Beginner Blogger




Beginner Blogger smashed it in October! Traffic wise every single day did better than last month. Cracked 1000 visitors for the month! So I decided to have a weeks vacation to Coolumn here in Queensland. Actually I lie, I would have gone for the holiday anyway but it was just fitting

Here are the numbers…

Remember green is good (means I did greater than last month) red is bad

Twitter stats for October

Tweets – 407 (Sep 283). +124 more tweets made than last month total 846
Followers – 843, (Sep 396) +447 more followers made than last month total 1597
Mentions – 210, (Sep 145) +65 more mentions to @beginnerblogger than last month total 421

Absolutely killed it with Twitter. A lot of has to do with the method of how I got 1000 twitter followers in 30 days. That said, I won’t be doing that again for November so my stats next month will drop dramatically for Twitter. I want to aim to get to know the people that I am following or have followed me on twitter more than I do right now.

I’ve been getting a lot more retweets lately which I think has come down to writing more quality blog tips. Also I’m making an effort to credit all the people that I tweet links to. I’m also making sure the links I tweet will provide value for my followers and aren’t just random links. (But that might happen on a rare occasion as I’m still human and I like to have some fun on twitter )

Twitter is definitely my huge success and I’d be next to nothing without it. I actually think people are getting more value from Twitter than they do my blog.

Facebook stats for October

Fans – 7, (Sep 2) +5 more facebook fans made than last month total 15

Facebook will be one of my main focuses in November. So if you haven’t already please add beginner blogger to facebook. As I write this I only need 2 more fans until I get can a unique URL.

Unfortunately my amazing system of linking up my twitter to yahoo pipes to twitterfeed to my facebook fan page seems to have come to a halt. I just spent a good hour trying to fix it back up so hopefully that works.

If you didn’t understand that last paragraph basically I want selected tweets from my twitter account to appear on my facebook fan page.

Blog stats for October

Posts – 6, (Sept 4) +2 more blog posts made than last month (total 24)
Comments – 43, (Sep 19) +24 more comments made than last month total 78 (excluding myself, pingbacks and spam)

Still none too happy with my posting efforts but I think I posted some quality posts this month. The method of how I got 1000 twitter followers in 30 days blog post went off the chart. I didn’t post it till the middle of October but it’s had over 100+ page views than any other page on my blog (for the month of October). Impressive. I guess having a bold statement on a hot topic like twitter, backed up with how I actually did it caught the attention of many readers.

That post also gained my first of many diggs – which currently stands at 17

Comments went off as well – I think this came down to producing some quality content which seemed to really connect with my readers which is awesome The more comments the better!

RSS stats for October

Subscribers –  12, (Sep 1) +11 total 18

RSS subscribers is finally picking up and on a healthy upwards trend. In the early stages it was going up and down quite dramatically. I tried to post at a consistent pace – around 1 blog post every 3-4 days so I think that helped my drop out rate that I was experiencing earlier.

Google Analytics stats for October

Visitors – 1,113, (Sep 531) +582
Unique Visitors – 610, (Sep 299) +311
Visitors not from Brisbane (my home town) – 951, (Sep 416) +535 (Because my IP address changes and I check my site constantly on different computers I wanted a way to check my stats that didn’t include my visits)
Visitors not from Brisbane and time spent on site higher than 0 seconds – 342, (Sep 123) +219 (I wanted to see how many visitors came to my site that spent greater than 0 seconds on my site – i.e. the page fully loaded and they spent some time on the site. I’m not sure if this is entirely accurate)

Best month by far. As you can see by the image I beat every single day from previous month. Really amazing results and thank you to all that visited. I hope I can continue to provide you with valuable content! Obviously this month as gotten off to a slow start so if I’m to beat these stats this month I have a LOT of work to do

I also noticed that my stats don’t seem to include visits from links I promote on twitter. I think because I use hootsuite the ow.ly links bring up a hootsuite bar at the top of the browser which doesn’t seem to register to google analytics as a visit.

