Blog Engage has undergone it’s first major redesign in 4 years and the new version of the site puts users front and center.  Featured users and showcasing members are key in the new version of Blog Engage.

The members voted and the new blue color scheme replaces the former green one for buttons and highlights.  The slider is a great attention grabber that showcases the featured members articles and spotlights.  This is a great reward and incentive to become a Blog Engage business member too so you can have featured spotlights that are attention grabbing right there on the homepage.

As you scroll down from the homepage a little you will see the top commentators, top voters and hot upcoming news (articles that are nearing publication to the homepage).  This is a great way to instantly find what is new and upcoming at a glance.

Right under that section you have your homepage published articles in a format that is quite appealing.  You will see that there are no Vote Down buttons anymore on Blog Engage, Blog Engage is about sharing and promoting articles you think provide value but not snubbing an article and penalizing a member.  If you think an article doesn’t make the cut, don’t vote for it, but there was really no reason to vote down articles specifically.

Blog Engage is an awesome article directory that not only helps promote and showcase your articles but your identity as a blogger.  You get to network and meet other bloggers and engage in a community focused on helping each other.  For a new blogger this is about a good a directory to start with and gain an immediate boost in traffic, backlinks and attention from other bloggers in your niche.

Great News!  We are giving away 5 Blog Engage memberships for free!  These memberships cost $29.99 normally (1 time fee).  This gives you full access to the Blog Engage community so you can start submitting articles and engaging with other bloggers right away.

4 members will win from the Rafflecopter Contest Entry below:

a Rafflecopter giveaway

1 Member will win from joining my mailing list, I will be tallying all members who join my mailing list between Friday 1/13 and Friday 2/10.  One person specifically who joined the mailing list during that time frame will be chosen as the 5th winner.

Join Mailing List for a chance to win!

But wait, there’s more!

1 winner determined by me will also win a full 1 year RSS Gold Syndication Plan ($59.98 value).  This RSS Syndication will automatically submit your blog articles (1 per 8 hours) to Blog Engage and save you time and money, in addition you will be eligible for Blog Engage 100% AdSense revenue sharing where you can earn money from the ads on  your submitted articles.  I will choose the winner based which blog I think would make the best addition to the Blog Engage community and will review the winner’s blogs after they are announced for the Blog Engage membership.

Good luck to all contests, and if you can’t wait you can just buy your RSS Syndication Membership now, it is well worth the money and I am a Business Member myself and have been since December 2010.

With my site getting over 85,000 pageviews per month, Blog Engage is my 7th highest traffic referrer and provides my RSS Syndication memberships provides me with over 5,000 backlinks to my blog yearly!  This is well worth the investment in my opinion.

-Dragon Blogger

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Analytics Report for August 2011

The traffic was tremendous and this is in a large part due to the Persian Poetess covering the Pottermore phenomenon with breaking news and updates throughout the month.

You can see that we had over 97k unique visits and over 129k pageviews for the month of August 2011 here on DragonBlogger.com.  69% of the traffic come from search engines with my highest visited content all being related to Pottermore articles with one article reaching almost 29k pageviews by itself for the month.

Pottermore definitely took over on DragonBlogger.com for the month of August 2011 and helped establish Dragon Blogger as not just a blogging and technology blog but also for covering entertainment items as well.

The top referrals after search engines were Tumblr, StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter and BlogEngage.

Earnings Report for August 2011

Earnings was another winner and this is the first time in 3 years I have managed to bring in over $1,000 in a single month from blogging related activities.  Of course my income sources are extremely diverse and AdSense leads the pack as the single highest income generator.

I also heavily promoted the AWESOME Formidable Pro WordPress form plugin and managed to make some decent commissions from this plugin sales.  I also sold a copy of WP Touch Pro WordPress mobile plugin and continued to make money form some direct published reviews and link sales on Intellilinks, LinkWorth and Teliad.

SocialSpark had some incredibly great opportunities which allowed me to review some great companies and products including Carbonite online backup and earned me $140 in August 2011.  If you like doing product reviews and earning from them, there is no program better than SocialSpark.

I also sold more BSA Ads in August 2011 than any previous month due to the higher number of impressions as well as earning a little on Twitter by doing SponsoredTweets.

