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Apr 04 2007

Month in Review – March 2007

Posted by Jon Lee in Personal, Site stuff, tags: , , , ,

Instead of bombarding you with the latest site updates since I’m constantly adding and updating things, I’ve decided to provide a comprehensive review once a month on everything that has happened in the previous month. This first review is a long one, covering the entire lifespan of this blog up until this point.

January-February
Although this blog was conceived (started) in January 2007, I view January as the pregnancy period. During this time, it was quickly growing and developing into a blog that could be presented and become part of the blogging world. On February 2nd, the blog was officially born. Over the course of its first month, it began to gain readership and started to get noticed. The first milestone was when a post, Hindsight is 20/20, made it to the front page of digg and became the top story of the day. It is currently sitting at over 4,400 diggs and is the 8th most popular story of the past year in the hardware section.

During this time, feed subscribers had inflated to over 3,000 readers – a figure that makes me feel good, but is not at all reflective of true readership. Over the next 3 days, subscribers had quickly fallen to the level it was prior to being dugg. The onslaught of readers in February boosted the blog’s Alexa ranking from around 3,000,000 to 300,000. Technorati ranking was fairly low at around 100,000 but it was steadily climbing. The following Google analytics graph shows the volume of readers in the month of February.

February Analytics

March
In March, a second milestone came when a February post, The best story ever told was on the front page of Collegehumor, bringing in a small batch of visitors. Aside from that, there weren’t any other big influxes of visitors, but a solid community began to build up around the blog. Alexa ranking had climbed into the 100,000′s and Technoarti ranking increased to the 50,000′s. I started my Quest to Defeat My Google Twin and made good headway on that – I am now fourth (as seen in the sidebar widget)! I also set the ambitious goal of getting to the front page of Google using the anchor text “Web Development” by March of next year. Traffic was steady throughout the month, averaging around 400 visitors a day as the month came to an end:

March Analytics

March was also the month I began to monetize my blog. I tried different things: Adsense, Amazon, RMX Direct, Text-Link-Ads, ReviewMe, and PayPerPost. TLA and ReviewMe both rejected this blog (due to non-existent page rank and how young the blog was). RMX Direct was very weak as described in my review and Amazon ads were very slow to load so I took them off. I was accepted to PayPerPost yesterday and it looks promising, but I am going to wait for my PageRank to be updated before I begin participating. Adsense earned me a little bit of money (under $10).

Although this blog earned very little money in the first 3 months, I am not worried. Making money was never the primary purpose of starting this blog – I have other sites for that. I am just glad to have an increasing readership and a growing community of great bloggers to learn from.

Looking Forward
For the month of April, I hope to increase the number of feed subscribers over 100, increase my Alexa ranking into the top 100,000, boost my Technorati ranking to at least 25,000 and continue to provide solid content for the community to enjoy. I also hope to participate in more blogs to help other blogs grow.

Here are some ways you can help me reach my goals!

Thanks for reading! I promise next month’s update will be shorter! ;)

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 4th, 2007 at 9:24 pm and is filed under Personal, Site stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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