March 07 - First Full Month of Blogging

The first full Month of Blogging has been really great, as I have been able to learn so much about blogging as a whole. The people I have been able to meet and learn from has been the real joy of starting this blog, so to all of you, I thank you very much. I’ve been very happy with the progress of the site and a lot has happened since the first of the month, which I hope to summarize in this report:

Technorati

Rank 23,425 - 408 Links from 161 Blogs
This was truly a Roller Coaster month in regards to Technorati. From cracking 100,000 to then cracking 10,000 to then being ranked as high as 2,065 due to Technorati’s glitch in ranking every page of John Chow’s site while I was a Top Commentator. Once the glitched was fixed, I fell all the way back to 32,100 and have slowly made a come back to 23,425 today.

Alexa

Rank 227,713 (3 Mos. Average) - *Sub-100k during this month on a weekly basis*
I can’t wait to get 3 full months under my blogging belt so I can have a true gauge of where my traffic is according to Alexa.
One major category that I’ve been keeping an eye on is my Page Per Viewers as that has slowly been increasing over the course of the month.

RSS Subscribers

Number of Subscribers: 53
A big reason for the increase is the direct result of incorporating a Subscribe to My Feed Plugin to my Index.php file. So, now on every post, there is an option for the reader to subscribe to my feed. If you haven’t subscribed yet, why don’t you by clicking here to subscribe =)
I’m hoping to increase this number and the only way to do that is to concentrate on building quality content.

MyBlogLog

Family, Friends & Contacts: 239
I have met a tremendous amount of fellow bloggers through MyBlogLog and as me and MsDanielle says, it really is the new myspace for bloggers.
If you haven’t done so already, check out my MyBlogLog page and as me as a friend if you haven’t done so already! If you’re new to MyBlogLog, you can trust me as you will find all kinds of bloggers with similar interests as yours!

Highlights

With the Help of Mark Shead and Jeff Kee, I was finally able to install the Top Related Posts plugin into my blog. I saw an instant result as my page views per vistors started climb. Now I have to figure out how to incorporate the same plugin into my feed and I’ll be set with that aspect of the blog.
At the suggestion of Saman, I gave up on the DiggThis Plugin and went with Digg Intergrator. It worked like a charm and with the help of my friend Derek, I incorporated it into my index file just the way I wanted it to.
The Name in My Domain Link Train has really taken off this month and caught some new life this past week as I have noticed that it has finally reached Asia and the bloggers over there have really taken this promotion and ran with it. This promotion has been the biggest reason my technorati rankings have shot up so fast and high, so this has to be the biggest highlight of the month for me.
My Best Home Workstation contest has been slowly taking off, but as more entries are coming in every day, I truly believe that it has the potential to be as strong as the Name in My Domain train. Who doesn’t want to show off a little piece of their workstation? It gives bloggers a chance to show where they’re from and that’s exactly the kind of personalization that bloggers should be aiming for.
I also started my This Week in Blogs series where I hope to be able to share with you the interesting sites that I’ve been visiting. I really have to credit installing my Stumble Toolbar with allowing me really venture out there with this series. If any bloggers want to start a Speed Linking type series, I would highly recommend installing the Stumble Toolbar to get yourself out there in the net.

Much like last month, I will be concentrating on building a foundation of high quality posts that I hope people can take something away from (and hopefully link to)! This past week has seen a tremendous growth in traffic and I attribute that directly to getting my posts on digg, reddit and netscape. Because of these results, I plan to participate more actively on these social networking boards along with continuing my efforts on MyBlogLog. I’m really excited to see what’s in store for April and how much more this blog is going to grow a month from now. Until then, thank you for visiting!