Crazy Eights

Eight crazy months of blogging.
I thought of going with a reference to “Aces and Eights” but that is the dead man’s hand – and even though it is painted on the motorcycle in one of my favorite movies – I figured it was best to go with something else.
Bonus Offer: The first person to name the movie that I referred to above with the aces and eights on the motorcycle will win a sidebar link for the month of November. Submit your guess in the comments.
Now, back to the discussion about eight months of blogging. Over these past eight months I have learned quite a bit and have been having a good time as well. As much as I would love to turn this into a full-time profession, you will see that my blogging for money efforts aren’t quite to the point where I can support my family – yet.

Metric Mania

As a means of tracking growth and progress, I like to review a handful of popular – although not always useful – metrics to measure how I am doing.

• RSS Subscribers :: There have been some crazy things going on with the RSS subscriber numbers being reported at FeedBurner, as you have likely seen discussed on numerous blogs. Since beginning this blog I have had the goal to crack 100 RSS subscribers and I have finally broken through the century mark – although FeedBurner denies that today. The high for the month was 126 RSS subscribers while the average was 108 RSS subscribers. Now I need to set my sights higher and strive for 150 subscribers. If you haven’t already, I encourage you to subscribe now!

• Traffic :: The unique visits and page-views have unfortunately not had the same success as the number of RSS subscribers. For the month, Google Analytics indicates there were 2,017 unique visits and 3,562 page-views. Similar to last month, I’ve had an increase in direct traffic and search engine traffic while the traffic from referring sites has decreased. This indicates to me that I am not doing enough to write posts that encourage people to link to me, as well as doing a less than stellar job with the social media sites.

• Technorati :: Last month I had met my goal of achieving a Technorati Ranking of 15,000 but that was short lived. It seems that Technorati has made an adjustment of some sort as my authority has improved from 284 last month to a new authority of 316 yet my ranking decreased (or increased depending on how you look at it) from 14,855 to a new ranking of 15,646. As I mentioned while discussing my 12 blogging tips, Technorati seems to have lost a little bit of the buzz it had going so I will continue to monitor this but am not too concerned about it.

• Alexa :: From the “it doesn’t really matter but is still fun to look at” department comes the Alexa rank. There has been a bit of fluctuation this month but as it stands right now, I have improved from 79,657 last month to 78,850 right now. I’d like to see this number get below 75,000 – so be sure to have the Alexa toolbar installed while you are browsing my site, lol.

Nifty Nine

As I venture into the ninth month of this blog, I cannot help but think that bigger and better things are on the horizon.
As we enter the holiday season, I am going to refrain from posting about any specific goals for the coming month. Instead I am going to make an effort to give thanks for all that I have as well as the new blogging friends (was trying to think of a catchy name for that but blonds sounds like the beginning to a bad joke and friggs sounds like a dirty word) that I have made along the way.
If there is anything that I can do for you, please do not hesitate to ask as I would like to give back to the community as a small token of appreciation for all that you provide to this blog. Unfortunately I do not have cash to distribute to everyone but will do my best to help via other methods.
Thanks again to each and every one of you!