Nominate Justin Germino for a social media award in the Shorty Awards

I was curious to see if I could make the top 10 list and collect the 300 votes to make #10 place at the time, but would be happy if I could get enough votes to make the first page which lists the Top 20.  One of my main reasons in the question asking “why should people nominate you for a Shorty” was my answer: “Vote for @dragonblogger because few social media entities can do technology, gaming, blogging, wordpress tips, poetry, movie reviews, make money online advice at same time” and do all this as a hobby not even their day job.

Remember, the Shorty Vote gives you +5 entries in either of the 2 contests listed above, just vote for a Shorty and mark it completed on the Rafflecopter widgets.

-Dragon Blogger

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June 2011 was the best month by far in terms of both Traffic and Income for my blogging Enterprises and continues to further my enthusiasm and hopes for continuing on this line of success.

First let’s talk about the traffic and growth:

Dragon Blogger June 2011 Traffic Report

In the 30 days of June 2011, DragonBlogger.com received over 49,600+ unique visits and over 65,100+ pageviews for the month.  61.5% of this traffic came from search engines with about 24% from referring sites.

Top referring sites included StumbleUpon, MGID, Twitter, BlogEngage and Facebook (in that order).

My top 5 specific pages are below:

Note that 5 posts (including homepage hits) account for 20% of all site traffic, this is both good but also bad as should these pages drop in the SERP it could be a huge % drop in traffic for the site if I lost one or more of these pages getting traffic from searches.  So this is a good and a bad thing to have some singular posts accounting for so much traffic.

Ideally I would like to see my homepage itself climb the ranks and become the most hit specific page on the site.

Overall though this was the best month in terms of traffic and was about a 3% gain on traffic from the month before even with May having 31 days.

Dragon Blogger June 2011 Income Report

One of the hardest things to do as a blogger is keep track of all the different methods of monetization I use.  This necessitated I use a spreadsheet and I constantly am adding new rows for affiliate programs or new income programs I am testing.

This month however my testing blog earning programs came at a price, and when I started testing Teliad and Intellilinks on this site I had a penalty email from Google in Webmaster tools saying they noticed paid links on my site and they were penalizing my PageRank.  Sure enough within a week my PR dropped from a PR4 to PR0 on DragonBlogger.com which was the price I paid for testing programs which allow you to sell links on your site.  A fair warning, that even though I earned about $96 in a month from Intellilinks and Teliad combined, I don’t think it personally was worth losing a PR4 for this income.  I wouldn’t recommend selling links on your homepage if you want to keep a high PageRank to anyone and I was doing it as part of the research more than anything else.

Here was the full income breakout:

You can see that AdSense was my highest earning month ever at over $265 in a single month of income, most of this came from DragonBlogger.com but my personal blog also started increasing its AdSense earnings.

I also had my highest Amazon Affiliate sales ever at $121 from 21 sales total.  The odd thing is though I install amazon ads for products, I continue to get commission mostly from products I don’t advertise directly as a result of the Amazon referral cookie being set.  This is another really great reason to use a plugin like the WordPress Easy AZON which allows you to insert images that link to Amazon affiliate products with ease.

I also became an affiliate for Formidable Pro which I use and consider THE BEST WordPress form Plugin as well as making some earnings with ClickBank on the Popup Domination plugin sales.

Some sponsored articles and reviews rounded out my earnings bringing my total blogging income to $906.38 for June 2011.  This was offset however by my highest month of expenses to date at around $307.83 which brought my net profit from blogging related activities to $598.55.

As you can see the web of income/expenses is becoming larger each month as my enterprises grow and this only becomes more essential to track everything separately (I keep everything itemized in a more detailed sheet for tax purposes).  I do file taxes as an independent contractor at the end of the year for being a blogger and it is becoming increasingly more complicated to make sure I have everything in order which is one thing you need to be aware of if you are a blogger trying all of these programs.

In Summary

This was the Traffic and Earnings report for DragonBlogger.com in June 2011 and this was the highest earnings report so far as well as highest traffic.  I am well on my way to reaching my $1,000 per month steady income goal from the site and reaching 100,000 unique visits per month by January 2012 which is another one of my goals.

