Beginner Blogger

I saw a great post on Mike’s Life, SteitBlog and Lifenotion about setting goals for 2010. While I am more a month by month person and think that a year is way too long to set solid goals for I thought I’d chip in and do some goals for this Beginner Blogger site.

These are very rough figures but I would be over the moon if just some of these happened. I’m also sure some of these figures will be adjusted as the year goes on so they’re more realistic.

Beginner Blogger 2010 Goals

• Top 50,000 Alexa Ranking – (though it doesn’t really mean anything to me, just shows progression based on traffic)
• Page Rank 4+ (though it doesn’t really mean anything to me just shows progression in the eyes of google)
• 1000+ visits per day
• Launch several small quality ebooks to give away for free
• Launch 1-2 paid ebooks
• 300+ blog posts either on the blog or as guest posts elsewhere
• 2+ guest posts a month
• Complete Redesign
• Create SEO strategy (my current SEO traffic is awful)
• Create structured email course
• Launch a product/package that is not just an ebook
• 1500+ RSS subscribers
• 1000+ Email subscribers
• 500+ Facebook fans
• 10,000+ Twitter followers
• Perform online presentations
• Read 20+ quality books like Trust Agents
• Video interviews, more skype chats – get over the fear of the phone/voice conversations and be confident in that area
• Outsource someone as an experiment and gain experience working with someone
• Attend a blogging related conference
• Meet some of the amazing people I’ve met online in the ‘real world’
• Perhaps partner with someone
• Do something ground-breaking, never seen/done before in the blogging world. Think outside the box.
• Be a ‘construction worker’ and live up to my 3 words this year of Focus, Busy and Engage
• Be able to say at the end of the year I can continue doing this for 2011

As you know I’ve left my full time job to pursue a career online. So that last goal is so very much important to me. I love what I’ve been doing so far and I’d love to continue with it for many years to come. I want to gain all the experience I can get and most of all be able to successfully help you with your blogging problems.

So what are your goals? If you’ve made a similar 2010 goals post make sure you include it here with a link back to your site. I think it’s great to set goals so you can look back on later and see where you’ve come from.

Let’s all achieve our goals for 2010!

If you enjoyed this post you may also enjoy:

Beginner Blogger Stats and Goals – Dec 09-Jan 10

Pilot Post

The Art of Jugglign a Job and a Blog

Popularity: 3% [?]

A new month, a new year, a new decade, a new chapter. Welcome to 2010!

As you know I left my day job at the end of November so I’ve been able to spend a lot more time on Beginner Blogger. As a result my stats his month have been fantastic! Best month by far and even beat the pants off my great month of October.

The great thing is I still feel like I can work even harder so therefore my goals for January are much more challenging than previous month. I’m up for the challenge, are you?

Let the numbers begin!

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

Twitter stats for December

Tweets – 639 +359 more than last month (total 1765)
Followers – 495 +407 more than last month (total 2180)
Mentions – 460 +270 more than last month (total 1071)

I used twitter a lot more this month spending a great deal of time interacting with my followers and continuing to pump out the tips, questions and links I feel will be of value to you guys. The trick now is to manage the time I’m spending using social media so it’s effective, valuable and also isn’t considered wasting time.

Below is the daily clicks graph from hootsuite showing how many clicks I got from links I published on twitter. Note that it drops off at the bottom. That’s because I’ve gone back to using bit.ly links as people were complaining that they didn’t like the ow.ly bar that HootSuite uses.

I do not care about the actual number of followers that displays on my twitter. I would be happy if the number didn’t even show up. What’s important to me is the engagement and value I can bring to others through twitter. If that means going out of my way to find people I can help and follow them so they follow me back then that’s what I’ll do. Helping bloggers blog and developing strong relationships is what I’m about. Think of the number of twitter followers like the sand grains when sifting for gold. The gold is what I’m after. Or the nugget

Twitter Statistical Goals for January:

• 2500+ followers (in total)
  
• 150+ valuable twitter tips and links to resources that will help you
  
• 500+ Mentions (@ replies)

Facebook stats for December

Fans – 45 +31 facebook fans made than last month (total 74)

I had a goal of getting a total of 50 facebook fans this month. I reached the goal about half way through the month so that was really great. I did a bit of promotion on twitter and put up the facebook fan page box on the sidebar of the blog. It goes to show that a little bit of promotion really works, the trick is to promote at the right times and make sure you’re still giving away free valuable content so readers won’t get annoyed with self-promotion. Remember: Give more than you receive

Below is a graph of people becoming a fan over time. That big spike I believe was when I suggested to my facebook friends on my standard facebook account to join my fan page – a very handy tool that facebook has.

Facebook Statistical Goals for January:

• 100+ FB fans in total
  

Blog stats for December

Posts – 10 +8 more blog posts made than last month (total 36)
Comments – 154 +134 more comments made than last month (total 252 – excluding myself, pingbacks and spam)

The amount of comments I received this month was incredible! This is probably the stand-out stat for the month for me. Just imagine if I had published more blog posts.

