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

Does this happen to you?

Seriously this is many times in the past 7 days where Entrecard has become unstable and just not working, last Friday and Saturday the site was almost down for 2 complete days and it looks like the pattern is going to repeat again. At this point there is nothing that can be done but check back in a few hours.

I do love Entrecard, but I need to expand my social blogging horizons and keep finding new services, I don’t like taking a dip in unique traffic whenever there is a full day Entrecard outage.

What other services do my readers like using? Besides Twitter, SocialSpark, Technorati? I have seen some people on HubPages and BlogCatalog, but not experimented with those much? One blogger told me they get a huge amount of their traffic from Craigslist. I don’t know how, I put ads up for my sites on Craigslist, but don’t really ever notice any traffic coming from.

-Dragon Blogger

Man, I just don’t understand Google PageRank, it makes no sense.

My Rock Along Productions blog turns out has a PR of 4:
http://www.rockalongproductions.com has Google PageRank 4 out of 10

Yet my This Blog, my Poetry Blog Wanderer Thoughts and my personal blog Justin Germino have PR of 0.

What doesn’t make sense is Dragon Blogger has over 300 unique visits per day, over 8500+ external links on Google WebMasterTools, yet Rock Along Productions has barely 200 external links, less than 50 unique visits per day.

This only confirms that Google Penalizes you for doing paid posts (Rock Along Productions is a company blog and I don’t do paid advertising on it).  But I don’t do paid advertising on the poetry blog either, so not sure why that is so low (maybe too new of a blog).

Also linking to other blogs hurts your blog PR, as the “SEO Juice” from a previous post, you leak your PR to other blogs reducing your own by creating too many links out.  Again, I am trying to figure out how to get around the vicious double edged sword.

Does anyone actually qualify for the like $60.00 or $100.00 paid opps on PayPerPost and do the post and still retain a PR of 5 or higher for most of these post requirements?

Just some stuff I am thinking about.

-Dragon Blogger

One of my readers had mentioned they use the Entrecard Toolbar for firefox so I decided to download it and install it this afternoon.  There are some cool things for the plug-in, first you can sign into entrecard right from your firefox plugin, right on your toolbar it tells you how much EC you have and how many drops you completed today.  You can also switch to any one of your profiles inside your account.

I really like how easily you can browse the “Favorites” which are the categories in Entrecard, or you can browse your inbox.    This toolbar also has another great feature, when you are on an entrecard site the toolbar will display 2 buttons, one to go right to the blog’s Entrecard Profile, and the other is to advertise on the blog also showing the cost involved.

The toolbar however is slow finding sites, and does not speed up performing drops.  It is much faster to open Google Chrome, and visit your drops inbox, then hit Control and click on every blog site in your inbox opening several dozen tabs.  Let all the tabs load, and then go mass dropping or reading + dropping depending on how you reciprocate with Entrecard.

Once again, I recommend Entrecard to everyone, even if you don’t use the EC dropping and advertising, I was able to find many blogs in the same blog category as mine and network with them, read great stories and such.  In this way I wish SocialSpark would categorize blogs so you can browse by category, instead of only being able to search blogs by keyword.

The tool has its uses, but it is slow and causes delays in an already slow Firefox.  So I probably won’t be using it too much, but it is a nice feature for those who want it.

-Dragon Blogger

I have been using Feedjit as not only a means of tracking who visits my site, but it is also an invaluable tool to help me determine where users are coming from and how they are arriving on my site.  I do spend some time each night watching Feedjit’s live feed to see people pop on and off my blog.

You see I was very worried that too much of my traffic is artificially created by Entrecard droppers, and though it is great to have the visitors and have them drop.  If entrecard were to crash for a few days as it did today, I was worried my traffic would vanish with it.

So I was feeling a bit better after reviewing my Feedjit traffic tonight here is a snapshot of 13 visitors to my site, and only 3 of them were directly arriving from entrecard.  Most of them arrived from doing Google Searches and a few of them arrived directly, which means they either typed my URL directly, or have me bookmarked.  Here is a snapshot from Feedjit live, click on image to make larger and see details:

This is another tool you can use for your blog to analyze visitors and watch your traffic in real time.  It is an excellent tool and I recommend anyone to download and use Feedjit if they don’t already.

-Dragon Blogger

Today I received my first paypal payment from blogging and I was very excited to see the transfer in my paypal account this morning.  I want to tell everyone that anyone can make some money blogging if you have a little time, dedication and patience.  Writing skills help, but I have seen blogs that still make money without very credible writing talent.

