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

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

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