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

• RealRank (Izea Rank stays < 400)

• Alexa Rank below 200,000

Wish me luck in meeting my blog goals.

-Dragon Blogger

First off, I have only been blogging for about 40 days now and I have heard other people rant about the Google Pagerank instability and having been “hit” by Google Pagerank.  I don’t believe how yesterday and for the last two weeks my blogs was a PR2 and then today bam I am now slammed with a PR0.  I didn’t convert my site from http://dragonblogger.com to http://www.dragonblogger.com, my backlinks, and all external links are growing and not shrinking.

My IZEARank is <400, my Alexa rank is 300,000 3 month average and <150,000 1 week average.  So what gives, how does something like this happen?

The bad thing is now my blog won’t qualify for many of the opps that require PR2 or above, so my blog goals just got a lot harder to achieve.

So, go ahead my fellow bloggers, rant here about your Google Pagerank story.  Who else has been burned?

Now that we are at October 1st 2008, it is time for me to set goals for my blog’s second month of life.  I have achieved quite a bit with my first month and am going to realistically pace myself a little better for the second month.

Rather than try to achieve some rediculously low IzeaRank I will set this purpose:

1. Keep my Blog < 1000 IzeaRank
2. Keep my Blog < 500,000 Alexa Rank
3. 20 new Back Links
4. Average Unique Visits to 200 consistantly, this means I am shooting for 6000 Visits for the month on GA
5. Dragon Blogger try to earn $100

I go into these goals with renewed spirit and realize how much I not only enjoy blogging, but browsing around getting to know others in my blogging community.  Some of you are my regulars, and some of you are just visiting my blog for Heroes posts, or Blogging Tips and such.

If anyone has any topic, they would like me to share or talk about be sure and let me know.  Especially if you need help with your blogging, or any sort of internet related technology.

-Dragon Blogger

In the spirit of mentioning top droppers for Entrecard, I have decided to do one post per month giving props to my fellow entrecard users who have consistantly dropped on me.
Here is a list of the top 20 bloggers who dropped on my Entrecard Site for the Month of September.

Thank you very much to everyone on the list, enjoy your linkback.
Great registry hacks
BMWF1Blog
Kutsara at Tinidor
IndoContest
chorva!
Here to Ask Why
Random Thoughts
Steven Video
info ebazaar blogging corner
Waycool Modz

-Dragon Blogger

I just learned something about wordpress that I didn’t know, many of you probably knew this feature but I just learned it tonight.  Did you know you can edit the date of your post and set it to the future, like tomorrow or next week.  When you publish your blog post with a future date, it won’t display and actually be available to your readers until that date.

This is the perfect way to write a whole bunch of posts and pre-date them if you will be on vacation, so that your blog updates with new posts every day without you having to do a darn thing while you are on vacation.  Of course you can’t write about current events for that day, but for a poetry blog, or philosophy or personal blog, you can create posts just so your blog doesn’t have a few days missing posts.

This was a really neat feature in my opinion.

You just click edit on the right of creating a new post, and change the date for any future date.

See Screenshot:

Now before you chafe me with “we knew that, how did you not know that?” Remember, I have only been blogging for about 37 days with wordpress, so I am still new and learning it.

So, I will turn this question into a Spark Contest.
How many of you bloggers alter your post date, to either past or future to either, what are some of the reasons for altering your post date? What benefits do you look for? (Besides trying to age your blog for pay sites).

-Dragon Blogger

Now that it is the last day of the month I will repost my goals I had set for Sep ‘08 and list my stats, earned money among other information.

• First here were my goals for September:

<1500 average weekly IZEARank
<1.5 million Alexa Rank average
50+ average visits per day
20 RSS Subscribers
10 backlinks from google

I have exceeded every one of these goals except the RSS Subscribers. At one point I was up to 12 subscribers, but that has dropped down to 7. I lost some subscribers due to me posting some paid content, and I talked about that in a previous post. It is hard to find a balance between providing good content and making some money from your blog as well. I try to keep 10% paid content, with 90% quality original content.

