TopOfBlogs is my second discovery in as many days. I have already registered this blog with them and I'll try to explain why I like the service.
TopOfBlogs is in a beta status, so a few things may change as time progresses.
At first glance, I thought technoNix was a blog using one of several blogging platforms. Upon closer scrutiny, I found out it was a complete content management system (CMS).
I think it's going to take me a while to go through all my feeds and pick out the things I want to write about. After that, I'll probably start searching for specific topics from blogs I may or may not be subscribed to. There's an endless supply of good stuff out there, enough to keep me busy forever.
Yes, I truly believe that the road to success is paved with stones of failure. There are a very few people in this world who are successful in any endeavor on the first try. The remaining 99.9% of us have to keep trying and trying to reach that success.
A Bit of History
When I first started this blog, I started it as a mere journal. It wasn't until several months later that I realized what kind of potential a blogging platform had to offer. Still, I was naive.
About a year ago, I posted my first milestone. I thought 10,000 unique visitors in 7 months was a lot. I set a soft goal of 100,000 unique visitors by the one-year mark. I went way over that goal because of the things I started doing to attract visitors. In a sense, I would call that a success, albeit an easy goal to achieve. Since then, I've stopped paying attention to that figure. I now get well over 5,000 unique visitors per month and well over 10,000 page views per month.
A year ago, I was getting 20 to 40 unique visitors per day. That number, as of a few days ago, was 200 to 400. Using the techniques I recently learned from 3 prominent bloggers, I plan to increase that to a number of at least 2,000 to 4,000 (and hopefully more than that) by this time next year. Will I be successful? I don't know, but I do know that the road to success is paved with stones of failure.
Over the course of the last year, I published posts under my bragging rights category. I was showing how well I was doing with my Alexa and Technorati rankings. Those rankings started bothering me when they stagnated and then started getting worse. My unpublished goals were incredible failures. Of course, I later learned that neither ranking is important and are only indicators of failure or success. I stopped bragging.
My wife is almost a computer illiterate. She has learned during our physical separation how much money can be saved by using an instant messenger with voice. She has been gradually learning other facets of computer operation. I can no longer connect to the PC she's using with a VNC client and she can't figure out why (and neither can the owner). I don't have the patience to try and walk her through all the possible causes, especially since I can't see what she sees.
New Goals
I and my wife have had some recent, long discussions via instant messenger. Starting in April (a good guess), and armed with resources and knowledge obtained from "How to Make Money Online for Beginners", "Court's Internet Marketing School", and "Blogger Unleashed", we plan to launch a series of niche blogs for the sole purpose of making money from search engine visitors. We want to create new blogs at a rate of at least one per month, giving each ample time to grow and ourselves ample time to make adjustments.
Recent events and a financial hardship mitigated, possibly eliminated, by the overwhelming support of our fellow bloggers has made it our desire to be able to do the exact same thing for others that find themselves in tight predicaments. We want to be able to funnel online income to the people who need it more than we do. Will we be successful? Again, I don't know.
I will be teaching my wife everything I can possibly teach her about computers in general, blogging, advertising, and anything else she needs to know in order to assist me in doing what we plan to do. I realize that I may not have any hair left after we're done, but that's a risk I have to take.
An Unreachable Goal?
While this isn't a niche blog, I believe I have the motivation and the talent to put it up there in the same league as the ProBlogger, where a few short paragraphs can make a resounding impact on the lives of others. I realize it's going to take a lot of work, a lot of rewriting (for SEO and SERPS), and a lot of determination to make it happen. I also realize that there isn't a timetable that I can follow to get there.
This is a lofty goal, which means I'll be in it for the long haul. It could be another year or another 10 years, or even longer. I expect to fail many times before I reach the success that I'm trying to achieve. The road to success is paved with stones of failure and it's going to be an extremely bumpy ride.
I started to write this article by picking on Marshall Kirkpatrick of Read/WriteWeb and decided not to go any further than stating that he's a misguided person. With his Google PageRank at 7 and his Alexa rank below 5000, he's displaying the typical blog snobbery I've been seeing a lot of lately.