Here’s a image of how many clicks I get when I post links on twitter through hootsuite just as an example:

I had a couple of huge days but that’s because I posted several links those days. I’m pretty sure this doesn’t include retweets and only counts links that people click from my tweets.

Email Subscriber stats for October

Subscribers –  4, (Sep 5) -1 total 9

Not the greatest month for my email list, but I didn’t promote it at all. I really recommend you sign up if you haven’t already. It’s a great way for us to communicate 1on1 and I really encourage that you reply to the emails I send out (and I reply to them asap). So if you haven’t signed up to my email list sign up below. I don’t spam or give your email away, it’s illegal to do so and aweber has a great security system so nothing like that will ever happen.

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Review of October Goals

* 10 Blog posts FAIL only posted 6. They were much better quality than previous month though I thought
* Add social media buttons to blog posts SUCCESS Thanks to this I got 17 diggs on the post how I got 1000 twitter followers in 30 days
* 30 blog comments on other blogs SUCCESS I commented on a lot more actually. I lost count, commenting on other blogs just comes naturally to me now. It’s a great way to connect with other bloggers as well as getting yourself out there. If you think I should be subscribed to your blog let me know about it in the comments below
* Twitter page background and twitter image update SUCCESS check out my new twitter background Let me know what you think Changed my avatar image too to incorporate the (new) logo as well as myself for some personality rather than just a logo.
* Fill 1 more advertising spot SUCCESS I did, it’s down now though. I actually took off all adsense as I thought it looked bad on the site and if it made any money it would have only made a couple of pennies which isn’t worth the damage it could potentially do to the image of the blog.
* Play around with CSS make it look a bit better FAIL I haven’t heard any complaints about the design (apart from myself) only praise. If someone says it could do with improving then I will do something about it. Having said that when all the important things have been completed (like more blog posts) then I will get around to changing the design of the site. I just purchased the Thesis theme so watch out
* Business card look and feel on ‘about me’ page with links to social media sites Mixed bag social media links are there but it’s not exactly as I planned out. I get a lot of links to my about page so it is something I would like to spice up a bit. Just didn’t get around to it in October.
* Create at least 4 emails to subscriber list FAIL I wrote 2-3 though. If you sign up (above or on the side nav) you will get some emails which I can just about guarantee will be beneficial for you. It’s an interactive newsletter, it doesn’t have to be, but you get more out of it if you interact.
* Set up templates for images, file name convention to streamline repeated tasks Mixed bag I am getting into a grove now. I just didn’t set up my ’streamline’ as I had in mind.
* Contact and Advertising page polish up Mixed bag This is green because I created a contact form and felt updating the advertising page wasn’t necessary at this point in time. I’m thinking I may just take the link off in the nav since no-one has taken up my $1 offer
* Approx 120 blogging tips on twitter SUCCESS I did this and more. This is really coming naturally now and I have a great process on how I do this now which I may share in an upcoming blog post
* 1250 twitter followers SUCCESS I killed it. I have over 1600 followers now. Big thanks to @Ileane and the program Buzzom, as well as the many people that retweeted me or recommended me on #followfriday or just said nice things about me.
* Video tutorial post FAIL I really wanted to do this too. If you’ve kept up with my twitter you’ll know there is a virtual high-five coming up for @steitiyeh for giving me an invite to google wave I’ll get to that sometime this week!

November Goals

* 3 Guest Posts
* 1 Video Post
* From this point on 1xblog post every 2-4 days NOT including stat posts (like this) or interview posts
* 1x Guest post on my blog – will it be you? Contact me if you’re interested
* 50 FB fans
* 30 RSS subscribers
* 120+ Twitter tips
* 3 emails to email subscribers
* 30+ comments on other blogs
* Learn FB fan pages inside out
* Read up on digg and stumbleupon a bit more

So that’s October stats and November goals for this month! Any questions please let me know in the comments below or by any other means

If you enjoyed this blog post you may also enjoy:

Beginner Blogger Stats and Goals – Sept-Oct 09

Beginner Blogger Stats and Goals – Aug-Sept 09

Beginner Blogger Stats and Goals – July-Aug 2009

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