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17 Sep

Dragon Bloggers Tips for Starting a New Blog or Your First Blog Part 2 – Setting Goals for yourself

By: dragonblogger  //  Category: Internet, blogging      //  1 Comment »

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.

blogsearch 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.


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14 Sep

Tips for Beginning Bloggers by Damien Riley

By: dragonblogger  //  Category: Guest Post      //  2 Comments »

This is a guest blog post by Damien Riley.

Before I write about how you can increase traffic and links, I want to establish my belief that content is more important than making money on blogs. If I stopped making money today, I would still blog because I love it. Having said that, you need traffic and links to make money with your content. That’s what this post is about.

When you’re starting out it is an exciting time. This is partially true because you have nowhere to go but up and therefore any results you see is an improvement. After you start looking around at other blogs however, you find there is always someone doing better. The worst type I run across are those who have better numbers than me and yet give no effort.
I have learned to run my own race.
In doing so, there will always be those ahead and those behind. Don’t get caught up in comparing yourself.
Well, the teacher in me decided to write a blog for those who are starting out. I hope some of this stuff helps you get better numbers and therefore better paid opportunities. Here are three things you can do to increase traffic and 3 to increase incoming links:
Traffic:
  1. Use services like Entrecard, Blogrush, Blog Catalog, etc. Use them to befriend people and make social contacts. It is the contacts you make with humans that increase your numbers in the long run, don’t play with them like games, see them as bars where you hang out with important people that can help you make money.
  2. Use Stumbleupon to ask your SU friends to Stumble the posts you really believe in. Don’t have any? Start adding some. This has brought some of my authority posts 1,000′s of new visitors overnight.
  3. Write an “authority” post once or twice a month. These are posts that Michelle MacPhearson says should take you 3-5 hours to research and write. Think of your blog as a daily bulletin board but it is also a resource that will come up for readers in the future. Many of my posts each week at Postcards from the Funny Farm are written with the intent of being reference posts people will dig up and use later.
Incoming Links:
  1. Write guest blogs and send them to your friends for them to publish. Notice I didn’t say “ask your friends.” In your submission to them tell them you are submitting a guest blog to them and you hope it will do. 95% of the time I have done this, the receiver has been all too glad to publish. Pick your sources well. Don’t get bitter if they don’t accept it. You might follow up in a few days asking why they haven’t responded. At that point, you can tweak to suit and publish it as your own post … no harm no foul and one less sorry ding-a-ling cluttering your blogroll (LOL I can be brash at times I apologize).
  2. Buy text-links on blogs you like but don’t know well. I’ve seen them as low as fifty cents a word/link.
  3. Use other URL’s you might have to refernce back to you. If it shows up in Google, it’s bonafide.
As you grow in the craft of blogging, I know you’ll learn a lot. Keep track of the important stuff. As a parting set of words: Remember that if you aim at nothing you will hit it. Blogging is about self-expression for some, money for others. Maybe you fall in between. It doesn’t matter really because it all gets published when you click the button. I have come to believe that those who think of themeselves as “purists,” those who don’t blog for money, ought to simply buy the most beautiful leather bound journal, crawl up in bed to write and leave the internet to the real writers who are writing excellent content, looking to market, looking to get paid for their craft.

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