I thought I was alone in my thoughts until I read Jaz's comment on his article and then read Ed's article on blog snobbery. Some popular bloggers think their methods of advertising revenue are more ethical than the methods of bloggers who aren't quite so popular. Are you one of those bloggers? If you are, go away and don't read my blog, ever. I'm not ethical enough for your tastes.
How can I make such a bold statement? It's simple. It's the truth.
I don't pay attention to the Alexa rankings anymore, but I was curious and looked at the ranking for my other blog, which is less than a month old. What I discovered was shocking and amusing at the same time.
It seems that blog had a ranking of 64,602 yesterday. How could that be? It takes some time to get that kind of ranking on any blog, right? Well, I guess not, but I think I accidentally gamed Alexa yesterday and succeeded in getting that number without trying.
You see, I went through all 40+ posts on that blog yesterday to make sure all the videos were still active on YouTube. I found quite a few that weren't and replaced them. I intend to do that at least once per month, at the end of each month.
So… yesterday's statistics for the other blog shows a reach of 0.00045%, a rank of 64,602 and 64.7 unique page views. There's no way those stats are right. I only had 47 unique visitors and one of those was me!
When I first met her back in October of 2006, I thought Alexa was great. She had curves and lines in all the right places. She seemed to be able to assess the values of those that she was looking at in as little as three months.
As time progressed, I realized Alexa was fickle and couldn't be counted on to give accurate assessments. Only those that catered to her every whim seemed to win her favor. Those that did not were punished by being ignored. The problem is that her assistant was classified as a spy and thrown out by almost everyone involved in the anti-spy agencies.
I thought she was doing right by me up until the middle of June. Then, all of sudden, she turned a blind eye to me. I wasn't happy. Even after she went to the trouble of hiring an additional assistant later on and I told people about him, she seemed to be ignoring me on a regular basis. She's still ignoring me at times. Maybe it's because most of my visitors don't know her or care about her.
I want to forget her. If it wasn't for the fact that other people are taking her advice on matters, I'd forget about Alexa completely. Unfortunately, I can't as long as they won't.
Some of you newer bloggers writers and authors need to take a step back and examine your statistics from time to time. Even so, you have to realize that they're just numbers that fluctuate, sometimes dramatically, and sometimes for no apparent reason that you can see.
If you're serious about increasing your readership, probably the worst thing you can do is to sit back and write haphazardly, seemingly without a care in the world. How are you going to know who your readers are, where they come from, and what they like if you don't use the tools available to you? You can be a rebel, if you like, but being a rebel (like me) can generate negative impressions that make it difficult to increase your readership.
I use the WP-PostViews plugin to count post views and generate my "Top 100 Posts" links. It allows me, at a glance, to see what's being read or looked at the most. It's kind of a double-edged sword in the respect that it not only shows how many views have taken place but it also encourages new readers to take a look, skewing the results. But why not? You want people to see your best work, don't you?
You may or may not have heard of the statistics generated by Alexa (Alexa either owns Amazon or Amazon owns Alexa, I never bothered to find out). While you can't get a traffic chart from Alexa until your ranking gets below (better) than 100,000, you can still see your one week and three month averages.
You can register at Technorati and see your authority, your ranking, and your blog reactions. The numbers are interesting to keep up with. You have to remember that incoming links are not counted after six months so that a sudden drop in any of the three doesn't give you cause for alarm.
You can use Google Analytics, Clicky or Site Meter (or any combination of the three) to see your daily statistics and more. There are even plugins that can help you see statistics (I don't use any or I'd give you a link or two).
A point that I want to get across is that your statistics, visitors, and popularity are going to fluctuate until you get a steady readership. I don't think it can be done in under a year (unless your readers follow you from another popular service, like a blogger I know about but won't mention). Here are my own charts from Alexa to prove it to you. Hey, what's that penis doing in the first one? Just kidding.
Seriously, though, that's my top post that got "dugg" and keeps on getting dugg, months later. Do you see the peaks (mountains) and valleys (canyons)? After a year, I'm still fighting my way to the top. I offer you these tips to prevent you from getting discouraged about your own blog performance. If you try, you can find stats for the so-called "A-List" bloggers and find out that they too have peaks and valleys.
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