Okay, so I was playing around with Google Web Master tools tonight some more, and have decided to look at the google searches that take place and what my site lists at when people do searches.
The first graph GWT (Google WebMaster Tools) shows you is “Impressions” these are the queries where your site gets listed.  (Not user’s who arrive at your site, but what queries, and what place your site gets listed in the results).  This is important, because you want to know what queries your site is showing up under.

So you will see in this image (you can click to make it larger) that”Heroes” related queries account for many my blog showing up in google search quite a bit.  Some queries my blog is as low as the 4th or 3rd position which I think anything in the first 5 is pretty good for a start.

Ubuntu related posts and iPod related posts are my next ones.  Ironically if someone searches for “Dragonfly Poems” my blog is the 9th site listed since I have a few posts that link to and talk about that site.

The next statistic is traffic, traffic is actual users who end up on your site based on the query they searched in google.  This is extremely important as it will help you craft your site’s “tags” to be more google search friendly.  Learn the pattern of queries so you can adjust your tags accordingly.

Here you will see thatagain ipod and ubuntu, and heroes related queries are very big for my blog.  But someone who searched for “Detailed Hardware Information” arrived on my blog, and I was the #2 position on that query.  This was probably my CPU-Z post, where I actually used the tag “Detailed Hardware Information”

So if you make your tags match what you think somebody would search in google to arrive at your site, you can bet better rankings and matches and therefore be in the top listings.  Obviously the popularity of a site also affects your listing, so if 10,000 sites matched the same tag, the popular ones would get the top slots, but still.  I am surprised that my blog only 30 days has any queries that match the top 3-9 queries on Google, so its a good start.

Just thought I would share this with the world, how many other blogger’s out there do this kind of Query Analysis of their blog on a regular basis?

-Dragon Blogger

I have received numerous requests via email on how I have gotten my blog to under 1000 IzeaRank in only its first 35 days of existance.  I have to say that one of the biggest tools that I use to achieve this is Entrecard.  First of all, I want to say that though my visitors to my site are high, I have a high bounce rate of 84%, which means that if I were to stop using these social networks, I would lose 70% of my traffic within 3 or 4 days.  I don’t have sustainable traffic yet, it takes about 1-2 hours of upkeep per day to keep this much traffic coming into my blog at this point.  I still strive for blog sustainability and I only believe this will happen with time and high quality posts about topics readers want to read about.

Here is an overview of Entrecard.

First you have an entrecard account, I recommend an account for each and every one of your blogs, but you can link them all together (more on that a little later).

You create a 125×125 pixel ad for your blog, make sure you have your blog’s name or URL inside the 125×125 ad.  Having a picture with no blog name or URL makes it hard for people to know who you are or what your blog URL is.  You want this to stick in their mind even after they see and recognize your entrecard picture.

Once you create an account you will go into your dashboard as seen here:

The biggest thing to note about your dashboard are the following:

1. The amount of credits you have (this is your advertising credits, EC’s)
2. The amount of cards you dropped today / all time
3. The amount of credits it costs to advertise on your blog
4. The amount of cards dropped on you today / all time

• Entrecard Credits (ECs)

These are advertiser credits, like online dollars. Each site you want to display your entrecard on costs a certain amount of ECs per day. You purchase advertising in 24 hour chunks for a set # of ECs from a blog site.
The more popular a blog is (the more drops it receives) the more it costs to advertise on that blog.
You get 1 EC for each drop you perform on someones blog, and you also get 1 EC for each drop that is made on your blog. You also get ECs from advertisers who purchase spots on your blog, but these ECs are paid only when the advertisers AD is displayed not at time of purchase.

• Dropping Cards

Dropping cards is one of the best ways to get ECs as well as get your blog visited by other Entrecard users.  When you first start out and link a blog, you will use the “Campaign” button at the top and do a search for blogs related to your blogs topic.  If you write poetry, do searches for “Poem, Poetry, Writing”…etc and then visit each and every one of these blogs sites and drop on them.

Tip:  Hover over the little Entrecard of the Site and hold Control Key and then click on “Visit Site”.  This will open the site in a new Firefox or Google Chrome tab.  This allows you to mass open a bunch of sites at the same time, then flip to each of the taps with Control - Page Up or Control - Page Down, click the drop, then Control + W to close the tab.  This is a little trick which allows me to make dozens of drops very quickly.

