I have been extremely busy experimenting with various blogger social networks and keeping up a presence here and there and I am going to suffer burn out pretty soon I imagine.

I continue to have a strong presence on Twitter with my daily Random Twitter Poems, ironically, my poetry blog is very popular but makes n0 money at all, I don’t do paid posts on it, since I really want it to be my purely creative outlet.

I continue to strongly keep a presence on SocialSpark, Zimbio, Entrecard and have added Blog Catalog, Digg and StumbleUpon.

I also do a little on Mixx, Plurk, as well as leaving blog comments and directly engaging other bloggers via their own blogs.

All of this I do within the short 2 hours per day I have to blog, I usually can’t do much during my work hours but send out a tweet and take in a random poem during my lunch break. My whole purpose is to use these social networks to get to know people and have them get to know me, the more people I meet and interface with the better. Building many social networks is key to getting people to know who you are and once you start getting name recognition among enough people your blog can spread via word of mouth or “tweet”.

I am going to have to invest in espresso machines if I keep up with this level of activity.

-Dragon Blogger

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

Does this happen to you?

Seriously this is many times in the past 7 days where Entrecard has become unstable and just not working, last Friday and Saturday the site was almost down for 2 complete days and it looks like the pattern is going to repeat again. At this point there is nothing that can be done but check back in a few hours.

I do love Entrecard, but I need to expand my social blogging horizons and keep finding new services, I don’t like taking a dip in unique traffic whenever there is a full day Entrecard outage.

What other services do my readers like using? Besides Twitter, SocialSpark, Technorati? I have seen some people on HubPages and BlogCatalog, but not experimented with those much? One blogger told me they get a huge amount of their traffic from Craigslist. I don’t know how, I put ads up for my sites on Craigslist, but don’t really ever notice any traffic coming from.

-Dragon Blogger

I have been reading many other blogs who have reported the same google ranking loss, and it seems that one thing that is apparent.  Google clearly penalizes blogs who try to do some paid posts for money.  I did do about 10 paid posts over the past two weeks, and even though I have over 120+ posts and less than 10% are paid content, the paid links are what everyone has said kills your pagerank.

Makes it hard to figure how to monetize your blog when many paid opps require a PR of 3, 4 or 5+ and yet to do paid opps you lose your PR.  Kind of like a double edged sword in my opinion.

So I am stuck just doing my promotion and networking as usual, my paid opp’s have dried up at this point.  Gonna be real hard to make some extra money this month it would seem.  However, I am not going to be discouraged, I enjoy blogging and would do it even if there was no way to make money at it.  I am hooked now and doing it for the enjoyment of doing it, and meeting new people along the way.

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.