How did my fellow bloggers fare?

-Dragon Blogger

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It is this collaboration that has grabbed notice of several blogs in the past year who have skyrocketed from “launch” to under 30K Alexa Rank and over 50,000 visits per month in less than a year.  It is in this collaboration I see these sites growing rapidly and potentially being able to “bypass” some of the traditional slower methods of building a blog.

As many of my readers know, DragonBlogger.com will eventually become an online magazine at some point, I have too many categories and vary so much in content that only a magazine style can showcase my blog the way I envision it.  As such, I will eventually be looking for various collaborators to write for the various categories (Movie Reviewer, Technology Guru, Social Media blogger…etc).  At some point I see myself hiring people to write, not paying them a per article basis as many do now through Freelancer.com or eLance.com but rather pay them monthly salaries for writing X number of articles per month and including of course the normal social media promotion that comes with such articles.

I have been more of a lone wolf blogger now for just over two years and though I accept guest posts on DragonBlogger.com the site doesn’t churn out as much content as I envision it with me doing all the content creation.  Of course this is partly because I am running so many blogs, but I am looking to turn this site into an online Technology and Entertainment Portal in the future.

There are plenty of lone wolf bloggers who have gone on to break the mold and reach success levels many of us dream of, but collaboration sites have an edge and have the potential to achieve goals of reaching a mass audience and in turn a better ability to monetize faster.

So let me know about your blogging goals, are you a collaborative blogger and share your site with others or do you prefer lone wolf and sole rewards from your sites?

-Dragon Blogger

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One thing about YouSayToo.com is I didn’t realize the site is as big as it is, having an Alexa ranking under 9k means it gets a decent amount of traffic and there must be thousands of bloggers already in the system. 

All you have to is sign up for YouSayToo, create your profile, set your Revenue Settings and then import your blog feeds.  You do need to put the YouSayToo badge on your site if you want to participate in the social network but this is hardly unusual as most blogging networks require a small banner or badge to include you in their system.

They do tell you to create a new AdSense URL Channel for www.yousaytoo.com so that you can separate track how much of your AdSense impressions and earnings are coming from your articles shared on YouSayToo.  This is a wise thing to do and I highly recommend it.

I unfortunately forgot to do this when I first set everything up two weeks ago, so I am still waiting for the next 20 days to report on how many impressions my articles get on YouSayToo and how much of my AdSense earnings come from this network.

Currently, I only listed my personal blog and poetry blog in YouSayToo.com I may add DragonBlogger.com later if I find the site to be particularly favorable.  I also added a Widget Exchange to my poetry blog only, this allows you to gain more traffic by showcasing other YouSayToo blogs in exchange for yours being showcased on other sites as well.  It is a mutual traffic exchange type of system and I am just testing it to see how much traffic comes in from YouSayToo.com to my Poetry blog.

One thing I like about the system is when you add "Interests" to your profile, you immediately see all other bloggers who added matching interests.  This  makes it easy to add them as friends and connect with others who share the same interests.  The system is also lightning fast for me, you can add people in seconds, pages and profiles load so quickly.  It is refreshing considering the slower speeds of many other blogging networks honestly.

Here is a breakdown of how your articles list on YouSayToo.com:

• The site does a good job of integrating AdSense blocks on the top and bottom of articles and these are the AdSense blocks you get a % of the revenue sharing for.

• YouSayToo does also use InfoLinks to make money from your articles but does not do sharing from Infolinks scattered on your post.

• YouSayToo.com does read in your blog RSS feed, so if you have your feed set to full feed then the entire blog article will be read in.  This means a user who reads your article on YouSayToo may not go back to original article on your site if they can read full article here.  If you do have full RSS Feeds, then at least use the RSS Footer WordPress plugin and brand your footer with copyright and ownership information.