Blog Statistical Goals for January:

• 20+ Posts
• 200+ Comments

RSS stats for December

Subscribers –  17 +7 more subscribers subscribed than last month total 45

I reached my goal of 40 RSS subscribers which was great. A little promotion on twitter that was it. I learnt the other day that if someone just visits the feed and doesn’t actually subscribe it will count as a stat but doesn’t count as an on-going subscriber stat if they don’t subscribe. So what I’m thinking happened is that I put a link to the Beginner Blogger RSS feed on twitter which got a big spike in traffic to my feed, but not everyone subscribed they just visited the link. Hence the spike up and back down.

RSS Statistical Goals for January:

• 75+ RSS Subscribers (total)
  

Google Analytics stats for December

Visitors – 1560 +922
Unique Visitors – 853 +487
Visitors not from Brisbane (my home town) – 1334 +800 (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 – 586 +400 (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)

Massive increase of pageviews and average time spent on site.

Google Analytics Statistical Goals for January:
•    2000+ Visits

Email Subscriber stats for December

Subscribers –  12 +7 more email subscribers added than last month (total 26)

I ran a Christmas Competition and giveaway on Christmas Day that ran for a few days. The prizes weren’t huge but the reception was great. Congratulations to Ileane on winning!

If you don’t want to miss out on the next competition make sure you’ve signed up to the newsletter. You’ll be added into the draw

Sign up to Beginner Blogger Newsletter

Email Statistical Goals for January:

• 40+ subscribers (total)
  

Review of December Goals

*120+ Twitter tips SUCCESS
*300 blog comments (yes, Three Hundred blog comments) SUCCESS – I completed this relatively earlier than I expected. It was good fun and made a lot of new connections. I seem to stand up and get really into setting myself challenges like this
*15 blog posts or 1 blog post every 2 days Mixed Bag – While I didn’t get 15 blog posts out on the site published, I have written 15 blog posts to 90% completion.
*2xVideo blog – one featuring me and one tutorial/screen post (or a mixture) SUCCESS – I talked about What the Tweetmeme button does and did a video review for Beyond Blogging. I plan to do more videos so make sure you’ve subscribed in one way or another.
*2-4 emails to subscribers SUCCESS – I sent out an email about the Beyond Blogging Book (aff link) and a Christmas special email both of which are exclusive to the newsletter so make sure you sign up if you want to receive some extra content.
*3 guest blogs FAIL – I wrote one which isn’t live yet. I will strive to write a lot in the near future, especially when I get the redesign of the site up. Oops did I say that too soon
*50 FB fans SUCCESS – I promoted this a bit on twitter and started adding a lot more people on my facebook page and referring them to the Beginner Blogger fan page
*40 RSS subscribers SUCCESS
*20 email subscribers SUCCESS – The Christmas Competition and Giveaway paid dividends for this goal!

Goals For January

* Complete redesign (At least 80% completion – February is the deadline)
* Email redesign (to go with redesign)
* 50+ blog posts written (not necessarily published, they could also be guest posts)
* Spend 30+ hours interacting/commenting with other bloggers and blogs
* 2-4 Emails
* Distribute videos across the net to other video sites
* 180+ Twitter Tips and quality links

Statistical Goals For January (out of my direct control)

* 2500+ Twitter followers (in total)
* 500+ Twitter Mentions (@ replies)
* 100+ FB fans in total
* 200+ Comments
* 2000+ Visits
* 75+ RSS Subscribers (total)
* 40+ Email subscribers (total)

The 50+ blog posts is my personal challenge this month. Last month it was to comment on 300 blog posts which I did successfully.

The redesign is something I have been wanting to do for quite some time but I subscribe to the idea that you shouldn’t mess around with the template too much and focus on the more important tasks like relationship building and creating content. This current design has been around for a while and I’ve never been quite happy with it to be honest so now is time to change it up. I’m excited about the redesign and the direction this blog is heading!

So that’s December stats and January goals for this month! Any questions please let me know in the comments below.

(Fireworks image from Free Design 4 Me)

If you enjoyed this blog post you may also enjoy:

Beginner Blogger Stats and Goals – Nov-Dec 09

Beginner Blogger Stats and Goals – Oct-Nov 09

Beginner Blogger Stats and Goals – Sept-Oct 09

Popularity: 15% [?]

Been a very up and down month for beginner blogger. Mostly down stats wise but a huge up in the fact that I will be able to dedicate more time to beginner blogger. So as long as people continue to visit this blog and are showing interest my time and efforts put into this blog will be 100% greater.

I did a bit of an experiment on my blog to see what would happen stats wise if I were to neglect my blog. It was an experiment. I just want to make that clear. I’m back here now and raring to go now that I have more time and energy than ever to really deliver to you what you need in order to achieve your blogging goals.

If you’re following me on twitter you’ll know I haven’t been totally inactive – I was still available and active on there during the month of November, just not on the blog. My stats will speak for itself how the experiment went :p

Here are the numbers…

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

Twitter stats for November

Tweets – 280 (Oct 407). -127 less tweets made than last month total 1126
Followers – 88, (Oct 843) -755 less followers made than last month total 1685
Mentions – 190, (Oct 210) -190 less mentions to @beginnerblogger than last month total 611

Although it would seem my twitter account did really badly this month, I would argue that it did around the same, perhaps a little poorer than usual but certainly not as bad as it seems. October was just an amazing month and that month will be hard to beat. Now I have more free time I might throw a challenge to myself to double the efforts of October, but it won’t be this month – something for 2010.