Lastly, I entered a BloggersCompete contest on my personal blog and my entry won and it earned me $75.00 which I added since it had to do with blogging and writing a blog post to win the money.  I will be doing more about BloggersCompete soon as we will be teaming up and hosting a cash contest for bloggers to enter starting sometime in September.

My blogging related expenses were also very high for the month, this involved higher writer payouts and I had to pay to switch to a new web hosting provider and paid the year in advance.  I also ran a few campaigns on MyLikes to see if I could increase my earnings and accidentally forgot to PAUSE my campaign which caused it to drain far more money than I intended.  MyLikes should allow you to set start/stop dates for your campaigns and not require a manual PAUSE to end a campaign, this is a really poor oversight and I am sure I am not the only one who overspent as a result of them doing this.

In total my NET income after paying all expenses was $766.22 which is the highest month of net earnings so far since starting my blogs back in 2008.

In Summary

August 2011 was a stellar month for DragonBlogger.com and the site is growing at a faster pace than ever.  As a result of this traffic growth I experimented with various CDN networks and will do a follow up article on which one I ended up using for the long term.

Though I started blogging as a hobby back in August 2008, the amount of effort and time it takes to research, write, promote and interact really make this more like a 2nd job for me.  I still managed to keep my hours to around 20 per week related to blogging activities so this would make my average $ per hour earnings about $14.00 hour which is actually the highest $ per hour earnings in the entire 3 years so far but far from being able to do blogging as my full time job.

-Dragon Blogger

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Of course Google PR matters! That’s why there are so many tutorials, tips and tricks about PageRank!

Do you think so too?

The events of the past couple of months surrounding DragonBlogger.com have radically changed my opinion of Nominal Google PageRank, more commonly known as toolbar PageRank or simple PR. In the first update since May 25th 2011, the homepage PageRank of DragonBlogger.com was reduced from PR4 to PR0. In the second update since then, it was again increased from PR0 to PR2 (in the past week!).

Now, let us see how that affected (or not) the blog’s traffic.

DragonBlogger Traffic Stats - Pageviews - May-2011-July-2011

If anything, there was an increase in blog traffic during the time the PR went down from 0 to 4!

While there are several factors (apparently hundreds!) affecting the search ranking of pages, Google PageRank has always been considered to be an indicator of the quality of inbound links to a page/website/blog. Clearly, the concept was wrong, and PageRank is now more volatile than ever. For one, if you increase the number of outbound links suddenly, there is a sharp fall in PR. That is probably what happened with DragonBlogger.com.

Google itself, through Matt Cutts, has declared that webmasters and bloggers should focus more on creating quality content and relevant inbound and outbound links organically in order to rank well on Google Search, rather than dwelling on Google PageRank! There is no longer any hint of doubt that PR is a very minor factor in search rankings, and is not a very reliable indicator of a website or blog’s authority. Visitor Traffic is really the only statistic we all should focus on, and use it as a feedback for out efforts in optimizing the blog/website.

If needed, you could also rely on Google Webmaster Tools to get a good picture of the number of inbound links and their details apart from search exposure of your pages. Recently, +1 activity has been added to Google Webmaster Tools.

What do you have to say about the importance of Google PageRank and its impact on Search Ranking/Traffic?

Get to the Top on Google: Tips and Techniques to Get Your Site to the Top of the Search Engine Rankings -- and Stay There List Price: $30.00 Price: $8.55 Read Reviews

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Search Engine Optimization

Introduction to SEO

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is no doubt essential for getting free and targeted visitors to your online properties, namely blogs and websites. However it is something which can easily consume most part of your online time. In the pursuit of a high Google PageRank and high ranking in Search Engine Results Pages or SERPs, many webmasters and bloggers forget the essential objective of SEO. It is useful only when your blog or website is good enough to retain the visitors!

Just like me, most internet users (hopefully all!) have a life away from it. So, in keeping with your social, occupational and recreational lives, it becomes necessary to prioritize the activities you carry out in trying to optimize your blog or website for search engines. I use a self-prepared SEO priority list, which I have created based on the results and time requirement for each activity. While popular search engines like Google keep changing their algorithm from time to time, these factors have consistently been considered important by all SEO experts, and rightly so.

