So I entered a poetry contest a while back where I wrote a caption to a picture of the Golden Gate bridge on the “My City By the Bay” blog. I won the contest which awards meOn A San Francisco High CD by Sony Holland and a $10 check. I am very pleased, you can check out this great blog and my winning poem on My City By The Bay.
This is my 3rd poem to win a contest in the last few years and I am always thrilled when others like my poetry as I enjoy creating them as much as hearing peoples feedback on them.
So I had set my goals for October 2008 and posted them previously, here is a reprint of my goals for October 2008 vs what I actually achieved.
Keep my Blog < 1000 IzeaRank
I have met this goal and in fact my blog has been in the 300 range for the entire month.
Keep my Blog < 500,000 Alexa Rank\
Again, my 3 month average is in the 200,000 range and this is because my blog only existed for 2 months. I am the 100,000 range weekly average.
20 new Back Links
I only managed to achieve 11 new back links for the month of October for this blog.
Average Unique Visits to 200 consistently, this means I am shooting for 6000 Visits for the month on GA
I have averaged 318 unique visitors per day and hit 8095 unique visits for the month.
Dragon Blogger try to earn $100
I have made a total of $110 in payments for the month of October, not pending payments but actual paypal received payments. ($17.50 from SocialSpark, $5 from PayPerPost, $87.50 from PayU2Blog)
So I had exceeded all of my goals except the number of back links, in the spirit of adjusting my goals I will set my November goals for reasonable growth. I have seen my blog taper off quite a bit so I won’t be unrealistic. Note each of my blogs has their own goals, and my other blogs have their own goals and income. My personal site Justin Germino has actually started making some money as well.
Goals for Dragonblogger.com for November 2008.
10 New Back Links
GA Visits Keep Average 320 per day / 9,000 Unique for the Month
Try to earn at least $100.00 for DragonBlogger.com
Dragonblogger.com would like to thank my Top Entrecard Droppers for the Month of October 2008. In addition to listing your links and sites in my table below, you get 1 free month addition to my Entrecard Generator (see page at top of this page) with a special button called EC TOP DROPPERS. Hope this sends some love back your way my friends.
So I have been tagged by KellyK
and decided to play the game and share 7 things about myself and tag some fellow bloggers who I follow and would like to learn more about.
First, these are the rules:
1. Link to your tagger and list these rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird.
3. Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blog.
4. Let them know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
So here are the 7 things about Dragon Blogger
My Real Name is Justin Robert Germino
I have lived in Arizona 13 years this month but was born and raised in New York City (Queens)
I’ve been told I am a hopeless romantic, my favorite movies include (The Princess Bride, Stardust and What Dreams May Come)
I have a very analytical job (I work with Web Site Security Software), but I am a very creative person. I channel this through my poetry blog Wanderer Thoughts
I have two beautiful boys ages 5 and 2 years old
I have only started blogging in the last 60 days and am addicted to it, also addicted to twitter now too
I have made more decent people from blogging and twitter in the last two months than I have found in 12 years.
That’s my 7 items for this tagging
So I tag the following 7 people whose blogs I follow and I would like to know 7 more things about:
PayPerPost finally deposited my first $5 dollars hard earned into my PayPal account this morning. It is my first payment from a 2nd blogging pay site. PayU2Blog is my primary bread winner right now for my blogs and out shadows the others by quite a bit. I originally had many PayPerPost opportunities when my blog was PR2, but since my blog was degraded to a PR0 now the only opportunities I qualify for are ones I would rather not post about like Insurance, Casino, Gambling, Dating…etc…
I do have standards and I will only take paid posts about things I think mesh fairly well, or something I can provide a valid and decent review of or opinion about. PayPerPost also disqualified some of my paid opps because I run google ads inside my posts via a plug-in, and I would have had to remove them in order to get paid for my posts. The problem is I don’t have the ability to remove from a single post, only all or none with the plug-in I use. So I just cancelled the opportunity instead of the hassle of trying to reconfigure my adsense banners.
SocialSpark and PayU2Blog don’t seem to mind or care if you have a google ad banner inside your post, but PayPerPost was pretty picky about it.
The last two Heroes Graphic Novels titled Sum Quod Sum Part 1 and Part 2 are centered around Elle right after she was terminated by the company by Angela Petrelli after her father was killed by Sylar. It starts off with Elle in London narrarating that she just got fired and just started losing control of her abilites. We see Daphne hand Elle the Pinehearst card on a train and tell her if she stops wanting to feel like a knife in a toaster for her to contact the company. Elle knew she couldn’t contact HRG so she winds up following and Claude the invisible man from Season 1.