Also note that I didn’t add anyone to twitter using my method of how I got 1000 twitter followers in 30 days. In fact I didn’t voluntarily go out of my way to add people. Unless I knew someone or if people added me first on twitter I didn’t add anyone new to twitter.

Had a strange thing happen to me the other day. I’m pretty sure it’s either incorrect or there is someone following me that was using a bot of some sort as I had 775 clicks on one link I posted the other day. I find that very hard to believe that almost half my followers clicked on my link, when the average is about 20 clicks for every other link I’ve posted.

So I’m guessing either a bot, hootsuite displaying incorrect data or perhaps it is displaying stats for a link that may have already been floating around twitter but have been posted by other people and not just me as a combined stat? Who knows. What do you think?

Facebook stats for November

Fans – 14, (Oct 7) +7 more facebook fans made than last month total 29

I didn’t quite reach my goal of 50 fans but given I was inactive for most of November that is ok.

If you’re not a fan I would love it if you became a fan of beginner blogger on facebook. If you already are it would be great if you could use the facebook button at the bottom of this post share this link or other links on my blog if you find them valuable. Think of it as a small Christmas present

Blog stats for November

Posts – 2, (Oct 6) -4 less blog posts made than last month (total 26)
Comments – 20, (Oct 43) -23 less comments made than last month total 98 (excluding myself, pingbacks and spam)

RSS stats for November

Subscribers –  10, (Oct 12) -2 less subscribers subscribed than last month total 28

I did 2-3 promotions of my RSS account on twitter this month and those 2 spikes near the end of the month are a result of that. I was quite surprised to be honest. Twitter is quite a powerful promotion system.

Google Analytics stats for November

Visitors – 638, (Oct 1,113) -475
Unique Visitors – 340, (Oct 610) -270
Visitors not from Brisbane (my home town) – 534, (Oct 951) -417 (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 – 186, (Oct 342) -156 (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)

Only two days this month were better than last month. Obviously – if you neglect your blog, so do your visitors. It’s very simple

Email Subscriber stats for November

Subscribers –  5, (Oct 4) +1 total 14

I believe the promotion of my email list in my last monthly stats post was the reason I gained more subscribers than last month. It was as simple as adding the form to the post and people signed up. I hope that those that are subscribed have enjoyed the emails so far and thank those that have subscribed and thank even more the ones that reply back to my emails. I really encourage people engaging and replying to the emails I send out. If you’re not subscribed please do so in the form below:

Sign up to Beginner Blogger Newsletter

Review of November Goals

* 3 Guest Posts FAIL – I managed to write 1 about blogging and business @ Melbourne SEO Search Engine Optimisation
* 1 Video Post FAIL
* From this point on 1xblog post every 2-4 days NOT including stat posts (like this) or interview posts FAIL due to experiment
* 1x Guest post on my blog – will it be you? Contact me if you’re interested Mixed bag I have a guest blog ready to post which will be up sometime this week
* 50 FB fans FAIL only managed 29
* 30 RSS subscribers FAIL close – managed 28 which I thought was pretty good considering.
* 120+ Twitter tips SUCCESS
* 3 emails to email subscribers FAIL – managed to write 1 which went out yesterday
* 30+ comments on other blogs SUCCESS – commenting on others blogs becomes so natural to me
* Learn FB fan pages inside out Mixed bag – I read a fair bit about facebook pages and did research. I just need to start implementing some ideas now
* Read up on digg and stumbleupon a bit more Mixed bag – learnt a bit about stumbleupon and I pretty much know what digg is all about but I want to have expert knowledge and that’s something I can’t admit to in these areas right now.

December Goals

*120+ Twitter tips
*300 blog comments (yes, Three Hundred blog comments)
*15 blog posts or 1 blog post every 2 days
*2xVideo blog – one featuring me and one tutorial/screen post (or a mixture)
*2-4 emails to subscribers
*3 guest blogs
*50 FB fans
*40 RSS subscribers
*20 email subscribers

The 300 blog comments is a 30-day CHALLENGE goal. I love setting myself challenges and I’m a big fan of Steve Pavlina’s blog where the 30-day Challenge originated with me.

I will have to average 10 blog comments a day – which is quite simple if you put it like this.

So that’s November stats and December goals for this month! Any questions please let me know in the comments below or by any other means Please continue to engage or start engaging if you haven’t already. It’s the easiest and most effective way for me to learn about you and your blogging problems that I can hopefully solve.

As I said previously I’ve got more time now than ever before so if you have questions – please ask!

(Candy Cane image from Icon Drawer)

If you enjoyed this blog post you may also enjoy:

Beginner Blogger Stats and Goals – Oct-Nov 09

Beginner Blogger Stats and Goals – Sept-Oct 09

Beginner Blogger Stats and Goals – Aug-Sept 09

Popularity: 1% [?]




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.

Sign up to Beginner Blogger Newsletter

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

Popularity: 9% [?]