Here is another note, look for sites that say “Drop For Life” or “Drop U Back”.  You know these people will almost always pay you back with a drop.  Secondly, look at blog post before you drop.  If you visit a blog that has a last post > 30 days ago, pretty much assume there is a good chance it is a less than active blog.  Drop if you like the topic but don’t necessarily expect a drop back.

I always try to read some of my dropper’s posts on their main page before dropping, and I comment where appropriate.  This is because even though they appreciate the drop, dropping and running will give the blog a high “Bounce Rate” and though they get the Unique Visits, it shows that their content isn’t keeping people on the site for a follow up click.

• Drops Inbox

After you have done many drops and you notice people start dropping on your site, go to your Drops Inbox as often as possible, at least daily.  Remember you can only drop once time per 24 hours, and if people are doing 2 drops on your blog but you are only returning 1, they aren’t inclined to keep dropping as often.  Entrecard requires a little bit of work, try to drop on all people who drop on you every day.  I set aside 1 hour per day to just perform entrecard drops and advertisements.

The funny thing is, when I was doing multiple Entrecard drops per day, I was losing track of which droppers I was returning the favor on.  I now use the “Show only people I haven’t dropped on” drop down menu, to show all the Entrecards of visitors who I haven’t dropped in the last 24 hours.  This way if you check your Entrecard several times a day, you know who is left to drop on for that day.

• Advertising

Okay here is the fun part, when you start off a new blog you need to advertise it, but you won’t have very many EC’s so you want to click on Campain, and click on Search, then Sort by Cheapest. But beware, many of the cheap blogs either are decomissioned or have never updated in months so they are cheap for a reason. New blogs sometimes don’t have a badge setup yet. Visit every site before you pay to advertise on the site, make sure the site is up, the site works, and doesn’t have content that conflicts with yours. Also visit their profile and see how often they accept or respond to advertisers, and note what their reject rate is.

When people advertise on your blog, visit their site first before just accepting.  Make sure its content is appropriate.  Secondly, reject some way off topic advertisers.  By doing some rejections, you actually make your blog more popular in the long run as you don’t look like you pander to just anyone.  But don’t reject too many or people won’t even try to advertise.

• Handling Multiple Blogs

This is one of my favorite parts about Entrecard is the ability to have multiple accounts and link all of the blogs together so you can switch back and forth between your Entrecard accounts.  You can only do 300 drops per day on one account, but if you have multiple accounts you can drop up to 600 cards per day.  I often try to get 300 drops per day, and I usually do at least 20-30 additional for my secondary blogs for about 400 drops per day.

The switch tab near your email at the top is very useful, this lets you see linked accounts and transfer ECs between your blogs so you can give your baby blogs more advertiser credits.  This also allows you to easily switch back and forth between your accounts, to check their dashboards for advertisers, and visit the drops inbox to return drop favors.

• Dragon Blogger Tips

Last but not least now I will explain how I use Entrecard.
I always drop everyone who drops on me, and if there wasn’t enough people dropping on me to fill up 300 drops, then I start campaign browsing. Honestly, I sometimes do Random searches, and drop on random people. I always give preference to bloggers who list “Drop U Back” or who list their Top Droppers on their blog, as these people tend to show more odds to return the favor. Secondly I drop on my advertisers, even if they aren’t in my drops inbox, because they advertised with me, I drop them. I also sometimes blog chain, and I can knock off lots of drops this way. This is when you visit a blogger’s site, and open the entrecard ad in their site to another site, then do the same over and over again. Dropping on each site as you go. This causes me to reach out to random blogs, but it also lets me see the blogs who really are advertising like crazy out there. When I see one blog having ten or twenty ads on other blogs I know they are heavily promoted.

I buy advertisments on expensive sites where I can, and cheap sites when I don’t have the credits for the big sites.  If I don’t have any ads running in the next 24 hours, I will sort my searches looking for blogs that have no ADs in the queue.  I try to have at least 3-4 ads running every day on someones blog somewhere.

I do visit the Statistics page and look at top droppers…etc and I will do a follow up blog on leveraging the Entrecard Analytics.

