If You Build It, They Will Come

When I first started this blog I never realized that time would go by so quickly. It feels like just yesterday that I was welcoming you to this new blog and now I sit back and see that three months have rapidly elapsed.
It has certainly be an exciting three months that have been filled with success and failure but most importantly it has been three months filled with opportunities to meet new people and make new friends. In the spirit of meeting people and making friends, I took a detour from my traditional goals related to improving my blog rankings and tried to focus on extending my community.
With the idea of fostering community growth, I had set goals that would allow me to focus on giving back to those that have helped build this blog and give me a chance to discover some new blogs along the way.
With the third month now fading in the rearview mirror, I am happy to report that I have successfully met the three community focused goals that I had defined. As a brief recap of my three goals:
Speedlinking
If you are not familiar with the term Speedlinking, it is basically a quick post to share a little link love with other people that I admire for their effort in contributing here or in the blogosphere in general. The goal that I had defined was to make one Speedlinking post per week that would feature 5 people or blogs in each post.
In an effort to be consistent, I selected Monday to be my day for Speedlinking posts although that is where the consistency ended. Part of the fun behind the Speedlinking posts is that I have changed the way that I select the blogs and posts to feature each week. One week it was the Top Five Commentators and another it was random visitors displayed in the MyBlogLog widget. You never know where I will pick the next five blogs from so be sure to stay active for your chance to be featured.
Follow Along
Another goal was to remove the NoFollow tag for all links on my site. By removing the NoFollow tag for links throughout the site, you receive a linkback whenever you take the time to participate in a discussion. Without the feedback and participation from all of you, I would likely be questioning this whole blogging idea and babbling to myself. As a small token of my appreciation, I installed the Dofollow plugin and haven’t looked back. While there were a few spammy comments as a result, everyone has behaved pretty well for the most part.
Networking
The last goal was to find at least 10 new blogs to Favorite at Technorati, 10 new communities to join and 10 new contacts at MyBlogLog and 10 new friends at StumbleUpon. In an effort to share a little link love with all of those new contacts, I featured all of their respective profiles in the latest edition of Speedlinking. This was probably the most fun goal of them all as it allowed me to meet some new people and really try to expand this growing community.
A Watched Pot Never Boils
Over the course of the first two months with this blog, I had been focused on improving various rankings such as Technorati and Alexa. Even though my goals may have been a bit aggressive, unless of course you are MsDanielle, I was getting close but just couldn’t quite get there.
As the third month approached, I took a different approach and decided to focus on the people that take the time out of their day to visit this blog as well as people that had yet to find their way here. It may come as no surprise to you but by not focusing my energy on specific blog rankings, I have noticed that I have made some nice progress on the various rankings.

• Technorati :: For my 2nd month I had wanted to get my Technorati ranking below 75,000 but fell short as I ended the month at 85,833. Without focusing on Technorati, I have now seen my ranking increase to 50,511 in my third month and even picked up 5 new Favorites during the month.
• Traffic :: While still a far cry from the numbers that some of you have on your blog, I have seen another nice steady increase in the number of unique visitors and pageviews. This month my Google Analytics account indicates that there were 939 unique visits and 1980 pageviews and I think that is a pretty nice increase from the 792 unique visits and 1702 pageviews that I had in my 2nd month.
• RSS Subscribers :: Since the beginning I have had a goal of getting the first 50 RSS subscribers under my belt and I have fallen short each month. While I still fell a little short this month, I narrowed the gap as I increased from 33 subscribers to 47 subscribers. If you haven’t done so already, be sure to subscribe to my full-feed RSS to help me reach this goal!

Looking Forward
This month has been an exciting one and I truly enjoyed the opportunity to share some link love with everyone while also making the effort to meet some new people. As an added bonus, I was able to achieve some nice improvements in various blog rankings even though I was not focusing my energy on those specific items.
Due to that success, I am going to continue with that theme of trying to grow the community and reach out to more people and share what I can with the people that have helped me out.
One item on the agenda is to create an account and explore over at BlogCatalog, which was brought to my attention by Derrich. In addition to that, I plan to continue expanding my StumbleUpon, MyBlogLog and Technorati contacts so feel free to say hello if we haven’t connected already.
Before I wrap this up, I just want to remind you that I am always on the lookout for blogs to feature in my Speedlinking series of posts so stay active in the comments, keep your avatar in the MyBlogLog widget and don’t be shy about linking back to my site as I regularly review my dashboard of incoming links. 😉
Thanks to everyone for making this an exciting month!