I’m always excited when a month comes to a close because it presents me with the opportunity to look back at what happened last month. This is especially important because I have the opportunity to see how I’m doing in attaining my goals for my sites. In particular, I’m most interested in traffic and financial trends.

Traffic Analysis
In looking at site traffic every month, I go immediately to my AWStats server software to learn how succcessful I’ve been. . .

• Did each of my sites see growth?
• What kind of growth was it?
• Did unique users increase or decrease?
• Did page views go up?
• Were there any major strains on my bandwidth (i.e. was anyone hotlinking to images on my sites)?
• What keywords were most successful in drawing traffic?
• Were there any keywords that fell in the rankings?
• How did the sites fare on the different search engines?
• Did I start to make progress on any one of them?
• Did I begin to lose ground on another?

I haven’t been especially active in tracking the number of sites linking in, the PR of my pages, or my Alexa rankings, because I don’t find them to be anything I can really control. Since I focus mainly on organic growth for my sites, I let the links come instead of undertaking a true link building program. With quality content, the links come in naturally. PR is really meaningless IMO, and Alexa rankings are extremely inaccurate. I have two different sites . . . one typically will rank on a daily basis similarly to another one, yet one of the sites gets between 10 and 20 times the traffic of the other. The one with less traffic that ranks well on Alexa is popular with webmasters and others online – people who likely have the Alexa toolbar or other tools installed on their browsers. It amazes me that this has become one of the standards for monitoring traffic because it is simply so innaccurate.

In terms of blogs, I’ll also look at numbers from places like Feedburner (# of subscribers to my feeds), Technorati (# of sites linking in), and MyBlogLog (number of people who have joined my community) in addition to the basic numbers.

May was a good month! I saw growth in all areas and by all metrics. I can’t really ask for anything else, especially considering I no longer run any keyword advertising programs. I’ll just say that I’m serving many millions of page views a month across the board!

Financial Analysis
The first of each month is also important because it allows me to reflect upon the financial status of my company over the past month. Between direct advertisers, ad networks, and affiliate programs, I draw income from various sources. In any typical month I spend a good amount of my time focused on how I can increase revenues from one or all of these sources. Because of this, I’ve been able to create a company that has seen steady growth financially since inception (with a few minor flat spots).

May was a good month and I’m looking forward to see what we can pull off in June! I guess we’ll find out next month!

I am!

I actually expected to be in the online encyclopedia for something else, but I guess I’ll take what I can get. It seems that someone felt that my post, the Real 2008 Political Internet Sensation: Ron Paul, about how Ron Paul is making strides in the 2008 Presidential Election by grassroots online support, was worth more then just a Digg. The post is referenced in the Ron Paul Wikipedia Entry, under the heading “2008 Presidential Campaign,” and the entry quotes me:

According to Joshua Dorkin at TimeForBlogging.com[26], “As you can see, this candidate (Ron Paul) is fast becoming a real internet sensation, not a manufactured one. He generated passion and curiousity and the people took over from there. I don’t really foresee this guy ripping off his supporters by stealing their MySpace support page (really stupid move for Obama).”

26 ^ “The Real 2008 Political Internet Sensation: Ron Paul” TimeForBlogging.com

I have seen a fair amount of traffic from this new link, but more than anything else, it is a bit flattering (seems like I’m using that word a lot lately . . . see my other post today). I’ve even been contacted by volunteers working on the campaign to get involved more. Seems that my neutral post about the emergence of a candidate has been taken as an endorsement, despite my disclaimer that I am not a supporter.

Back to Wikipedia . . .

Of course, Wikipedia is one of the most trafficked websites in the world, and getting a link on the site is good for anyone’s website. People try gaming the site to put up irrelevant information, but the editors are quite good at catching SPAM. I wonder what it takes for the site to feel that a person, company, brand, or website is worthy of addition. Anyone know?

I do hope to someday soon have an entry in Wikipedia for the website I founded, BiggerPockets® Real Estate Investing Community. The site, I believe, is deserving of being listed. If there are any Wikipedia editors hanging around here . . . please think about it!

Are You in Wikipedia? What for?

