June Statistics - into the summer

Holding steady, well almost. Bloggers I am following and who also frequently post their results for the previous month ... haven’t, yet! And I must say, that I am blogging away towards the close of day. Today is Canada Day – Canada’s birthday and today we celebrated Canada’s 142nd! Yup. As countries go, we are still just a babe in the woods - which is how I often feel about my own internet marketing career. Many years ago I came to this country and officially became a Canadian as soon as I qualified. Took my test. Was so proud to be sworn in. Am so proud to be a Canadian.

So, how did June pan out? A small downturn from May which is a bit disappointing ... I am looking for growth after all. But I have been told that the summer doldrums hit even the internet and my postings are not frequent enough to counteract.



As usual there are some peaks in the month. The two posts that drew the most traffic were

The Dot Com King
Ed Dale Kicks of 30 Day Challenge Pre-Season



The bright light is that it seems that the search engines are beginning to find this blog – at 15.93% it’s the highest to date.

The only earnings to report are Adsense at $6.83 ... no affiliates this month.

There were 46 downloads of my ebook ABC’s of Blogging for Money

Overall growth seems to be eluding me. I’ve looked at how I could improve the stats, get more traffic and have more people subscribing to my RSS feed (not sure I have that set up right), the newsletter or the “follow me” group. I checked to see what my more successful compatriots are doing:

John Chow who reportedly makes $40K per month really works hard at his blog. I just went over the past month and not only does he blog daily, but several times a day! And it’s all good stuff too ... some of it on his daily life, some of it on internet marketing, some of it on our buds in the biz. He’s got several products as well. He enjoys over 200K in traffic per month. Much of his revenue is from the paid sponsors. Not bad for someone who started to blog in 2006 “just because”

Yaro Starak who is known to have taken $100K to the bank at least one month – but more importantly, consistently pulls down over $35m monthly. Yaro has been blogging on one blog or another for nigh on ten years now and brings a lot of experience to the table. Not only does he post kick ass info but is now successfully joint venturing with other successful internet marketers -that's striking the gold vein in the mine!

Caroline Middlebrook – a software professional who started her blog some two years ago. Modest - compared to the two above - monthly income that hovers at the $2000 mark, but she’s been a rare presence on her own blog due to the time she is spending in developing a new software program.

How did I spend my Internet Marketing time blocks this past month?

- published 9 posts on this blog
- submitted 2 articles to one article directory
- kept up to date in the 30 Day Challenge pre-season
- researched niche topic for the 30 Day Challenge (I think I have one nailed)
- working on the beta project that Dan Lok put out
- Read my RSS feeds
- Read my favorite blogs and posted comments (got backlinks)
- Visited some forums
- Working on my postings for July which will be on linking.

Thoughts to Ponder: Now that I am much more familiar with WordPress I am seriously considering migrating this whole blog to that system. I am also seriously scared – scared that I’ll mess the whole thing up in the process techie type stuff not being my strong suite. But I now understand why the top dogs in the internet marketing scene choose Wordpress.

Soon I will unveil my project in the beta program which I think will work in good stead with the niche I am considering for the 30 Day Challenge. These will be covered in this blog in the future as each will have something to contribute to my progress and hopefully yours.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina Bellicova
Blogging for Money

PS. Another top notch blogger, Alvin Phang baked a cheesecake for his first anniversary. Pictures and recipe on his blog.

Quick Links:
The Dot Com King
Ed Dale Kicks of 30 Day Challenge Pre-Season
John Chow
Yaro Starak
Caroline Middlebrook
30 Day Challenge
Alvin Phang

Zero to Ferrari - Blogging?

Once a week I mine the internet for some good blogs. I usually do it on a Sunday – a day when I visit my faves, leave some comments where appropriate, and then go on the hunt for another. Today is not Sunday. I strayed and stumbled on a blog that caught my attention – it was one of those click this link to get to that site to get to an article I was interested in. The author prefers to maintain her privacy. Her nom de plume is Silicon Valley Blogger, or SVB for short. The name of the blog is The Digerati Life.

She writes well. I’m a sucker for the well written word, so ended up reading not only the article that led me to the site in the first place, but several of her other postings as well. As her name indicates she lives in Silicon Valley and in this particular post she writes about the fast money in her industry. She uses the term “… from zero to Ferrari…” actually she wrote 0 to Ferrari.

I loved it!

Wow! What an image it conjured. I thought it would make a fantastic domain name – never mind the content, that could come later – so quickly went to buy it off of Go Daddy, my domain vendor only to find, gasp! that it was already taken? Logged on to see what this site was all about – and there is no site!!! Aha. Someone besides me collects domain names.

So I’m sorry if you thought that I was going to tell you about someone who hit the mother lode while blogging and went from zero to Ferrari! Wouldn’t that just be awesome.

But that got me thinking. You know, there are lots of bloggers out there that are making more than just decent coin. I would venture that Darren Rowse of ProBlogger could probably spot a Ferrari or two and not feel a dint in his bank account. Carl Ocab, the 13 year old wonder from the Philippines is no slouch either as he makes more per month than most adults he knows make in a year. And then there is John Chow, who lives in my backyard, and routinely makes bank of 40K plus each month. Not exactly chump change.