Claude attempts to flee from her and she tracks him outside in the rain and blasts him to stun him, but she also gets caught in the feedback from the rain. The first comic ends with the two of them unconscious on the street. Remember Claude seems to be able to teach people to control their abilities, this is why Peter went to him back in season 1 and probably why Elle is tracking him now.
Novel 109 opens with Claude being helped by by two people a man and a woman, he asks them to bring Elle along with them. Elle wakes up in a bedroom and Claude dismisses his companions to speak with her privately. Elle informs Claude of her problem Claude throws a joke that he has been known to throw students off of buildings. Claude takes Elle to a crowded theater where he informs her that she starts going off just after her dad died and that is no coincidence. Claude lends her his ear so she can unload her “Daddy” issues. Claude tells her she needs to be able to either forgive him or at least let it out, meaning her frustration, hurt, anger at her father treating her so poorly for all those years.
We cut to a scene where Elle is sitting in a hot tub and the woman Abigail who helped Claude earlier attempts to enter but before Elle can stop her she gets shocked the moment she sticks her toe in the tub. She attacks Elle and Elle attempts to zap her, but she puts up some sort of force field in front of her that reflects the electricity right into Lee who was the other man who had helped Claude who was at the wrong place at the wrong time. Abigail punches Elle with a force field around her fist and shields Lee and herself from a potential counter attack.
Elle apologizes saying she did not mean it but they both demand she leave. Elle goes back to her room and packs up her belongings, Claude tries to convince her to stay but she made up her mind. We then cut to Elle in Noah Bennetts house right after she shocked Claires Brother waiting for her to arrive home.
These novels show that Elle just wants to be normal like Claire, and they actually have a lot in common. Except Elle was treated so poorly by her father that her sense of right and wrong are off, she also has developed sociopaths behaviors as a result. You can’t help but feel sorry for her, and hope she continues to find her way to being one of the “Good” heroes.
I looking at my blog traffic from October 1st through October 27th 2008. I seem to have plateaued in visitors and this is due in part because of my reliance on Entrecard for visitors to the website. But my numbers were still much higher than September totals.
For the month of October I had a total of 7,097 unique visitors to my site, here is my visitor and page view breakout. This is o
# of Absolute Visits is the big thing to pay attention to, this is the # of unique people who actually visit your site.
Visits includes people who just hit page refresh or the same person clicking multiple links (this is good) but absolute unique are people who hit the site for the 1st time, it doesn’t track additional clicks or page refreshes.
Pageviews are the number of times a page load has been requested, this is usually very inflated as most admins open their own site to test and refresh the page often which can drive these numbers up.
Time on Site is also important, if you see this number too low, people aren’t even reading your content, they are visiting, dropping EC’s or something like that and leaving. you see my average is 51 seconds and that isn’t really a lot of time to read full article so this means that many Entrecard droppers are “drop and run” on my blog.
Bounce Rate - This is the percentage of people who visit your site and immediately leave without looking or clicking on something else on your site. This also tends to be very high when you use Entrecard as most people just drop and run, though we will talk about bounce rate variations later this can also mean someone came to your site to read a specific article and left without bothering to search for more content.
New Visits - this is the percentage of new visitors to your site, this good if you have a high amount of traffic and means you are bringing in new people and uniques. This can be bad if you are looking for high # of RSS subscribers and return visitors though.
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My average breakout accounted to 319 visits per day which puts me at an Izea Rank in the low 300’s. Which is very good, but as mentioned I saw growth of 100 in September, 200 in early October and seem to plateau toward the end of October. I do have some days where I break over 400 uniques per day, but only 2 out of 7 days the last week hit this high of a number.
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So lets examine Traffic Sources, if you click on your Traffic Sources menu link on the left you will see several options. For now lets stick with the overviews and reading the results. Again for the time period of 10/1 - 10/27 my stats break down like this:
18.55% of my traffic is direct (this means someone had my site bookmarked, or typed my URL manually)
46.75% is from referring sites such as entrecard, technorati, zimbio…etc
34.70% is from Search Engines
This is actually pretty good statistics, almost 20% of the people have bookmarked dragonblogger.com or come to it directly which is 1 out of 5 people. These would be return visitors most likely you can assume. obviously almost 50% of my traffic comes from referring sites, so this can be good or bad depending on the referring sites. I get 1/3 of my traffic from Google searches which is good it means when people search for keywords, my site is showing up and people are arriving on it from Google searches.