There are tons of new bloggers online every day, and many, if not most of them make similar mistakes starting out. I thought it might be fun to compile a list of some of these. Without further adieu:

The Top 77 Mistakes New Bloggers Make
en Español, en Français

Domain & Hosting
1. Not hosting their own blog
2. Registering a blog name (URL) that has been copyrighted
3. Registering a long and difficult to remember domain name

   Style, Design, and Basic Blog Ingredients

4. Keeping the basic template that came installed on the blog
5. Using a black background or one that flashes, blinks, or moves in any other way
6. Using background music
7. Not updating the blogroll that comes with the blog
8. Not using permalinks for their blog posts
9. Not protecting their blogs from SPAM comments with easily installed plugins
10. Under-utilizing easily installed plugins
11. Not including a clear way to contact them
12. Not including a basic About the Author page
13. Not creating a sitemap for Google and other search engines

    Blog Comments

14. Keeping the first post & comment that came with the blog
15. Forcing guests to register in order to leave comments
16. Commenting on other blogs with nothing to say other than “nice post” or some other worthless nonsense
17. Commenting on other blogs and posting spamming their blog’s URL in the post
18. Not commenting on other blogs enough
19. Not thinking through what they comment about on other sites
20. Not responding to comments on their blogs
21. Asking other bloggers to link to their blog in comments
22. Gathering email addresses from people who comment and adding them to email marketing lists without permission (privacy violation)
23. Posting affiliate links when making comments on other blogs

    Links

24. Emailing other bloggers and asking them for links
25. Not linking out enough
26. Posting incorrect or broken links
27. Not using their blog’s trackback capabilities to keep other bloggers in the know

    Blog Content

28. Creating SPLOGS
29. Setting high expectations for your readers and then failing to meet them
30. Not learning blogging etiquette or blog culture before starting out
31. Not choosing a niche to write about
32. Not keeping their blog focused on that niche if and when they do choose one
33. Copying the style and substance of other blogs
34. Blogging about absolutely nothing
35. Not proofreading their posts
36. Failing to place themselves and then experiencing blogger burnout
37. Stealing blog content
38. Blogging about something they know nothing about
39. Copying entire blog posts from other sites and thinking a simple link back makes it okay
40. Failing to attribute another blog or website that you got an idea from
41. Trying to blog as some fake anonymous persona like the kids in Ender’s Game
42. Posting uninteresting titles
43. Posting huge blocks of text without using headlines, images, etc. to break it up
44. Posting at an irregular frequency
45. Forgetting that they are writing for an audience, not themselves.
46. Writing things in their blogs that may harm them in the future
47. Committing libel
48. Being unprofessional
49. Attacking other bloggers just to get attention
50. Sharing company secrets or private information on their blogs
51. Giving away too much personal information (potentially dangerous)
52. Not having their own voice when writing, instead using bland and dry language.
53. Not engaging the reader to participate in the conversation (failing to stimulate comments)
54. Blabbing too much without making any relevant points
55. Writing about what everyone else is writing about
56. Holding blog contests and not coming through on prizes you promised

    Blog Promotion & Traffic Building

57. Advertising their brand-new site anywhere
58. Promoting a site with less than 10 posts
59. Using traffic boosters to get traffic
60. Using any methods to get un-targeted traffic
61. Over-submitting their blogs to social bookmarking sites
62. Submitting bad posts to social bookmarking sites
63. Under-publicizing their best posts
64. Not entering Blog Carnivals to start building traffic
65. Not including a link to their blogs in their email and forum signatures
66. Not responding to emails or other messages

    Blog Monetization

67. Worrying about making money with their blog before they even have any quality content
68. Placing as many ads from as many ad networks as they can on their sites
69. Clicking on their own AdSense Ads
70. Allowing just about any site, even unrelated ones, to advertise on their blog
71. Writing reviews of other sites through ReviewMe or other services and doing a shit job of it. Reviews can be bad or good, but they should at least be well written (happened to me today . . . argh!)

    Feeds

72. Under-utilizing their blog’s feed
73. Not having a clearly identifiable and highly visible way to subscribe to their feed
74. Not using feedburner to optimize, quantify, and publicize their feed
75. Using Feedburner chicklet that shows number of subscribers before you’ve got at least 50-100 subscribers
76. Posting a partial blog feed instead of the full contents
77. Overusing feed advertising

I’ve seen a few other mistake lists out there, but most cover things I’ve mentioned above. Here are a few good ones:

Ten Blogging Mistakes I’ve Made
The Top 10 Design Mistakes
Blogging Mistakes Final List
10 Blogging Mistakes to Avoid

Think I’m missing any important points?

I found an article through Kevin at BloggingTips about how to support your favorite bloggers. This article covered quite a few great points and I thought I’d go into 2 of them with some more detail.