• Here are my specifics for the month:

My Weekly IzeaRank is 708
Here is snapshot

Alexa rank average is 626,765 this month:
Here is snapshot:

My average # of visits is 101 per day according to Google Analytics and 89 per day according to SocialSpark.
Here is snapshot of Google Analytics:

Backlinks I am referring to are only from blogsearch link: searches.
I have 10 links to http://dragonblogger.com
I have 26 links to http://www.dragonblogger.com
For a total of 36 backlinks for the month.

Link Popularity Check shows that i have 5,750 links on the web total, which is around 2,000 more than at the beginning of the month, I am closing fast on DamienRiley.com but still a long way away from postcardsfromthefunnyfarm’s 14,902 links.

Snapshot of LPC

I didn’t project or set a goal for income for my September as it was my blogs first month, but I did make some money from this blog and will report it below:

Google Adsense = $7.83
Social Spark = $6.00
PayU2Blog = $62.50

For a total of $76.33 for my blogs first month of operation.

So that is my blog’s performance for the month of September 2008, I am going to set some new goals for October and post them tomorrow.

Now that you have read my Dragon Bloggers Tips for Starting a New Blog or Your First Blog you are ready for Part 2. Some of this advice comes from my friend Damien Riley who’s “CAN” acronym I am using as well as building upon from my own point of view.

According to Damien you set these 3 goals every month:
Circulation - the number of backlinks to your site
Analytics - visits to your site
Net - how much money your blog makes or income.

I have a little bit different of a goal set in mind, assume you are just starting a new blog and have not yet figured out how to monetize your blog. I only just won my first sponsored post a few days ago, so my blog has netted me $6 which is still in pending, but my blog is only 4 weeks old so I am off to a decent start.

I set realistic expectations for gaining sponsorship, viewers, and advertisers.

Note: Most pay sites and advertisers want to see the following as a minimum to consider advertising on your blog:
Must have IZEARank < 1000
Must have Alexa Rank < 1,000,000
Must have Google PR of 2+
Must have 100+ visits per day

Now, IZEARank, Alexa are very frustrating since you can drop or gain so much on a daily basis, you have to throw away daily ranks and ratings, and base them on 3 month averages. If you don’t have a blog that is 3 months old, for now don’t worry about these. You can just use weekly as your target, but don’t make my mistake and start fretting the Ranks right off the bat. I would watch my IZEARank be 7000+ one day, then 3500 the next, then 1700, then back up to 4000. Just ignore this temptation to track and micromanage rankings.

Some good goals to set for yourself as a new blog are the following:

At the end of your blog’s 1st month
<4000 weekly average for IZEARank
<2,000,000 average for Alexa Rank
25-30 average visits per day.

Set a goal for 10 backlinks for your first month
Try to set a goal for 5 RSS subscribers in your first month

Don’t worry about a money goal for your first month unless you are super ambitious and have more time than normal.

I set some lofty goals for myself, My blog started on August 21st 2008.

By September 30th I am am trying to achieve the following:

<1500 average weekly IZEARank
<1.5 million Alexa Rank average
50+ average visits per day
20 RSS Subscribers
10 backlinks from google

To check your google backlinks do the following:
Go to http://blogsearch.google.com
type link:
example link:http://www.dragonblogger.com will show you all of my backlinks

Then you click on “Past Month” to see your backlinks for the past 30 days.
I currently have 4 out of my goal of 10 as you can see in this snapshot.

Start small and use social networking sites to help you reach your goal. At first you will have lots of unique visitors and it will be hard to have sustained readership, don’t get too excited when you have 1 day with 90+ visits, but the next has 25 visits but don’ t get discouraged if your site only has 5-10 visits its first few days and weeks. This up and down spiking will happen until you can get backlinks and many posts out there. The more quality posts you have the more people will come to your site.

Stay tuned for part 3 which is promoting, linking and gaining readership.

I am learning each and every day about blogging, I have been blogging since June 2008 with my first blog, but then started a replacement blog Dragonblogger.com in August 2008.  So I really have only been blogging for about 3 months and only seriously and with wordpress for about 4 weeks.  Each and every day I am learning new things about blogging, how to write more engaging blogs, how to promote your blog, how to market and properly praise other bloggers…  Tools, Techniques, Tips…etc

A new blogger starts out with the following in mind:

• 1)  Do I want to blog and why?