So, here goes the list:

On Page Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

1. Domain name and Site/Blog title

2. Meta Description and Keyword Tags

3. Keyword Density Optimization of main Site/Blog content

4. Internal Link Building

5. Profuse Image Inclusion with ALT and TITLE tags (I get 40% of my blog traffic from Google Image Search!)

6. Automated Keyword Inclusion (I use related posts, categories and tags but some people use external RSS Feeds)

7. Relevant Outbound Links

Off Page Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

1. Inbound Dofollow Links from Relevant high PR Pages

2. Submission to Search Engines

3. Inbound Links from Social Networking Sites

4. Submission to RSS Directories

5. Submission to Blog/Website Directories

I hope you didn’t find the list too long!

Do share your experiences and opinions regarding time management while doing SEO for your blogs and websites with us.

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Now, there are many online entrepreneurs and bloggers who make a far better income, but there are far more who struggle as I did for a few years before income really started increasing.

May Earnings Report

You can see from my spreadsheet that I have a very diverse set of income sources for my various blogging activities.  I made the most of my money selling direct sponsored posts or links within older articles, but my 2nd highest income source was Google AdSense which earned $200 for the first time ever in a single month.   Direct Banner Ad sales, were also good and SocialSpark continues to be among the top performing blog paying programs online.

I was surprised that within my first month of using Intellilinks I was able to make $58.47 and this is promising and I am looking forward to seeing if this continues to increase.  I also earned some money my first month with Teliad but this was from writing sponsored reviews rather than guest posts.  Also, I wanted to point out that Teliad divides the payments for sponsored posts by 12, so I actually am being paid 12x what is listed, but since they pay you 1/12th per month I have to break it out as such.

Amazon Affiliate continues to increase slightly but I know I have tons of room for optimization and improving performance there as well.  This was also my highest profitable month with AffiliateLights which I use to sell the BlogEngage RSS Syndication service which I think is a great benefit to bloggers.

All in all, at $809.93 cents this was my 2nd highest earning month in the past 33 months of blogging with last month being my highest at $839.72 so it was pretty close.  I also had the most expenses ever in a single month for my blogging efforts as well and between writer payments and testing out some services like Twiends and ReFollow I spent $216.87 in expenses.  This brought my net profits to $593.06 for the month of May, and some of that will be to make June payments for writers and some will also invest back into blog promotion/advertising…etc.

Overall, I am saving my blog earnings to purchase a new powerful computer system and I have my eye set on a CyberPower model.  With any luck I will achieve my earnings by August to order the system I am looking for.

May Traffic Report

For May 2011 I also had the highest amount of blog traffic than previous months as my traffic keeps increasing by about 10% per month steadily since January.

You can see I had 48,206 visits to the site in May 2011, and over 63k pageviews.  My bounce rate is still high though and my avg. time on site fairly low.  This means I still need to include more video and conversation starting material to help keep readers on the pages longer and more engaged for articles.  Keeping readers engaged is something that always can be improved upon and optimized as engaged readers will keep coming back.

My highest watermark was 2,600 unique visits for a single day with my average being around 1500 visits per day.  This is about double the traffic I was getting a year ago at this time.

Summary

DragonBlogger.com continues to grow rapidly and sometimes I don’t even know why I run 3 other blogs when they only account for about 2% of my total income compared to this site accounting for 98% of all my online income.  Then I realize that I run my poetry blog just for the fun of it, don’t care if it makes money and my personal blog is really my venting platform for articles that don’t really fit here on DragonBlogger.com.

Complacency is never something I am content with and I will continue to look for ways to improve and optimize my site earnings over the next few months.  I have also started up a micro site in the health and fitness niche recently about weight loss belts to test my hand at a micro affiliate site.

As always, I will report any new methods I use to make money online here on DragonBlogger.com and Teliad + Intellilinks both had reviews in May since I was new to both services.  You can read about them by clicking on their links here:

About Teliad

About Intellilinks

How did my fellow bloggers fare, feel free to share your traffic and earnings reports, goals, successes and triumphs with me and the rest of the readers.

-Dragon Blogger

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