Both of the steps I mention can really make a difference for your favorite sites, and spreading the word about them can make a difference for you as well!

The 2 Best Ways to Support Your Favorite Websites

1. Socialize the Blog or Site
   If you find a site, blog, article, etc. that you find interesting or helpful, one of the best ways to support it is to “socialize” it. Of course, the original form of socialization is word of mouth, but email works great too! Let your friends and family know about the site and tell them to let their friends and family know about it. Many of the most popular websites have all grown on word of mouth campaigns.

   In addition, by submitting it to different social networking and social bookmarking sites, you increase the exposure opportunities for that site. Sites like Netscape, Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia, MyBlogLog, MySpace, Facebook, etc. are all wonderful tools for sharing the love. I make it a habit of social bookmarking or Digging any article or site that I think is a great one, because I hope that someone will do the same for me. If we can spread the idea of helping one another out by doing this, I think we’d see lots of great, semi-unknown, sites climb to prominence. There are tons of these sites around, but people don’t realize how easy it is to do their part to help those sites out.

   If you like a site, an article, a blog, etc., then Bookmark It! It is that easy!

2. Visit the Site’s Advertisers
   These days, most websites have some sort of advertising. Many webmasters (like myself) support their work online soley through that advertising. While we all become semi-blind to ads these days, it is extremly important that we do our part to help our fellow webmasters by visiting the advertising on their sites. Imagine if even a small percentage of your users happened to visit the ads on your site (provided they are some kind of PPC ads)? Be careful not to overdo it, though. Clicking too often on a site’s ads can constitute click fraud, something you don’t want to do.

   Even visiting ads that may not be PPC is helpful to websites. Advertisers always look at the amount of traffic they get from a site when considering whether or not they will extend their campaigns. If you do your part by visiting these ads, you help the sites to retain advertisers and increase revenue. You also help the advertiser by finding their site . . . the more eyeballs, the better!

   Remember not to just click on any and all ads. Visit those that look interesting to you.

   Like with socializing, if we can build this mentality around the ‘net where people support one another’s advertisers, I think a lot of people would be a lot happier. The advertisers would get increased exposure (which is what they are paying for) and you’d be supporting the owners of your favorite sites, blogs, etc. If only 25% of a site’s visitors supported its advertisers, I’m sure the resulting increases would be beyond remarkable!

   If you like a site, an article, a blog, etc., then visit its advertisers! It is that easy!

By following these two simple and EXTREMELY helpful tips, you too can support your fellow bloggers and favorite sites, and hopefully they will do the same for you!

Please bookmark this site and help spread the mentality! (click the Share This link below)

We’ve all seen them . . . new blogs with ads at every turn, with nothing to say other then “I make money online” and “I blog about my blog.” Typically, when I come across a site like this I leave and do not return. I realize that these sites offer nothing useful to me or anyone else . . . The sad fact is that thanks to different gimmicks out there, sites like these seem to becoming more and more popular every day.

You can’t really go through more than a handful of blogs these days without reading about making money online using Adsense, Chitika, BlogAds, AuctionAds, Text Link Ads, etc. The purpose of these sites is to push affiliate programs and ad networks without offering anything concrete to anyone except how they are becoming more popular by doing nothing. It seems like we’re in some kind of vicious cycle now:

The Vicious Cycle Started by Bloggers who Blog About Nothing But How to Make Money Online

1. Person sees that others are “making money online” with their blog (most fail to provide any proof and likely don’t make any money at all)
2. Person wants to make money with a blog of their own
3. Person sets up blog and claims to be a “money making” blogger
4. Person monetizes their blog as soon as possible, throwing up as many ads as possible
5. Person starts joining every blog train, meme, link exchange, favorite exchange, etc. to start building up their Technorati ranking, PR, feed subscribers, etc.
6. Person starts to blog about the same crap as every other blog about making money online (typically nothing . . . many of these sites just blog about the ads that they just put on their site and then just fill their site with all the crap mentioned in #5)
7. Person sees their site begin to become “popular” and starts to tell all their friends about their “success”. They then encourage their friends to start blogging. Amazed by how easy it sounds, these friends go to #1.

   Note: The site has actually not become popular at all. It is just another site that other sites have used to grow their own useless sites through blogging gimmicks. All the people who have added it as a favorite, as a subscribed feed, or as any other kind of “friend” fail to come back because the site really has nothing to offer, just like their own sites. A network of useless “popular” blogs begin to climb the charts with nothing to contribute to anything but their own existence.

