My online Identity known as Dragon Blogger is my brand and in 2009 I plan to build and extend Dragon Blogger in the online community so that more and more people recognize me and get to know the person as well as the content that I provide.  I have been blogging for 4 months as of December 23rd with this blog and already I have grown to over 12,000 unique visits per month averaging over 350 per day and hitting as many as almost 700 unique visits on some days (can’t figure out why the random spikes happen, but they seem to come from StumbleUpon a few days a month).

I continue to try and write reviews on products, software that my readers may use or want to use to help in their every day computer use.  I also will continue to provide honest and complete movie reviews as well as keep up with my NBC Heroes following.  And first and foremost to my fellow bloggers I plan on sharing everything I learn about blogging, from SEO to Income Generation with my readers so that everyone can model or at least pick some of my tactics to try and see what works for them.

So to summarize the last four months of blogging here is my primary methods for building my current success level:

Entrecard is still my #1 traffic generator consistantly, get the service and drop often.  Drop your inbox but go a day behind and drop further, don’t drop the same day droppers as they can’t drop you back the same day, always drop 1 day behind and you will see better traffic.  Also, do leave comments and feedback, don’t drop anonymously and move on, build a blog community and build blogging friends.

Twitter doesn’t generate enormous traffic but gets me out there and I enjoy connecting with people, I plan to leverage twitter more and more over the next year as just a means of getting to know people and for them to learn who I am and what I am doing.

SocialSpark I have worked hard to become the 3rd most # of friends on SocialSpark and I am hoping to take the 2nd slot in early next year just behind the CEO who automatically has everyone who joins on his friends network (cheater).  I have helped many people on SocialSpark, people will message me with random questions like “How do I get started?”, “How do I Link my blog”, “How do I add the ITK Tools”, and I am always more than happy to share anything I can with people, it comes from my tech support nature in my day job.

Blog Catalog, Zimbio, StumbleUpon, Digg are also helpful and I will be leveraging these more over the next year, particularly StumbleUpon and Blog Catalog which seem to work very well for some people.

For everyone looking to create a successful blog and build readership, and earn a little money on the side, keep this blog in mind as I will be sharing everything I have learned with you at some point as I learn it.  I am by no means making bank, but I have earned between $100 and $150 per month consistantly with my blog by its 2nd month and will be closer to $200 in January I predict.

Happy New Year

-Dragon Blogger

The entrecard team had posted that during the outage they decided to add some improvements to make the site run faster and perform better.  Well I use Entrecard every day and I can tell you it appears to be running a little faster, switching between dashboard and drops inbox loads in less time, as does flipping through the campaigning and statistics menu.

One can only hope that the Entrecard website continues to perform at this nice level as to save time when doing all my Entrecards socializing.  So the outage was worth it if the site stays performing at this nice level.

-Dragon Blogger

Entrecard has certainly helped my blogs with a rush of visitors checking out my site and has brought some new people and expanded my reach.  But it is becoming too cumbersome to maintain, the traffic is artificial for the most part.  I have proven this by not dropping much on the weekend and will see the same results magnified when I am in Las Vegas because I won’t have time to drop like I do when I am at home.

I saw a 33% drop in Unique Visitor traffic for two days in a row when my I didn’t drop that much.  I am sure this will cut even more as some people drop to people who dropped in last few days instead of just same day.  This means about 50% of my dragonblogger.com traffic is artificial and only gained by reciprical dropping.

So I average about 150 unique visits per day if I stop using entrecard entirely or keep my 300 - 350 unique visits per day and continue my drops.  Which takes a lot of time for several blogs, I lose almost an hour and a half per day just dropping EC’s.  Now there are other reasons to continue these drops, the drops have no effect on Google Page Rank, but they do affect your Alexa Rank, and your RealRank (IZEARank).  So by keeping up Entrecard I can keep my blog under 500 RealRank, which has a significant ability to monetize my blog on PayPerPost and SocialSpark.

So because I do the drops and spend the time, I qualify for higher paying opps in the $8 - $10 dollar range instead of barely qualifying for the $5 opps.  Since my RealRank is very good I actually can do 1 - 2 paid posts on PayPerPost now that my RealRank is updated, whereas before my RealRank showed up I barely got 1 post in 30 days.