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This final graph, (you have to click on the picture to read the numbers and percentages.) shows you that Google accounts for the highest percentage of hits to my site called “Organic” which is very good. Organic means people are finding you and this means a high unique # of visitors. Entrecard is however #2 and accounts for the other 1/3 of my traffic. This shows that entrecard works in bringing visitors, but this also means that if I stopped doing drops tomorrow, I would lose about 30% of my unique visits as people stopped returning the favor. I consider this artificial traffic or manufactured traffic. I have to drop to get drops, and this is a gift and a curse for Entrecard. I do spend way to much time now, almost 2 hours a day doing EC drops and I can’t keep doing it when I could be focusing on writing quality blog posts instead. So in November I am going to wean back on Entrecard a bit and see how much of a hit I take.
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So this is an overview of some high level statistics you can garner from Google Analytics, don’t ignore these, you can look for trends, patterns. Look for which days have high # of unique visitors and see what you posted and how you advertised to learn what works best.
We start off with Hiro and Ando discussing what path to take regarding the villains where it is revealed that Arthur will become the most powerful man in the world. Hiro is still cautions and does not want to go back in time based on what happened the last time he went back in time.
We see Flashbacks to Nathan, Peter and Arthur from Peters dreams, and then he awakes chained to a table. His father admits to taking his abilities and that they are gone forever. He tries to convince Peter to join him and help him but Peter defiantly explains what the future will be and that they have to stop it.
Claire and Sandra talking in a car about what they just dealt with. Arrive to find house is Elle at their housee sparking up the place. Elle electrocutes Claire but she can’t feel pain so she is unable to hurt her, Sandra throws a bucket full of water on Claire and short circuits her. She then breaks down and says she needs help. Elle tries to leave and she keeps short circuiting saying that she lost control of her abilities. They both decide to go to the company and try to solve their problems.
Dr. Suresh, Nathan and Tracy were in the standoff from last week, when Suresh grabs Maya from a cocoon and flee’s through the ceiling. Later we cut to Suresh at Arthur Petrelli’s company lab where he keeps Maya. Arthur goes in and steals Maya’s ability which is what she wanted and shortly after Suresh confides in Arthur about his abilities and side effects and how he wants to keep the abilities but reverse the physical mutations. Arthur convinces Suresh to work with the company to help develop the formula and it could work for him.
Angela winds up being able to speak to Sylar while she is immobilized and comatose. She comes to him in his dreams and helps him wake up. Sylar escapes his imprisonment in the Level 5 cell promising to save Peter.
Daphne comes in on Maury and Arthur and they talk to her about her failure to recruit Matt Parkman. Maury tries to stand in front of Arthur to save his son and Arthur kills Maury snapping his neck. Arthur is merciless, cruel and just as quick to kill any of his followers, which may be his downfall in the future. Daphne is terrified and begs for another way to make it up to him claiming she is a thief not a killer.
Matt Parkman is at his apartment and on the phone with Mohinder when Daphne shows up with a loaded gun. Matt invites her to shoot him if its the only way to save her life. Daphne can’t kill him and he reads that her father was killed by Arthur. Meanwhile when we cut back to the two of them, Matt and Daphne discuss the company and what to do about it. Knox who has been shadowing Daphne arrives outside the apartment door and breaks in to attack them. Daphne tries to flee and Knox breaks her neck before she can escape. Matt incapacitates Knox temporarily but Knox turns the tide on him, breaks loose from Matt’s mental grip and kills him by punching his fist through his body. Knox walks off leaving Daphne and Matt dead on the floor, only it is then revealed that Matt made Knox believe the whole thing and it was all an illusion. This was such an incredible scene and it was so amazing that they played it this way, I was so relieved and happy at the same time.
Peter tries to escape captivity and challenges his father again about the fate of the world and what his plans will bring. Arthur detains him again and has him shipped to the lab where Suresh can test on him. Peter implores Mohinder to help and tells him about what he becomes in the future, but as Suresh is just about to inject Peter. Sylar arrives and attempts to rescue him which means a battle ensues between Mohinder and Sylar, and though Sylar gets the first bash. Mohinder’s superhuman strength overpowers him and Dr. Suresh beats on Sylar, smashing his head and face over and over while he lies on the ground. Peter attempts to escape and does manage to get away while Arthur shows up to interject and stop Mohinder from brutalizing Sylar further who is now beaten unconscious on the floor.