8. Person realizes that they have nothing to offer the world other than a bunch of crap that has been repeated a thousand times before, yet continue to offer that crap because they are now actually making a few bucks a month.
9. Person begins to be seen as an authority by other newbies and actually begins to get real traction, despite having nothing to offer but the popularity of their site that has nothing to offer.
10. Sadly, eventually that person really begins to believe their own hype. Many times, this person still knows nothing about anything, yet offers their advice to others who are too green to know any better.
11. Bad advice follows bad advice and the internet becomes overwhealmed by people following the one guy with nothing to offer but a bunch of bad advice.
12. People who actually do have something to offer others, for some reason, start to follow the path set by these know nothing “authorities” and make their advice even more popular.
13. The entire internet goes down in flames as 1 billion people around the world are all doing the same thing trying to make money by doing nothing but blogging about blogging about making money online by saying a whole lot of nothing!

Pretty Scary, huh?!?

Spreading the word about your latest blog entry is as easy as pinging a few update services. Most blogs allow you to add different update services (ping sites) to notify. I thought it might be userful to put out a list of the update services I’m currently pinging. If you’re interested in adding any or all of these services to your blog, here’s how (I can only explain how using WordPress – my list of sites can be used on any blog, though).

How to Notify New Ping Sites of Your Updated Blog Posts

1. Login to your Control Panel
2. Click on the Options tab, followed by the Writing tab.
3. Scroll to the bottom of the page and add whatever services you’d like to the Update Services box.

The Mega List of Ping Services

This list includes all the ping services I’ve been able to locate. Feel free to use it as you wish.

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

ttp://rpc.qwikping.com

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/

http://rpc.britblog.com

http://rpc.tailrank.com/feedburner/RPC2

http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc/

http://1470.net/api/ping

http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b

http://api.feedster.com/ping

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2

http://api.moreover.com/ping

http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2

http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping

http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php

http://bitacoras.net/ping

http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc

http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2

http://blogmatcher.com/u.php

http://www.blogoole.com/ping/

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1

http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php

http://www.blogsnow.com/ping

http://ping.fakapster.com/rpc

http://www.blogoon.net/ping/

http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi

http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC

http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc

http://coreblog.org/ping/

http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/

http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt

http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php

http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php

http://ping.amagle.com/

http://ping.bitacoras.com

http://ping.blo.gs/

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/

http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/

http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc

http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://ping.myblog.jp

http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php

http://ping.weblogs.se/

http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2

http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php

http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/

http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2

http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2

http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php

http://topicexchange.com/RPC2

http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/

http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/

http://xmlrpc.blogg.de/

If you have any additional services that you ping, let me know! I’d love to build this into a massive listing of all ping services.

Manual Ping Sites

There are a few good ping sites that will allow you to manually let them know of updates. These are included in the above list, but for those people who need to do things by hand, this should help.

• http://www.pingomatic.com
• http://www.pingoat.com

Sometimes people ask me why their blog isn’t growing as fast as they’d like it to, and I usually ask what they are doing to build an audience. Most of the time, the answer I get is “I’m writing good posts” and “I try to do it regularly.” While this is important, I’ll venture to say that it is only a small fraction of what is necessary to build traffic to your site. What is the other 50%?

50% of Blogging Success is Connecting with Others

Most of the bloggers out there who are frustrated with their blog’s traffic growth are simply not doing enough to connect with other bloggers outside their sites. That’s why I feel that tools like MyBlogLog are so important. In this day and age, people want nothing more than to connect with others. This explains the growth torrent of blogs, forums, and other social websites.

What Do You Need to Do to Connect?

• You have to get out and see what others are doing, talking about, writing about, etc.
• You have to visit other sites and comment on their posts and get involved in the discussion.
• You have to email other people in your space and get to know them, and more importantly, let them get to know you.
• You have to network outside the virtual world..
• You have to be original and show people that you aren’t just another imitator trying to get your piece of the pie.
• You have to write quality posts about interesting or helpful subjects and you have to show people why it is important to them.
• You have to convey a passion in your writing.
• You have to be opinionated.
• You have to reveal at least a small part of yourself.
• You have to shape the debate in your area of content.

I can go on and on, but I’m getting a bit distracted watching the NBA Playoffs . . . I suppose the main point I’m trying to get across is this:

If you hope to build a thriving blog community (all the top blogs are primarily communities – just look at the amount of comments they get), then make sure you’re spending a good chunk of your time connecting as well as writing!