So if you are somebody who looks to monetize your blog and get opportunities from PayPerPost or SocialSpark, it is worth doing the full 300 drops and getting the better rank because it helps you qualify for more opps and make more money.  I think this is milking the system however and ultimately this is artificial and it is only a matter of time before SocialSpark and PayPerPost do not count visitors from Entrecard as Unique Visits and therefore won’t reflect in your RealRank.  Once they do this Entrecard will become all but useless.

So I still use Entrecard now primarily to visit and see other blogs, but I keep it up to maintain a good RealRank so I can eke out a few extra paid posts before the holiday season.  If you happen to see a few more paid posts than normal, bear with me.  I have Christmas Presents to buy this year, and I still will push out quality content as often as possible.

Dragonblogger.com would like to thank my Top Entrecard Droppers for the Month of October 2008. In addition to listing your links and sites in my table below, you get 1 free month addition to my Entrecard Generator (see page at top of this page) with a special button called EC TOP DROPPERS. Hope this sends some love back your way my friends.

Entrecard Top Droppers for October 2008

Dropper	# of Drops
Wanderer Thoughts	30
Great Registry Hacks	29
Money Maker Times	28
Septagon Studios Inc News Blog	27
Justin Germino	27
Up to the Minute, with C.G. Salgado	27
The Movie Whore	27
Smoothie Land	27
The Power Of Three	27
Where the Long Tail Ends	27

-Dragon Blogger

I looking at my blog traffic from October 1st through October 27th 2008.  I seem to have plateaued in visitors and this is due in part because of my reliance on Entrecard for visitors to the website.  But my numbers were still much higher than September totals.

For the month of October I had a total of 7,097 unique visitors to my site, here is my visitor and page view breakout.  This is o

# of Absolute Visits is the big thing to pay attention to, this is the # of unique people who actually visit your site.

Visits includes people who just hit page refresh or the same person clicking multiple links (this is good) but absolute unique are people who hit the site for the 1st time, it doesn’t track additional clicks or page refreshes.

Pageviews are the number of times a page load has been requested, this is usually very inflated as most admins open their own site to test and refresh the page often which can drive these numbers up.

Time on Site is also important, if you see this number too low, people aren’t even reading your content, they are visiting, dropping EC’s or something like that and leaving.  you see my average is 51 seconds and that isn’t really a lot of time to read full article so this means that many Entrecard droppers are “drop and run” on my blog.

Bounce Rate - This is the percentage of people who visit your site and immediately leave without looking or clicking on something else on your site.  This also tends to be very high when you use Entrecard as most people just drop and run, though we will talk about bounce rate variations later this can also mean someone came to your site to read a specific article and left without bothering to search for more content.

New Visits - this is the percentage of new visitors to your site, this good if you have a high amount of traffic and means you are bringing in new people and uniques.  This can be bad if you are looking for high # of RSS subscribers and return visitors though.

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My average breakout accounted to 319 visits per day which puts me at an Izea Rank in the low 300’s.  Which is very good, but as mentioned I saw growth of 100 in September, 200 in early October and seem to plateau toward the end of October.  I do have some days where I break over 400 uniques per day, but only 2 out of 7 days the last week hit this high of a number.

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So lets examine Traffic Sources, if you click on your Traffic Sources menu link on the left you will see several options.  For now lets stick with the overviews and reading the results.  Again for the time period of 10/1 - 10/27 my stats break down like this:

1. 18.55% of my traffic is direct (this means someone had my site bookmarked, or typed my URL manually)
2. 46.75% is from referring sites such as entrecard, technorati, zimbio…etc
3. 34.70% is from Search Engines

This is actually pretty good statistics, almost 20% of the people have bookmarked dragonblogger.com or come to it directly which is 1 out of 5 people.  These would be return visitors most likely you can assume.  obviously almost 50% of my traffic comes from referring sites, so this can be good or bad depending on the referring sites.  I get 1/3 of my traffic from Google searches which is good it means when people search for keywords, my site is showing up and people are arriving on it from Google searches.

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This final graph, (you have to click on the picture to read the numbers and percentages.) shows you that Google accounts for the highest percentage of hits to my site called “Organic” which is very good.  Organic means people are finding you and this means a high unique # of visitors.  Entrecard is however #2 and accounts for the other 1/3 of my traffic.  This shows that entrecard works in bringing visitors, but this also means that if I stopped doing drops tomorrow, I would lose about 30% of my unique visits as people stopped returning the favor.  I consider this artificial traffic or manufactured traffic.  I have to drop to get drops, and this is a gift and a curse for Entrecard.  I do spend way to much time now, almost 2 hours a day doing EC drops and I can’t keep doing it when I could be focusing on writing quality blog posts instead.  So in November I am going to wean back on Entrecard a bit and see how much of a hit I take.