September was a sensational month for me. Mainly off-blog wise. My football team I support in the AFL the Geelong Cats won the Grand Final. We’ve only won 2 since 1963 so they don’t come by every day and needless to say a lot of my attention this month was focused on that. The good news for you guys is that now footy season is finished that means more time I can spend helping you out blogging!

So onto the stats for September. You’ll see a welcomed addition of email subscriber stats!

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

Twitter stats for September

Tweets – 283 (Aug 123). +127 total 439
Followers – 396, (Aug 296) +100 total 754
Mentions – 145, (Aug 53) +92 total 211

You’ll see I’ve gotten rid of Direct Messages and how many people I’m Following. DMs are gone because there is too much spam these days and I rate mentions much higher than DMs. How many people I’m following is irrelevant really. I need to get as many targeted people following me as I can so my message is spread across more eyes and ears

Overall my twitter stats are rocking! I have primarily been focusing on my twitter account. Perhaps even moreso than this blog. So if you haven’t added me to twitter already I suggest you add me to twitter now. I post daily blogging tips and I reply to all my @replies and DMs (as long as I don’t suspect they’re spam).

Facebook stats for September

Fans – 2, (Aug 6) -4 total 8

Only managed an additional 2 subscribers to my facebook fan page. As I write this I am just setting up a new facebook page which connects to my main/personal facebook page. So please add beginner blogger to facebook. I stream all my twitter tips and blog feeds to the page now so if you use facebook a lot it’s a great way to get everything in the one spot!

Blog stats for September

Posts – 4, Aug 5 -1 (total 16)
Comments – 19, (Aug 10) +9 total 35 (excluding myself, pingbacks and spam)

I know a pretty dismal effort in the actual posting of blogs. I think I have some weak mentality with blogging on my site. Maybe because it’s broadcast to the whole world I am scared to post often? I am a bit of a perfectionist at times when I can be so maybe that’s it. I spend a lot of time talking to people 1on1 and using twitter.

I’ll work on my blogging mindset, but my goal this month is to produce at least 2 blog posts a week, really aiming for 10 posts this month. As I said before I’ll have more time up my sleeve this month.

It was however a great month of comments and to me that is the most pleasing sign. I think this is a result of my twitter promotion and engaging with my audience. Just imagine how many comments I could get if I produced some more content on my blog. Exciting prospect!

RSS stats for September

Subscribers –  1, (Aug 3) -2 total 6

Pretty dismal effort with RSS subscribers. It bounced around a bit over the month. My guess is that due to my lack of posts people that were subscribed, unsubscribed. So something I really need to focus on is consistent and frequent blog posts. At least 2 a week. Would love to see that total at 15+ by the end of this month.

As you can see from the image below there is steady progress so that’s a good sign at least

Google Analytics stats for September

Visitors – 531, (Aug 435) +96
Unique Visitors – 299, (Aug 235) +64
Visitors not from Brisbane (my home town) – 416, (Aug 308) +108 (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 – 123, (Aug 102) +21 (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)

Obviously not as great growth as previous month but I’m still getting more traffic which is a great thing. Steady progress! I’m already off to a fantastic start this month in October and I guess the really exciting part is that I’ve hardly promoted my blog apart from on twitter.

Email Subscriber stats for September

Subscribers –  5, (Aug 0) +5 total 5

Great start to my email list. It wasn’t up for the whole month, didn’t promote it at all, it’s just sitting on the right hand side of my blog. Also given that I’m not giving anything away (yet) to sign up it’s a great start. I really recommend you sign up to my email list because it’s the fastest way for me to be able to answer your questions and let you know what’s happening in a quicker way than posting blog posts. You’ll also miss out on some great content if you don’t sign up!

If there are other stats you would like to know please let me know in the comments below and I will share any stats you would like to know!

Review of September Goals

* 20 Blog posts FAIL only posted 4.
* 50 Quality Twitter ‘tweets’ SUCCESS really hit it off with twitter. Tried to ‘tweet’ 3 tips a day and I believe I succeeded this by far.
* Comment on at least 10 other blogs SUCCESS I actually posted on 20+ blogs. According to my stats it would appear I would get about 1 visit to my blog per comment I made. By posting on other blogs I learn more, engage more with similar bloggers and increase my brand awareness so I think it’s a good very very good thing to do.
* Engage with people on Twitter and other blogs SUCCESS
* Fix current images on site – make sure all unique FAIL I was going to put up a unique image that had just a face on them but I didn’t get around to it. It wasn’t significant enough to be a high priority
* Add google adwords to sidebar SUCCESS – Google adwords appears at the top of the page and I now run some ads on the right hand side. I don’t get paid for these to be up. If you sign up to them I get a slice. It doesn’t cost anymore than going to the site itself. I get paid because you click through from my blog. Also the 4 banners I post on the right hand side will always be quality products or services I recommend. I will never post scams or anything like that. So if you’re looking for a quality web host or want to build an email list with aweber check out the links on the side
* Add categories to sidebar SUCCESS
* Email list back up SUCCESS
* Create/Organise contacts that I have made through this blog SUCCESS
* Polish off areas of site – Contact, Adverise, sidebar footer etc FAIL I will get around to creating a proper contact box this month and fixing my advertising page. I may even just get rid of that link on the main navigation.