Happy Dropping my friends,

-Dragon Blogger

I have tried numerous Google Adsense Plug-ins for Wordpress downloaded from Wordpress Plugin site and have had limited success. Most of the plug-ins will only display the Google Adsense on the post if the post is the only page loaded, but not on the home page.

Alas, my good friend Damien Riley informed me of the Plug-in he used. It is called “All in One Adsense and YPN” and it works beautifully. First of all it is very easy to setup and allows you to create any size Adsense Banner you want without having to create one on Google Adsense site first. You don’t need to know or copy/paste any of the HTML/Javascript code for an Adsense banner. This Plug-in will do it all for you.

Once you download the Plug-in from the site, unzip it and copy the folder and files to your Wordpress / wp-content/plug-ins folder on your web server. Once that is done open up your WP-Admin and click on Plug-Ins. Select the All in One Adsense and YPN Plug-in and enable it.

Then you click on the Settings -> Adsense Link and you will see the Adsense Options Below.
Click on Photo for Larger View

First you enter your Adsense ID (this can be found on Google Adsense Website by clicking on My Account, then looking at the bottom at “Property Information”. You only enter the #, not the “ca-pub-” part.

Second you enter your Adsense Channel (if you are using a specific Channel for your ad). Channels are recommended so you can see which ads bring in revenue and perform better.

Next you select what ad type (I usually do Text and Image) but if you prefer text only, or image only select that.

Next Select your Corner Style, I always liked the “Slightly Rounded Corners” but select whatever you prefer.

Now select your Ad Size. If you don’t know what the pixels translate to onscreen, you can go to Google Ad Formats page to view sizes of ads.

Next set your colors, I always try to match my Google Ads to my color scheme of my website. Nothing is worse than having a black website with a big ugly white box for a Google Ad. Though if you have a White background website, white works fine.

Next you set the # of Ads to show per page. Remember you can only have 3 Google Ad’s on the same page, so if you have Google Ads in your sidebar (I have 2) I can’t have more than 1 additional set per page. If you only use 1 Google Ad in your sidebar, then you can have 2 set here, or if you have none in your sidebar you can have 3 set here.

Now you set the # of Ads to show per post, rarely do you want to show more than 1 ad per individual post, so I would always set this to one.

Ad Positioning is important and this Plug-in gives you much flexibility, Top Centered is preferred in my case, but some people like Bottom Left, or Bottom Center.

Finally you set the Add space between ad and text, this is how much of a gap you set between your post verbiage and the ad. This is another very useful, as you don’t want too little or too much of a space. Experiment to find the gap you like.

Next but not least you have the ability to ad custom code before or after the ad. This could be tag code, other ad code, verbiage or anything else you can think of.

Now you can choose where NOT to display these ads, for those who don’t like an ad on their homepage, you can check mark “homepage” and you won’t have an ad display on your homepage. You can also prevent ads from displaying on your static pages and your archive pages, which is also useful.

The last bit of options are useful as well.
You can check mark “Only let myself see the ads” for testing, so you can see the ads but not let your viewers see them yet.

You can also check mark so that the ads won’t display for you, so that only your viewers will see them. I don’t recommend this because you won’t know if they are working unless you can see what your reader see’s however.

So my fellow bloggers, I encourage everyone who wants to or already uses Google Adsense to give this Plug-in a try if you haven’t already. Let me know what you think.

-Dragon Blogger

I have been promoting my site heavily over the past month since its conception and creation. My blog is still billed as 50% technical, 25% entertainment, and 25% paid content. I am doing my best to keep with those statistics and so far I am doing well. I am proud to say I have been consistently being viewed by over 100 unique visitors per day, but I had an explosion of visitors in the last 24 hours.

This is in part due to my posts of the NBC Heroes website. I wrote 2 reviews of the first 2 episodes of Season 1 and Season 2 (you can search for them in my search bar). I also posted my reviews on some NBC Forums and IMDB.com and I have jumped from my average of 100 Unique visitors per day to almost 300 unique visitors yesterday. Most of them have come to read my review of the NBC Heroes TV Show.

That being said, I have decided to write a post each and every Monday night or Tuesday morning devoted to each Heroes Episode, since it clearly is very popular and is a good thing to blog about. I realize spikes in traffic come and go depending on the popularity of your articles and genre of topic so I don’t expect my numbers to stay at 300 per day.

