that I reached for the month was 33 subscribers. However, I’ve noticed this number fluctuates quite a bit and I experienced a drop here as well during the week that I was out of town.
With my time being a little more limited lately, I know that I have been reading more of my favorite blogs via their RSS feed. The only drawback to only reading the RSS feed is that I found that I do not comment nearly as much. As such, I’ve been trying to make more of an effort to read the actual blogs so I can participate more in the discussion. If you prefer to read via your feed reader of choice, please go ahead and add my full-feed RSS feed.
Plans for 3rd Month
As this blog enters the third month of existence, I am going to take a step back from the goals that I have been tracking and view my growth from a different perspective.
Rather than set goals related to the specific metrics that I used for the 2nd month, I am going to focus more on trying to continue building a community among the readers of this blog. I’ll continue to monitor the rankings, traffic and subscribers but that is not going to be my focus.
Using specific metrics such as Technorati rank or monthly visitors makes it a little easier to define goals but I think I have a few ideas that can translate well to goals for the coming month:

• Speedlinking: Make one speedlinking post per week to help highlight new blogs. This will include blogs of visitors to the site, people leaving comments and maybe a few sites that you haven’t seen before. Each speedlinking post will include 5 links.
• Follow Along: I’m going to remove the nofollow tag for all links. Without all of you participating on this site through the comments, it would get awfully boring. The least I can do is return the favor with a linkback. Oh yeah, you’ll usually receive a response from me as well.
• Networking: Find 10 new blogs to Favorite at Technorati, 10 new communities to join and 10 new contacts at MyBlogLog and 10 new friends at StumbleUpon. I’ll be highlighting each of these additions with a linkback as well, either throughout the month or as one summary at the end of the month.

In addition to the goals stated above, I will be trying my best to continue providing quality content that entices interaction with all of you. Likewise, I will be making an effort to do less reading from my RSS reader and be more active on your blogs with comments and interaction of my own.
As I wind this post to a close, I just want to take a moment to thank each of you again. Your involvement and feedback have helped me get to this point and will continue to help me make this site even better.