So two days ago I received my first Google Adsense payout and it was $105 and some change, it took 5 months for my blogs to reach my first Adsense payout. I average about $7 per week from adsense earnings and I am still running that average. I am hoping the more articles I have, and the more content I publish this number should steadily increase but it certainly won’t be a big money maker. I have a friend who has run a website for about 4 years and averages about $90 per month from adsense. That is some pretty nice side cash from just leaving ads up on your site.

Meanwhile my blog analytics have been doing pretty well the last 30 days for Dragonblogger.com, my site is up almost 10% visitorship since previous month and averages around 400 unique visits per day according to Google Analytics. This is about 100 more visits per day than I was receiving in December, so my blog at 6 months old now is just shy of around 13,000 visits per month.

You can see though from my traffic sources that 50% of my traffic comes from Google searches, 20% from Entrecard (down from 33% last month) and 20% from direct traffic. A little bit from yahoo and stumbleupon there in the 2% mark. This is good, you want most of your traffic to come from google searches, not entrecard or a social media site. That means that your traffic would vanish if you were to remove or lose that social network. As 50% of my traffic comes from google, it means if I dumped Entrecard (which I am not going to do), I would lose only about 80 visits per day out of my 400 per day average.

If you think about it though, I almost always drop 300 EC’s per day, and to only get 80 visits per day back means I am not getting back nearly as many drops as I am giving out.

In looking at my keyword searches you will see that my blog is a Technology and Entertainment blog but clearly 7 out of my 10 top keyword searches are related to my NBC Heroes section. 2 are related to technology posts, and one is related to my Kung Fu Panda review. This only proves that entertainment is more popular than technology. My Heroes section is extremely valuable portion of my blog and has a large visitor base.

I should note that my #1 search result was for Shiny Search, this was a paid post I did for SocialSpark, so this paid post brought 221 visits in 30 days just to their product. To me that tells me it was a successful paid posting, as I probably brought at least 700 people to read about their website in the last few months since I did the post.

Those are my metrics for the last 30 days, I will do an earnings post when the month turns to March.

In Summary, I am right on track for about a 6 month old blog, averaging 400 visits per day and 12,500 for the month. My growth is a steady 8% and I hope to keep that kind of growth up as I try all different tactics. I am glad that only 20% of my traffic comes from Entrecard, this shows my blog is growing on google and I can be less reliant and dependant on the network. I love entrecard, but it is getting harder and harder to do 700 drops per day for all my blogs. I would like for them to stand on their own two feet without the forced traffic from the EC network.

-Dragon Blogger

One of the most complicated things to do lately is design websites or choose blog themes and templates that render correctly in every type of browser, including: FireFox, Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8, Opera, Google Chrome, Safari…etc. Some people write tons of extra code into the browser to format the content style sheets a certain way depending on browser type, but you end up with a surplus of bloated CSS code or html code to try and make your blog fit perfectly with every browser.

Simplicity is the winner here, try to find a very minimalist theme and style and tweak it to suit your needs. One of the best and simple blog themes I have seen is now being used by Postcards From The Funny Farm. Damien has gone through several themes over the past several months and the latest theme is just easy on the eyes, simplistic and keeps the user focused on the content and not what is going on all around the sides of the blog.

Also his blog renders perfectly and exactly in every single browser I have tested, whereas some of my blogs have problems with IE7, or Opera, by keeping with a simple and elegant theme his blog renders perfectly every time, all the time.

I want to adapt some of my blogs to a more simple theme and design, I just haven’t decided what I want to do with them yet. Meanwhile I encourage you to check out one fine blog example of simplicity and elegence over at Postcards.

-Dragon Blogger

Fellow bloggers may have experience what I have now just begun to suffer from “Blog Traffic Plateauing” which is where your blog grows rapidly for a period of time and then levels off like a plateau.  Ironically this effect happened at a fairly high level of viewership but locks my blog from being where I want it to be.  I am trapped between 250 and 300 unique visits per day on average, and though I have the occasional spike to 3x that (my Tuesday after my Heroes posts often spike to 750+ unique in one day).  I seem to be leveled off to where my analytics are showing between +/- 2% either direction for the last month or so.

This is now causing me to find new strategies and methods to market and promote my blog, as mentioned previously I am flirting with buying my way into indexing sites and engines.  I don’t want to spend 30 hours per week blogging and keeping with Damien Riley’s noteworthy goal of not blogging more than 15 hours per week, I am trying to maximize my time.  I can’t spend it submitting to indexes, sites and stuff, this will cost me from being able to create content.  So every month I am going to put $20 of my own blog earnings back into advertising for my blog, I may purchase some PayPerPost spots soon and see how they work, but for now, buying index links seems cheapest and easiest way to blast out my site.

Meanwhile I want to redo my blog theme and make it more like a Magazine, where I can showcase and feature my latest posts from “Technology, Entertainment, Heroes and Blogging” right on the main page in a magazine type style.  Instead of seeing most recent post and previous in order, I can have the most recent from each category highlighted.  Before I start redoing blog themes I am finding out from IZEA and others if this type of theme is supported and still allows for blog sponsorship and opportunities.  I don’t want to change my blog theme and cut off my main source of blog income as a result.

Let me know if you have any idea’s on and what tips, tricks and tactics you have tried to promote your blog.  I am always looking to learn and share what I have learned with others.

-Dragon Blogger

I have lost faith in Link Popularity Check as it has been reporting what I believe to be a false number of Google Links to my site for the past week, I have run it every night and it stays consistent and keeps growing.  I doubt that my http://www.dragonblogger.com has more Google Links than Dooce.com yet according to LPC, it shows that it does.  This only proves that this is not a reliable tool anymore, but it was fairly accurate up until recently.

They should take all those linking and ranking systems pack them up in shipping boxes and send them all to the South Pole as far as I am concerned. The whole keeping track of ranking, backlinks, comments, drops, ratings, stumbles, diggs, thumbs, props, kudos makes me very frustrated sometimes. Seriously can’t we all just blog and forget about all this ranking crap, is like high school popularity contest all over again.

Here is the screenshot showing the abnormality (click to enlarge if you can’t read it). Hey, maybe I do have more links on Google than Dooce.com, ya never know.