But they all started from the same place that you and I started. Most often blogging wasn’t their first online venture and success did not come overnight, it was more like overyears. Consistent effort was what paid off, it's like making small deposits to your own Bank of Success. It works the same way as depositing money over time - I think its called compound interest.

So keep depositing your consistent effort. Maybe you could be the first 0 to Ferrari, and in the speed of time implied.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina

Cheese? What cheese? Give me the Ferrari!


Quick links:
The Digerati Life
Go Daddy
Darren Rowse
Carl Ocab
John Chow

The Good, the Bad - but Not So Ugly! February Analytics

Lessons one learns: before setting out goals have a foundation to support them.

What do you mean, Valentina?

In a minute. First, I am so pleased to announce my first earnings. My first month in business as a blogger I had the following income:

Adsense: $ 5.28
Nitro Marketing $48.50

Total: $53.78

What this amount does is take care of some small bills, for example Hostgator, Wordpress, purchasing Ewen Chia's new book How I Made My First Million on the Internet and How You Can Too!: The Complete Insider's Guide to Making Millions with Your Internet Business
and a coffee or two with my friends. Hey! Its a beginning!

Ok... on to the goals.

What I mean is that when I published my January Blogging Anaylitics I made a few goals to be achieved in February which in retrospect were not well founded. How I made these goals was to look at what January produced and simply doubled the results for February. What Results? What the analytics for February did was to bring me quickly to a realization: if I am going to make goals, there has to be a foundation for reaching them.

What I had in mind for February was to double all statistical figures. It did not happen. Here is what did happen:

Screen shot #1


Screen shot #2


Comparative Data: February vs January 2009:
Number of visits declined by 25% Yikes!
Page views declined by 4.25% - sweating bullets now
Page visits up by 27.88% - redemption yet!
Bounce Rate declined by 7.19% - that's good
Average time on site up by 58.5% (to over 6.05 minutes) WOO HOO! That's really good!

Most popular posts were:
Avoid Time Thieves - Focus on Blogging
Oh Google My Google, Where has the Adsense Gone?
Bloghosting - To Pay or Not To Pay

Traffic Sources

I am encouraged that the search engines are finding this blog. The Search Engine generated traffic is up to 8.5%, up significantly from the January figure of 1.18%.

What do these statistics tell me and what can I do to improve in March?


The good stuff:

#1. I really find it encouraging that the average time on the site is now 6.05 minutes. What that tells me is that visitors are spending time reading the content. Moreover the bounce rate has declined by almost 8%, which again substantiates that visitors are coming to read.

#2. Search engine traffic up by 7.32%. I don't know what a guru's take on that would be, but I'll tell what mine is ... I'm doing cartwheels! I think ideally that one would want the traffic sources to be somewhat evenly spread ... but hey! I'll revisit that when I have a better understanding of the value of each type of traffic. But for a two month old blog, that ain't no chicken feed in my book!

March Focus for Improved Results:

#1. Post more frequently. Image #1 shows a decline in traffic towards the latter part of the month. I stopped posting when I could not deliver my new blog in the way that I wanted because of my technical challenges. So, it is true what the gurus say: post, post, post.

#2. Market my posts: I can do this in several ways:
a. Repurpose the blog post with just a few changes and publish it to Article Directories (at least one - more if possible). What this does is that it gives me valuable backlinks and it just might drive some traffic to this blog. In the long term it will give authority to this blog and drive it up in Google's and other Search Eginge's rankings.
b. Use social media more effectively.
c. Broadcast to my list every time there is a new post

#3 - Launch that new blog already!
As mentioned in a previous blog I opted to use the paid version of Wordpress as the platform for my next blog. It is the platform of choice for professional bloggers and offers many more options than Blogger --- it is also somewhat more complicated than Blogger. I've never done one. Wanting to save myself some techie time grief I accepted Nitro Marketing's offer to install a new blog on Wordpress.

I was impressed with how quickly it was installed for me. Then came the techie nightmare. The installed template was simple and easy to use, not only that but Nitro uploaded 14 more templates that I could easily switch to if I was not happy with the one I got.

Having spent some time on blogs authored by Caroline Middlebrook, Yaro Starak, John Chow and others that are pulling in better than a decent annual income, I decided I wanted something different ... and therein lies the tale of downloading and uploading, cpanel and FTP (never mind, you too will one day cross the bridge).

Jeff at Nitro was most helpful in trying to help me navigate through this maze (of course being the stubborn being that I am, I wanted to know every step that I needed to take so that it is indelibly ingrained in my noggin for the next time), except that for some inexplicable reason my screen was not showing the same as it was on Jeff's. Long story short - it's up. I just want to populate it with a few more items and then voila! We're live, baby! Not perfect, but live!

Till then, Happy Blogging:

Quick Links:
">January 2009 Analytics
">Avoid Time Thieves - Focus on Blogging
">Oh Google My Google - Where has the Adsense Gone
">BlogHosting - To Pay or Not To Pay

Recommended:



PS. Be sure to post your thoughts or comments on this post (or on the blog in general) below.