I notice my Bounce Back rates are very high, Entrecard brings in many unique visitors, but they just click the Drop button and move on (as I do on most of my drop sites). This does bring in unique visitors, but also gives you a high bounce rate, which means people aren’t staying more than to casually scan your front page and are moving on.

Here is a snapshot of my Google Analytics from this morning showing my blog over the past 30 days. I only started with analytics in early September and had a 2 day outage due to analytics code being wrong on my site. (See my Analytics Blogs) for how to setup analytics properly.

My good friend Damien Riley who runs 3 blogs including Postcards From the Funny Farm showed me a tip with analytics this morning, if you click on the email symbol at the top, and email yourself a PDF output of your statistics, you get all the information you want without having to sift through the HTML links.

Thank you Damien for the tip.

Here is my current statistics, click on image to view it larger and in more detail.

-Dragon Blogger

A friend of mine was mentioning to me that far more accurate than Blogsearch’s link:http://www.dragonblogger.com method of tracking links to your web site, is using Google’s WebMaster Tools another free service from Google.   Webmaster Tools will diagnose your web site, collect statistics and track all pages that have sitelinks or external links to your website.  This goes above and beyond just blog sites, blogsearch will only track blogs, but this scans everything that is picked up in google.

You can use Google WebMaster Tools to Crawl your site and make sure everything is linked properly and indexed correctly.
You can also see which Google Searches your blog or website shows up in, this is highly useful.

If you can see by the picture below, I have several searches where my blog shows #5 in the list of results, these searches included:
<i>
Homescan review
songbird ipod linux
ubuntu hardy ipod
</i>

Picture of my top 20 queries where my blog was returned:  (Click on Picture to blow it up and read it)

In addition and one of the biggest features is the “Links” section, Where you can click on “Pages with external links” and see all sites that have links to yours.

This first page shows you all of your pages that have links back to it, as you can see my total links is 1680 from all my pages combined.  (Click on picture to enlarge so you can read)

Then if you click on any sub page, you can see the actual individual sites that link back to your site:  (Click on picture so you can read the information)

So I highly recommend my fellow bloggers to use Google Webmaster Tools, it is another weapon in your arsenal for tracking link backs and statistics for your web site.  As well as learning what query patterns are working best.  By learning the query patterns, you can tune your post “keywords” to help better match google query patterns.  Remember when tagging you pages to put popular queries:

Example, if you wrote a page about using an iPOD on Ubuntu Linux, you might use these keywords:
Ubuntu, Ipod, Linux, Ubuntu Linux, Ipod Linux, Ipod Ubuntu, Ubuntu iPOD, Linux iPod, Apple iPod, iTunes, iPod on Unix, iPOD on Ubuntu

You can have multiple word keywords, and they pattern match better in google.  Always have at least 10 keywords for every post you create, I try to have at least 15-20 for each of my posts.

-Dragon Blogger

I posted a little while ago about Link Popularity Check, a freeware program that totals all you links found on the web.  This includes RSS links, Yahoo links, MSN links, Altavista Links and Google Links.  This isn’t about finding links back to your site from another site, as much as it is your site showing up in other sites listings and such.

In my original Post “Freeware for Bloggers: Link Popularity Check” My total links found were 921 Total Links.

I download and tested the following software “RSS Submit” by KSOFT to try and get my blog pinged to as many sites as possible.  Okay, I did this yesterday.  This software integrates with Feedburner to read all of your Feedburner RSS posts and blast them out to over 100 RSS Sites online.

At first I didn’t believe this product would work worth a damn right, but I noticed something funny today.  My dragonblogger.com counterize II stats was showing more traffic today than the past week.  I had 100 unique visitors by noon, and 5 online at the same time.  This was way high compared to previous days.
I then ran my Link Popularity Check again and to my AMAZEMENT my total links is up to 3,785.

I went from 921 to 3,785 links online in just 1 day, just from using RSS Submit a single time.  And more than just links, I notice more traffic on my site today, I will let you know my daily numbers tomorrow to see how they compare to the day before.

Here is a POST showing my latest numbers, go ahead and compare these to my previous post.

Click on the Image to enlarge so you can read the statistics:

This RSS Submit software so far is very encouraging, and immediately had noticable results.

-Dragon Blogger

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.