October Goals

* 10 Blog posts
* Add social media buttons to blog posts
* 30 blog comments on other blogs
* Twitter page background and twitter image update
* Fill 1 more advertising spot
* Play around with CSS make it look a bit better
* Business card look and feel on ‘about me’ page with links to social media sites
* Create at least 4 emails to subscriber list
* Set up templates for images, file name convention to streamline repeated tasks
* Contact and Advertising page polish up
* Approx 120 blogging tips on twitter
* 1250 twitter followers
* Video tutorial post

So that’s September stats and October 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:

How I set Up Google Analytics To Track My Blog Stats

Beginner Blogger Stats and Goals – Aug-Sept 09

Beginner Blogger Stats and Goals – July-Aug 2009

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What a month August was! I was bed-ridden for almost 2 weeks with a case of the Swine Flu. Couldn’t believe it.

Beware this is a long post but I think it’s worth your while having a read, especially if you’re into stats and enjoy watching the progress of things – like blogs

Anyway, although I didn’t set myself any statistical goals for August it was clearly a dominating month. Bold Green indicates how much I beat last month by, and success. Bold Red indicates I did less than last month, or failure of a certain goal. So without further ado here are the stats for August 2009.

Twitter stats for August

Tweets – 123 (July 33). +90 total 156
Followers – 296, (July 62) +234 total 358
Following – 1228, (July 157) +1071 total 1385
Direct messages – 78, (July 21) +57 total 99
Mentions – 53, (July 13) +40 total 66

Twitter Notes and September Goals
The twitter stats were huge! I admit I probably spent most of my focus on twitter than anything else. I had aimed to get 150 followers, but I more than doubled that! It’s a really exciting and fun social media platform and I engaged with many people through twitter over the month of August. A large majority of my traffic to this blog was a result of my activity on twitter.

I still have a long way to learn about twitter and how to use it as effectively as possible. My goals for September won’t necessarily be about numbers, it will be more about providing quality ‘tweets’ and engaging with the people on my list and other people I find that I feel I can help.

I’m hoping through helping others and providing quality content on twitter I’ll be able to get more followers. I won’t be going crazy adding everyone and anyone I can as it may look based on the stats. I didn’t just add anyone though, the people I added were based on searches I used related to blogging that I feel were the right type of people for me to follow and that I felt could benefit from following me.

Facebook stats for August

Fans – 6, (July 0) +6 total 6

Facebook Notes and September Goals
I barely focused on my facebook account at all. I had a goal in mind to get about 5 fans but I didn’t devote any time to it apart from adding in the live feed to my blog, so this result really surprised me.

I don’t really have any goals in mind for September to do with facebook until I learn more about it. I am actually thinking I will change the URL of my facebook page and link it up to my personal account instead of the one I created just for beginner blogger.

So I may do a bit more reading about facebook fan pages this month but only if I find some time. Facebook is not a large focus for the month of September for beginner blogger.

Blog stats for August

Posts – 5, July 7 -2 (total 12)
Comments – 10, (July 6) +4 total 16 (excluding myself, pingbacks and spam)

Blog Notes and September Goals
This was a poor month in terms of content/posts for my blog. As a result my main focus this month is content generation. I have done quite a bit of planning of posts to come but I failed in delivering these posts to the blog.

I have been listening to people I have engaged with on twitter and other social mediums and I have a goal to produce 20 blog posts for the month of September.

A big focus for the blog in September is giving what my readers want, giving my readers what I would want and hopefully getting a reputation. It’s a big part of what this blog is about – engaging with the people that visit my site, but it’s a primary focus for September.

RSS stats for August

Subscribers –  2, (July 3) -1 total 5

RSS Notes and September Goals
Unfortunately I did not get many RSS subscribers this month as I had hoped. Perhaps this is an indication of the post quantity on my blog and quite possibly the quality also. I’m also unsure of how exactly the RSS stats work as the stats seem to show different results every day. Here is a screenshot of the last 30 days:

I set up subscription by email so that is now an option when you subscribe to the beginner blogger RSS feed.

My focus for September doesn’t really involve RSS subscribers however I am hoping that I gain more with an increase of posts for this month.

Google Analytics stats for August

Visitors – 435, (July 90) +345
Unique Visitors – 235, (July 52) +183
Visitors not from Brisbane (my home town) – 308, (July 62) +246 (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 – 102, (July 23) +79 (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)

Google Analytics Notes and September Goals
A significant increase in traffic this month I believe is mostly is due to my activity on twitter. More than 70% of my traffic came from twitter outside of my hometown Brisbane. Only 3% were from ‘organic’ traffic (from search engines).

For September I am hoping to significantly improve my traffic. For a blog that is over 2 months old I think the traffic I am getting is fairly low and feel I can generate a lot more. I would love to get a day where I get 50 visitors and generate an average over 20.

As you can see in the image above the blue line is August and green line is July. That peak in August was when I launched my new blog design and was telling people about it. It generated a bit of Buzz and I received my highest traffic in one day which was 36.

I think through creating more posts, telling people on twitter about my new posts I create, fixing up some SEO and engaging with my readers and other peoples blogs I will be able to reach my traffic goals for September.