You have to give Tim Kring credit for writing a character like Sylar who you can hate/love in the first season and find yourself rooting for a murderer in this season. He has always been one of the most popular characters on the show and it is easy to see why.
Later we see Nathan and Traci are waiting at Suresh’s lab for Noah Bennett to show up, they start investigating the cocooned individuals when one of them attacks Traci. Meredith and Noah show up in time to stun the cocooned man and parlay about the situation.
Meanwhile Claire and Elle decide to take a flight to get to PineHears and while on the airplane Elle is short circuiting causing electrical problems on the plane. Claire decides to become a conduit for Elle’s electricity so that she can channel it into her releasing it from Elle. This allows Elle to discharge and temporarily abates the short circuits. Later Claire and Elle walk up to PineHearst headquarters and have a heart to heart thanking each other. With a few funny quips by Elle that the more Claire is nice to her the more she hates her they both witness Peter fall from a 7 story window.
Arthur has Sylar suspended in the air as they talk about Angela and Sylar still is defiant and threatening Arthur. Arthur attempts to appeal to Sylar’s reason and he explains Angela tried to kill Sylar shortly after birth seeing what he would become. Arthur apparently convinces Sylar to abandon his mother and join with him instead claiming he needs to learn the truth about his mother. A few moments later when Sylar is alone Peter instead of trying to esacpe the building without any powers at all, instead was trying to find and free Sylar. Mohinder who is in another room in the same building walks in and confronts Maya about the past. Maya doesn’t want to speak to him and she says she can never trust him. Mohinder tries to convey his feelings were real for her and she leaves to go make amends for her past. Peter walks into the room where Sylar is currently occupying and he explains how he can’t leave his brother behind, but Peter finds out too late that Sylar has switched sides. Peter tries to reason with him and when Arthur walks into the room Sylar telekinetically throws Peter out the window, he plummets below presumably to his death but Peter hits the ground and instead of being killed is badly injured, Claire and Elle who just witnessed this rush up to him, Claire walks away with him inquiring how he was able to fall that far without dying if he can’t heal. Elle wants her powers removed and instead of fleeing with Claire and Peter goes into the building to try and have per powers removed.
Cut to Nathan and Traci talking with Noah about what Dr. Suresh was doing, it was funny when Noah says in response to the question about what Mohinder was doing “Building a nest, laying eggs.. Who the hell knows”. Noah tells Nathan and Traci that he needs to have them come in and be tested to make sure they are both still “normal”. Meredith, Nathan and Traci have an awkward moment, where Meredith tells Traci to watch out for that one (pointing at Noah). Nathan steps away to answer a call from Claire who explains about his brother and asks for his help.
We cut to Arthur and Sylar talking about Peter surviving the fall without dying. They both don’t know how Peter survived the fall, meanwhile Arthur takes a call from Daphne who reveals that she is still working for Arthur and now playing a spy against the Primatech company.
We turn to Claire and Peter who starts to think that Sylar slowed Peter’s descent and saved his life. Nathan arrives beside Peter and learns Peter lost all of his powers, Nathan is shocked to find out that Arthur their father is still alive. Nathan clearly lies to his brother and plans to go see his father. Nathan is foolish to think he can take on the company himself and being that he can so easily be bought, he will likely defect to Arthur’s side very quickly.
We cut to Hiro and Ando with the African Visionary where Hiro is still trying to avoid going back in time and yet still learn about his enemies. They decide to go on a spirit walk to learn about his opponents by eating a grotesque paste and then wait. Hiro then quickly falls into a spirit trance and Ando is unable to wake him up.
The episode then ends and the new episode is in two weeks. A preview shows that we will be taken back years before anyone had abilities and this looks pretty good.
I have been using TwitterBerry since Saturday and I can say that it does a great job of allowing you to send your tweets from your mobile device. What it doesn’t work so well as is to direct message or direct reply someone, though you can view your replies and direct messages, you can’t return them. I am following around 500 people and for some reason when I try to “See what my friends are doing” my Twitterberry application just stalls loading forever and never updating. I don’t know if there is just too much for my blackberry to download, or the application just cant handle or what.
But I can only seem to use my Twitterberry for posting tweets or checking replies and direct messages, I have to go to Twitter website to check all my follower’s tweets.
Does anyone else have this problem with Twitterberry?