I started this blog (so far my only profitable one) on August 23rd 2008.  That is around 6 weeks ago.  I was able to qualify for 3 SocialSpark and 3 PayPerPost opportunities but this was back when my blog was a PR of 2, now that it has been knocked down to PR0 since Saturday, I haven’t been able to qualify for a single post or opportunity, or even gotten any assignments from PayU2Blog.

Anyway, SocialSpark and PayPerPost have a fairly long “pending” period where your money is in pending status and pays out at the end of the next month or cycle.  So I haven’t actually been paid from either of those, even though I have about $15 pending in PayPerPost and $22.50 pending in SocialSpark.

PayU2Blog has been where my real payday is, I was assigned a # of opportunities between September 23rd and October 2nd.  I was able to make $77.50 cents in just 2 weeks of off these opportunities, and the best thing about PayU2Blog, is there is no fighting to try to get a slot in opps, you are given assignments and you do them.  On the downside, you don’t have a choice, you must do all your assignments or you risk not being given anymore.

Here is snapshot of my first payout from PayU2Blog:

Here is the snapshot of my paypal account showing the transfer was made:

Now, as mentioned I haven’t gotten a single Assignment Since October 3rd, which ironically is when my PageRank was whacked by Google. PayU2Blog claims it isn’t based on PR solely, but other factors. I was able to link my other personal blog Justin Germino to my PayU2Blog account, so maybe I can get more assignments with two blogs linked.

Most of the assignments are 50 word freeform using the text link required, you can craft them however you want and they are very easy to do. Just remember to check your account often, PayU2Blog doesn’t email notify when new assignments are given, and they must be completed before the deadline.

Every blogger who wants to try to make money with paid posts should at least try out PayU2Blog, it allowed me to bring in $77.50 in my first 30 days of blogging, which means this one blog already paid for the DNS names of my 3 other blogs and some of my web hosting fee’s. In less than its first month my blog has paid for itself and helped me fund 3 other blogs.

Not to bad for 1 months worth of blogging.

-Dragon Blogger

First off, I have only been blogging for about 40 days now and I have heard other people rant about the Google Pagerank instability and having been “hit” by Google Pagerank.  I don’t believe how yesterday and for the last two weeks my blogs was a PR2 and then today bam I am now slammed with a PR0.  I didn’t convert my site from http://dragonblogger.com to http://www.dragonblogger.com, my backlinks, and all external links are growing and not shrinking.

My IZEARank is <400, my Alexa rank is 300,000 3 month average and <150,000 1 week average.  So what gives, how does something like this happen?

The bad thing is now my blog won’t qualify for many of the opps that require PR2 or above, so my blog goals just got a lot harder to achieve.

So, go ahead my fellow bloggers, rant here about your Google Pagerank story.  Who else has been burned?

I found out for some reason Technorati flagged my blog, and it is no longer listed.  I can’t re-link it because it was flagged.  This is really foul play, they didn’t warn me or notify me, and I contacted support but have not received any response in two days.  I was just starting to leverage and like using it, I had built my blog up to 47 Authority for it now to be squashed.

I read all their rules and terms and such, and couldn’t think of why my blog would have been removed.  So now I am off to search their forums and see if I have better luck that way than with customer support.

Has this happened to anybody else, how did you resolve it?

-Dragon Blogger

I have mentioned previously on my blog why it is better to have a custom domain than to have your blog hosted on blogger, or one of the other free blogs.  This is especially true if you want to monetize your blog.  If you use Pay Per Post you will see many opportunities that say specifically they don’t want their post on a free blog site blog.  This is true of other pay services as well.  The Lady Programmer does a really good job of explaining how to convert from your free blog domain to a custom blog domain.

I would encourage everyone thinking about doing this to click on the custom domain link at the top and reading her blog.  In addition to creating your own custom domain make sure you use http://www.yourdomain.com don’t use http://yourdomain.com.  Damien Riley and myself have talked in our blogs why you should always prefix your domain with www, as this sets the protocol and many firewalls and filters will block sites that don’t have www in front of them.  This can be seen as phishing attempts and most users expect and are wary of not seeing the www in front of a URL.  It is easy to configure your website to only accept and redirect http://domain.com to http://www.domain.com but do it early, as your blog will suffer some link loss and a Google Page Rank hit until the links catch up if you change it on an established blog.

-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