Significant other things I did in August

* Brand new redesign What do you think? It caused some headaches but I think it has improved the site dramatically.
* Created a (free) email list. I have taken this down for now as I will be getting an Aweber account soon. Until I have that set up properly I will most likely set up the free email subscription box again. So please subscribe!
* Engaged with many wonderful and talented bloggers
* Signed up with Hootsuite This is a great twitter application. You thought TweetDeck was good, wait till you try this!
* Created video blog post

Goals for September

* 20 Blog posts
* 50 Quality Twitter ‘tweets’
* Comment on at least 10 other blogs
* Engage with people on Twitter and other blogs
* Fix current images on site – make sure all unique
* Add google adwords to sidebar
* Add categories to sidebar
* Email list back up
* Create/Organise contacts that I have made through this blog
* Polish off areas of site – Contact, Adverise, sidebar footer etc

September is going to be a huge month! Not only have I set myself a lot of goals for this blog I am also working on a completely new side project which I hope to share you with later on down the track. Also I am a big AFL fan here in Australia and it’s finals time in the month of September so I will be devoting a fair bit of my weekends to watching the game I love. Along with a full time job, fathers day and other events I am going to be extremely busy. Having said that Im’ excited and really looking forward to the challenge that this month will offer. Bring it on!

Please let me know in the comments below if you have any questions regarding stats or anything else related to this post. I am happy to answer any questions

If you enjoyed this post you may also enjoy:

Beginner Blogger Stats and Goals – July-Aug 2009

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This blog has been up for over a month now and I thought I would share my stats with you. This is also a great way for me to share with you the tools I am using to work out how well my blog is going. I want to go through with you my goals for August as well. I use a variety of different methods to track my stats and here they are:

Twitter stats for July

Tweets – 33 (how many messages I posted)
Followers – 62 (how many people see my messages when I post, in their account)
Following – 157 (how many people I see posting messages, in my account)
Direct messages – 21 (how many people have sent me a private message)
Mentions – 13 (how many people have sent me a direct message using the @ tag which is potentially visible to everyone)

Facebook stats for July

Fans – 0 (how many people have joined the fan page beginner blogger)

Blog stats for July

Posts – 7 (how many posts I have made)
Comments – 6 (how many people posted a comment, excluding myself)

RSS stats for July

Subscribers – 3 (how many people have subscribed to my RSS feed, according to feedburner)

Google Analytics stats for July

Visitors – 90 (how many people visited my site)
Unique Visitors – 52 (How new visitors came to my site, this is checked by IP address so is not entirely accurate as IP addresses can change daily on some computers)
Visitors not from Brisbane (my home town) – 62 (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 – 23 (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)

Significant other things I did in July

• Created this blog
• Created email account
• Created twitter account
• Created RSS subscription through feedburner
• Created Facebook fan page
• Experimented with some plugins and widgets in wordpress
• Made some great contacts/future contacts
• Submit site to google (ranked on page 1-2 depending on time of day, have been as high as no1 spot for search term ‘beginner blogger’)

Goals for August

• A new fresh design!
• Add in a video to a blog post
• Experiment with a podcast
• Get better at batching my tasks
• Get a blog post out at least once every 3 days – so at least 10-12 posts this month.
• Find a blogging association/group to join

I have goals I want to achieve in terms of traffic/visitors/twitter followers etc. But because this blog is very new I just want to see how next month pans out before I share with you what my goals are in that respect. That way come the end of August I’ll be about to do a month on month comparison

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This is an update from my post a week ago about batching for bloggers. My goal was to batch certain tasks together to create more time to focus on more important activities like creating blog posts and becoming more of an expert in my field. Also to eliminate distraction from achieving these tasks.

The verdict? Quite a fail. However(!) I have learned a valuable thing or two that I would like to share with you in regards to batching tasks. Firstly though lets recap what my goal was and how I actually did.

• Checking my beginnerblogger email – 3xweek I was checking this way too often. Possibly my biggest disappointment. I remember leaving it open and reading emails as they would come in. In fact, I’m almost ashamed to admit it – I kept on hitting the ‘get mail’ button on several occasions. I was procrastinating badly. This is a big no-no. What I should have done is checked it once, gone through all my emails then close the mail program.
• Checking my personal email – 1xday. I did this once a day and more. I have over 1300 emails unread in my personal email, I should just mark all as read. In fact I am going to do this right now! I just cleared 1366 emails which are now marked as ‘read’ in my personal gmail account. That feels so amazingly good. If you’d like to know how to mark all emails in google as read in less than 5minutes – even if you have thousands like I did – shoot me an email at blogme@beginnerblogger.com
• Reading my RSS feeds – 1xweek. This was a success. I have my feeds go through newsgator and you may or may not be aware that they are now merging with google at the end of August so I’ve made the transition and because of that I am starting my subscriptions from scratch.
• Checking facebook – 1xday. I probably did it more than 1xday but I certainly am not checking it every hour or 10 minutes like I used to. I am batching them mainly for viewing at night on the bus ride home from work and then I am all up to date with facebook. I achieved the goal of making one facebook message per day.
• Checking Twitter – 2xday. Twitter is becoming like my facebook obsession. I failed my goal however I feel like I have achieved a lot by being on twitter a lot. I’ve gotten myself quite a following (over 50!) and am making connections with my potential audience which is what I want. I made many updates to twitter. If you haven’t already – please add me to twitter, I would love to hear from you!
• Writing blogs – 2xweek. I really failed this – I wanted to blog a lot more than I did. I had complete writers block over the weekend. I feel though I am making up for it this week. I will improve this.
• Checking Google Analytics – 2xweek. Fail. Fail. Fail. I was checking this about 5 times a day. I just really like stats! There isn’t really much point me checking it either. I need to focus on writing content!
• Checking Feed Burner – 1xweek. I checked it twice. I still need to figure out how it actually works. The stats tracking isn’t as black and white to me as I first thought. If you haven’t already – which I’m pretty sure no-one has please subscribe to my RSS feed.
• Surfing other peoples blogs – 2xweek. I did this. I feel that I don’t need to do this as often really. I don’t want to suffer from an information overload but at the same time I love checking out other peoples blogs. I will click links sent to me on twitter but it doesn’t mean I’m going to subscribe or continue to visit that site.