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So this is an overview of some high level statistics you can garner from Google Analytics, don’t ignore these, you can look for trends, patterns. Look for which days have high # of unique visitors and see what you posted and how you advertised to learn what works best.

-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

I get asked many times and see many people say they joined SocialSpark but don’t really know how to use it as a social networking tool.  They only use it to do paid opps, but want to learn how to leverage the site more.  Here is how I use SocialSpark to find and network with my blog community.

First here is how I like to build my blog community, find like blogs in category and befriend them.  Then find bloggers by location and befriend them as well.  Read their blogs, visit their blog site, see what interests them, take any sparks they might offer…etc.

SocialSpark added great searching features in the last few months, these features did not exist prior to like June/July time frame, so take advantage of them.

Sign into your SocialSpark account

Click on Community -> Browse Users

By default the first screen will sort by newest members first, so people who joined most recent will always be listed first.

There are options to the right, you can search by any keyword.  This is useful for finding any blogger or blog that has a specific keyword in their profile.

Here is an example of the returned sites when I searched just for the keyword “Arizona”
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As you can see only 2 sites returned because only 2 profiles in all of SocialSpark have the word “Arizona” in the Account Description.

Now instead of using a keyword search, I am doing a Location search.
Blank out the keyword, and select Country of “United States” and State of “Arizona”
You will see many accounts returned who selected Arizona as their location.

Now one of my favorite searches is to browse blogs by Channel (aka. Category). I wish SocialSpark had a category for Poetry Blogs, instead of them falling under Other though.
You can leverage a Keyword Search in addition to other searches. For this search I am looking for a Channel of “Technology” and the keyword is PC, so any blog account that mentions PC in the description and their blog category is listed as Technology is returned.

Experiment with different search methods and find the bloggers who match your blogs Channel and other area’s of interest. I do network with almost any blogger as my 4 blogs cover every single category with the exception of Women’s Interests but I just figure that as Personal Diary anyway. I have met so many people through SocialSpark, and crazy enough SocialSpark is one of the reasons why my blog has an Alexa rank of like 16,000 in the Philippines.

I hope this article helps my fellow bloggers who don’t use SocialSpark much to leverage it more, and if you don’t have a SocialSpark account create one. My account is DragonBlogger and all my blogs are listed under my account. You also get really good analytics if you have your blog listed for more than 30 days. I posted about this in a previous post.

Stay tuned for more about how I leverage Zimbio, Entrecard, WhereIStand, Twitter (you can see this article on JustinGermino.com

-Dragon Blogger

Let me know how you all like my tips for SocialSpark and if you like using the site not just for paid opps, but for socializing as well.

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

My fellow Entrecard users, forgive if I haven’t dropped you back since Friday. The problems with Entrecard have made reciprocating drops almost impossible.  Every time I click on Drops Inbox, I get a 500 error in Entrecard, I can’t barely even check my account dashboard.

When I visit any of my fellow’s sites, the Entrecard logo never loads the “Drop” button, so there is nothing to click on.  Ah well, I figured my site would take a huge hit with Entrecard being down for almost 2 days, but my site actually didn’t take too bad of a traffic hit.

My site did drop from about 300+ unique visits per day to about 50 per day.  This shows that at least a good portion of my users come to my site for more than just Entrecard drops and this makes me very proud.  I also want to tell users that I did have the option to do a Social Spark Opportunity yesterday, but I chose not to do it.  I just couldn’t believe in the product and it wasn’t worth promoting something I don’t believe in just for $6.50.  I value what people think of my blog too much to put an ad for some shoddy product that I just can’t sell without feeling like I am selling something hokey.

Spending the weekend with my kids, so not blogging my 4 times per day as usual.  I will pick that up again tomorrow.

Thanks to all my readers for visiting and I encourage you to do a Social Spark opp (See my post prior to this one) if you are bored this weekend, it is something to do.

Also, I need another volunteer for my Poetry Contest on Wanderer Thoughts it isn’t going to be much of a contest with only 2 submissions,  I mine as well just give away the Entrecredits at this point.

-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