This morning it appears as if Entrecard is down again, I get application errors and can’t get to my dashboard, drop inbox or several other area’s of the application.  For bloggers that depend on the Entrecard service the longer it is down the less drops people can do and it means a traffic hit to their web site can result for that day.

Entrecard suffers an outage usually at least once every week or two and it is long enough to be an inconvenience to droppers and users of that service.  I myself get most of my traffic to my poetry blog through Entrecard, as poetry does not span google search engines well, so most of my readers are brought in via Entrecard.

Still the service has been lightning quickly lately and I hope it stays as fast when the finally bring the service back up.  I have told my readers that Entrecard was one of the quickest and easiest ways to build a network of bloggers that you can meet and eventually collaborate with.  Entrecredits also are useful for putting free Advertisements on other blogger’s sites in the Entrecard network.

Hopefully the Entrecard site will be restored soon.

-Dragon Blogger

I can’t believe it when I found out by browsing SocialSpark today that the website has a tie in to Twitter, if you click on the account menu and “Manage Blogger Account” you will be taken to the screen where you will click on Profile.

Then click on the connections tab on the right.

Then you can click the edit button next to twitter, or if you use pownce you can do the same with that service.

Once you click edit, then you fill in your twitter ID and password, and check mark which options you want to take advantage of.

(Click for larger view)

Socialspark will automatically send a tweet whenever you update a blog post, publish your blog on SocialSpark, Accept a Friend request, or get a payment.  This will help add to promotions for your account and your blog and is an excellent free resource and yet another great reason to use SocialSpark not only to make money but to increase your blogger social network as well.

-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

I am a big fan of SocialSpark, I love the networking site and use it more for blog analysis and meeting friends than actually for making any money.  I only actually have done 3 paid opportunities in the past 45 days.

I invite everyone who reads my blog to join socialspark and if you are already a member hook up with me, I periodically like doing other people’s spark opportunities and invite anyone who wants to participate to view my spark listing and take one of my spark opportunities.  I have some for this blog, JustinGermino Blog and Wanderer Thoughts blog.  I like reading other blogger’s stories and hear their opinions on the sparks that I create.  It is a great sense of community when you can poll or fellow bloggers and share information and opinions.

So since Entrecard is apparently down today, why not spend some time socializing and blogging in SocialSpark.

So check out my Spark Opportunities, and message me if you decide to do one.

-Dragon Blogger

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.