Given that I pretty much failed my batching task – I did learn a good thing or two.

Probably the most important thing is that when you get your own free time to work on your blog – work on your blog! Don’t waste time constantly checking emails, facebook, twitter etc. Check them all just once if you have to then close them down, put them away. Avoid distractions. I have just come home from work now and am writing this blog post. I checked my beginnerblogger email, personal email and twitter and now have closed them all down – 100% focusing on writing this. It’s only 7.30pm I remember it taking me till about 10pm last week to have written out a blog and the only thing that was stopping my was the above mentioned distractions!

Another thing I learned is that it’s OK to spend as much time as you want with those ‘distraction’ tasks like twitter/facebook etc when it’s not impacting your free time. In my situation I work 9-5, I commute 1 hour to work and 1 hour home. I see this 2 hours as a time for me to do all those things like check email/facebook/twitter etc. Lunch breaks at work for me are also another time I can check these things – I often check out my traffic stats in google analytics in this time also.

Sure, I could utilise my commute time and even do some blogging on the bus but generally I am tired going to work and coming home that checking email/twitter/facebook etc is the perfect time for me to be doing those things. This is just a stepping stone for batching.

I would love to hear what your batching techniques are. Feel free to leave a comment below, shoot me an email, send me a tweet or leave a comment on my new facebook fan page!

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Since starting this blog there are many activities I now do that I never did before and some that I have done in the past but are related to my blogging experience. It is quite a long list of activities and thus can take quite a chunk of time out my day.

The following list is the activities I participate in that I think are related to blogging and how much time I spend on each currently.

Activities related to blogging and how much time I spend currently on each

• Checking my beginnerblogger email – 1xday. I check it currently as soon as I get home from work. On and off during the weekends.
• Checking my personal email – 3xday. I check this in the morning when I am walking/waiting/on the bus to work. I don’t make emails then I just read them. I will usually check once again in my lunch time and sometimes more often than that. I will then check again when I get home and the bulk of my emailing will happen then.
• Reading my RSS feeds – 1-2xday. I actually just did a big clean out of all my subscriptions and will start getting new ones in as I enjoy reading my RSS feeds. I generally will check if I have any new ones and read them on the bus to and from work.
• Checking facebook – 1-toomany xday. I check facebook too often. It’s too convenient on my phone. Ok this isn’t 100% related to blogging, but I would love to know a blogger out there that doesn’t have a facebook. I’m currently int he middle of setting up a facebook for beginnerblogger but am having trouble setting a URL for it. But that’s another story.
• Checking Twitter – 1-toomany xday. Ever since I downloaded TweetDeck for iPhone I am checking this many times during the day. At the moment I am just adding people
• Writing blogs – 1-2xweek. This just isn’t enough. I am spending more time doing other things than doing what’s important and that is write content for this blog. This will change.
• Checking Google Analytics – 1-4xday. I just really enjoy looking at my stats! Even though I’m only averaging about 2 visitors a day it’s just exciting to know that people are visiting my site.
• Checking Feed Burner – 5xweek. I don’t check this often, but I check it way more than I should. I think my problem is that I’m not even sure if the feed burner is working properly.
• Surfing other peoples blogs – 3xweek. I should really be checking out more blogs and getting involved with them. I am not doing this at the moment. The main problem is that I haven’t subscribed to anyones RSS – this will be addressed.

The Problem

The problem I have and what I suspect other bloggers have is that they are doing too many activities/time wasting activities that could be batched together to create more time for the things that are really important – that is blogging!

The Solution

The solution I have – and many thanks to the 4-Hour Work Week book which I have just read – is to batch tasks. I mean really batch them. If you are checking facebook over 10xday, checking email constantly during a day you are spending too much time on these activities when you could be doing more important tasks. If you batch tasks to once a day, that ‘task’ is out of the way and you are then free to do more important tasks like blogging!