In Summary

YouSayToo has brought in some traffic to my personal blog, but mostly I have seen quite a few votes and comments on my YouSayToo articles submitted to the site.  As it only imports your current articles going forward, I only have about 40 articles in the system (compared to 3000+ on all my blogs).  So as you have more content fed into the system, presumably you get more pageviews, more revenue and more traffic to your sites. 

I think even if there was no revenue sharing the more you can expose your content online the better, and the social networking aspect appears to be pretty good though the messaging system is kind of unusual in that you handle everything in a popup from your little top right profile area of the screen.  You deal with messages, friend requests all from this little dialog box that expands which took some getting used to.

It is too early to say what the revenue sharing looks like, but so far this looks like a blogging social network I will keep active on.

Feel free to connect with DragonBlogger on YouSayToo and I will be happy to add you to my network.

-Dragon Blogger

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I never realized when I started blogging that I would become so instantly passionate about it.  Two years later people come to me for Blogging advice, WordPress consulting and just by “doing” and experimenting my reputation as a blogger, internet entrepreneur have reached levels I wouldn’t have thought possible from just running a few blogs and being social on Twitter and a handful of other social media networks.

In two years DragonBlogger.com has had over 308k visitors and very close to 500k pageviews.  This is on this one site, my other 2 blogs are nearing 2 year in September and all of my sites combined are very close to 1 million pageviews.  You can also see that over two years 62% of my traffic comes from search engines.

My site also now averages between 900 and 1,000 unique visitors per day which is 2-3x as much traffic as 1 year ago, and 12x as much traffic as 2 years ago.   I was fortunate to have some great posts early on that brought my site almost 100 unique visits per day within my first 60 days of blogging.

In two years, Blogging itself has earned me $5,095.35 dollars from my 3 blogs combined.  Considering that I blog only about 20 hours per week and blogging is just a hobby and a side project of mine I am quite proud of this.  Just click on my make money online link to see what programs I used to earn money on my sites, though different programs work better for different people mine have been very consistent for me across my sites.

I have made a high number of mistakes early on in blogging that cost me a lot of time and slowed the traffic growth of my sites.  In the end the experience and lessons learned were worth making some mistakes, but I would share with you which mistakes to avoid.

Know What your Blog Niche Will Be

This is a big one for me, when I first started DragonBlogger.com it was my first blog and I put posts about anything and everything.  I always wanted it to be a Technology and Blogging blog, but I also mingled in political posts, personal updates, poetry…etc  This was a big mistake and I got complaints from people who were interested in one thing that weren’t interested in other unrelated niche topics.  This caused me to branch out to 3 blogs within 30 days of starting DragonBlogger.com.  I created JustinGermino.com to be my personal blog, WandererThoughts.com to be my poetry blog and left DragonBlogger.com to be dedicated to all things Technology, Internet with some Entertainment thrown in.

Start a mailing list sooner than later

I waited almost 18 months before I took this serious and starting a mailing subscriber list, you can reach audience members in a different way here by showcasing articles, products as well as doing polling and giveaways.  You can build a trust with your mailing list that works a little differently than your blog readers or people who randomly hit your site from search engines and it is something you shouldn’t ignore.

Tune Your AdSense for Optimum Performance

Again, I waited sixteen months before really taking the plunge and putting actually effort and testing into my AdSense banner sizes and found a great combination that increased my earnings by over 300% within 2 months of tweaking the banner sizes and placements.

Summary

Those are some of the bigger lessons I have learned but some others I would include are not visiting other blogs enough and leaving comments, not submitting enough guest posts for other blogs…etc.  Some of this was because I simply don’t have a lot of time and I already write 90 articles per month with only 80 hours of blogging time dedicated per month.  I deliberately try to limit myself to 20 hours per week or less of blogging time.  I have a full time job which consumes 50-60 hours per week and I have two young kids and a family, so I need to make sure my work home life balance stays in order and blogging doesn’t interfere with my family time.

That is some of the many lessons I have learned from the past two years blogging, know this though.  I believe mistakes are key to learning and you have to try and experiment with as much as possible (especially early on) so that you can learn and become a better blogger.

-Dragon Blogger

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