Find out why you want to blog, what is the purpose?  Is it just to share your opinion and thoughts and life with the world, is it to make money online, or maybe a little of both.

• 2) What type of blog service should I use?

If you are doing a personal or diary type blog, with only casual advertising pick up, or if it is your first blog then I would recommend using Blogger, or a Free Wordpress blog.  If you want to develop a professional blog, or you want to have a string of multiple blogs, then you will need to pay for web hosting and install and configure a wordpress blog.

• 3)  What do I want my blog to look like?

This is one of the hardest things, how to style your blog.  Many bloggers like artistic and wildly colorful blogs and many of them look great.  I kind of fashion the following rule:  If you are blogging about art, music, entertainment then I think an artistic blog is much more attractive and fits the bill.  If you are doing a political blog, having a theme with flowers and kittens is a little out of character.  Plain generic white themes with 2 columns are also the most popular, and functional, but personally in my humble opinion I like to see a little “Personality” in a blog site.  Even if it is a colorful logo, or some borders.  Generic white blogs to me tend to reek too much of “Regurgitated content” and my initial impression is that maybe someone didn’t put time into stylizing their blog because they aren’t that serious.

That being said, plain simple blogs are fine for many people, and there is nothing wrong with them.  I may use one for one of my blogs, but I tend to like a little color and a little style that makes your blog stand out a little from the rest.  That being said, my black with silver theme is fairly common too, I have truly seen some really nice templates out there.

I recommend having a blog with no less than 3 columns
Content Column - Where all your posts lie
Advertiser Column -  Where you can put all your 125×125 ad buttons or links
Social Column - This is the column where you put all your social traffic stats, rank badges…etc.

Some people just have 2 advertiser columns and mix and match advertisements with badges, traffic…etc which is fine as well.

If you use Entrecard put it at the top of your site, so that people can find it easily.  It is very annoying to bury it down at the bottom of a site, or in the middle where people have to scroll and search really hard to find it.  This tends to prevent people from dropping and may hurt your drops in the long run.

• 4)  What widgets, plug-ins and text links to put in:

I highly recommend getting a Google PR badge, Alexa Badge, Izearanks Badge, and Technorati Badge as the starters.  I would also recommend getting a Feedburner or other RSS plug-in which displays your readers.  A feedjit feed is also good and fun, the map isn’t necessary, but its nice to show a list of people who are visiting your site.  It is also cool as heck to watch the real time live feed, where you can see people pop on your site from around the world.

Create some “Advertise Here” and “Hire Me” buttons, this tip provided by my good friend Damien Riley.  You want to let advertisers and companies know that they can hire you or sponsor your site.  Create a Hire Me page, with a contact form “cforms II” is my favorite forms plug-in for wordpress.

• 5)  Create your first 10-20 good quality posts

Before you even start advertising, you need to establish some base content.  First create an introduction page, include a disclosure agreement as a widget, or in your introduction page.  Then create 10-20 good quality blog posts about your chosen blog topic, or if you are a personal diary, write about some recent things.  These posts should be at least 250 words in content and have no more than 2 links out per post.  (Too many links out of your site, will hurt your site rating I am told).

• 6)  Join Socialspark, Entrecard, StumbleUpon, Digg, Technorati…etc

Join as many social networks as possible and create accounts and information about yourself and your blog.  This will help you get established and start building a network of friends.  Some people can be very helpful and others not so much.  I have made some great friends already, people whose generosity really makes me glad to have started blogging and met them.  Don’t overkill and spam people to visit your site, just casually add people to be your friend, or visit their blog, and leave a comment on one of their posts.  Find people who use commentluv, which will link back to your blog.

• Final Thoughts

Those are some of my tips for today, I will post more as I learn more.  I will be posting soon about setting blog goals for yourself after getting an established blog.  Remember, blogging is about expressing yourself and your thoughts, opinions.  Don’t regurgitate content if you can avoid it, if you find an article you want to quote, put it in your own words, and then link to the original article.  Don’t cut/paste content verbatim from other sites just to fill POST quota.

Enjoy Blogging, I really am finding it quite an addicting endeavor

-Dragon Blogger