My Solution – the week batching trial

My solution is to batch tasks. This is my personal solution and trial I am going to run for one week and I will keep reports on how often I check each. It won’t be easy. The trial will start for me tomorrow being Wednesday 28th July 2009 and I will report back with my results on Tuesday

• Checking my beginnerblogger email – 3xweek. Tomorrow is Wednesday. So I will check my beginnerblogger email on Thursday, Saturday and Monday.
• Checking my personal email – 1xday. I will only check my personal email once a day when coming home.
• Reading my RSS feeds – 1xweek. Because I don’t have many RSS subscriptions I will just check this on Friday. I hope to subscribe to more great RSS feeds so if you have a great blog let me know about it!
• Checking facebook – 1xday. I really want to tackle this. I love hearing what my friends are up to, but I can easily batch this in one day. I also want to post an update of myself once a day. I will do my facebooking update on the bus on the way home.
• Checking Twitter – 2xday. I will check this in the morning on the bus to work and on the way home from work. I will post one update a day at least on twitter.
• Writing blogs – 2xweek. This doesn’t mean I’m just going to post 2 blog posts a week. This means I dedicate 2 solid ’sessions’ of writing blog posts. I will do this Thursday and on the weekend.
• Checking Google Analytics – 2xweek. I really don’t need to check my google analytics stats so often. I don’t get enough traffic as it is. The focus is to create more content and make this blog great! I shouldn’t really check it at all – but I still am curious! So I will check this on Thursday and Tuesday.
• Checking Feed Burner – 1xweek. I will check this over the weekend. I really need to figure it out and make sure this is tracking correctly.
• Surfing other peoples blogs – 2xweek. I want to find some great blogs out there that inspire me. Bookmark them, subscribe to them and learn from them. I will do some surfing on Thursday and on the weekend.

So there you have it. This is my batching plan weekly trial. I hope by doing this I won’t be so disctracted and can really focus on particular activities, rather than many at once!

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It’s been a little less than a month now since I started this blog and thought it was about time to do some reflecting and share with you exactly what I have been up to outside of what you can already see in this magnificent blog, in list format

• Set up Google Analytics for stat tracking
  Basically it is a free google service that allows you to track visitor information that comes into your webpages. Not only does it just tell you how many visitors that have visited your site but it also tells you what city visitors are coming from and how long they spend on your site and so much more. It’s such valuable information that you really must have if your goal is to generate more traffic to your website (which is definitely my intention in the near future, not so much at the moment as I’m still generating content).

  So if you haven’t already got a visitor stat tracking program for your blog or website I really recommend google analytics.  It’s seriously amazing and I’ve only just started taking baby steps in the shallow end with this. I will definitely be blogging on more than one occasion about Google Analytics, it’s so in depth. I will release a blog soon about how to get started. For now though just check out how powerful Google Analytics is by clicking here (link will open in a new window).

• Submit www.beginnerblogger.com to Google
  Although I am not after a large amount of traffic yet, I did want to submit my site to google as I am aware that it takes a lot of time for pages to rank well. I’ve read that consistency is one important key to ensuring well placed rankings in google. I feel like I’m getting a post out at a consistent basis so by the time I’m ready to really start promoting this site and wanting to focus on getting a lot traffic I will have ranked well in google so I will hopefully be getting the right amount of traffic at the right time.

  Amazingly I am already ranked no1 if you search ‘beginner blogger’ in google. Which I think is really exciting. I’m not even trying to promote my site at the moment as I said before – I need to generate more content otherwise people will just leave and most likely not bookmark me or visit my site again. I am hoping that if my visitors can see I am posting regularly that they will visit again.Since submitting my site to google and have installed Google Analytics into my blog I have had 6 visitors coming from search engines. This is exciting!

  I will post a blog on how to submit your site to google so you’re searchable in google soon!

• Created a Twitter account
  That’s right, beginner blogger has a twitter account! So please add me to twitter and follow me. I only have 5 followers as it stands at the moment and this is one way I really want to get in touch with my visitors. So please follow me on twitter here. Or you can click on the link in the navigation bar.
• Created an Email account
  I created an email account specifically for this blog. So please drop me a line at blogme@beginnerblogger.com I would love to chat with anyone – from people totally new to blogging to the most experienced. I’d love to know what you think of my blog, any improvements, what you would like to see. This blog is a creation for both my own personal learning experience but I am creating an experience for you too as I am documenting everything as I go along. You will get to see first hand at what is working and what isn’t.
• Created an RSS feed
  You can subscribe to my RSS feed by clicking here or clicking on the RSS link in the navigation bar. This enables you to put all your blogs you enjoy in one main browser or directory if you will so you can easily view all blogs or news items etc that you’re subscribed at once rather than going to each site individually. I love RSS and subscribe to many RSS feeds. Putting them all together in one place is such a more convenient way for me to read all the sites I love in one go without having to go to site to site. So I recommend you do the same and subscribe to my RSS feed.

These are some of the main things I have done with my blog so far. I hope in the next few days I hope to be able to dive further into above so you too can implement the following to your blog.

I just wanted to mention as well that I have loved that I have receieved a comment for every post I have created. I hope this trend continues. As I keep mentioning I really want to connect with my visitors. So keep interacting. Subscribe to my RSS, add me to twitter and send me an email. I would love to hear from you!

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