STATS:

Alexa

My current Alexa ranking is 71,968, which isn’t bad but it’s not the greatest, even considering Alexa’s flawed ranking system. Admittedly, some of the drop in rankings was mostly due to two things: a lack of quality posts in September and less commenting on other sites.

Technorati

Sometime in the last month or so, my blog crossed below the 3,000 threshold and has been steadily hovering near the 2,800 mark now. Thanks goes out to all the bloggers out there who’ve linked to me, without which my ranking would definitely be much higher.

Content

I admit, many of the posts in September (when I had the chance to get to them) were pretty crappy, and few and far between. However, in my defense, I started a new job and the adjustment took more than I’d expected. I forgot what it was like to start work at 8:00am. Now that I’m somewhat adjusted and getting back on track, I’m hoping to crank out some quality posts, although most likely not daily.

With the launch of our new site, Creative Traffic Builders, Gary and I will be posting a lot of our internet marketing articles there, and I may be shifting away from the more technical articles here. But this is just for the “how-to” articles.

As far as statistics, MsDanielle currently has 155 posts and 2,752 comments, so thank you everybody for contributing your valuable feedback and comments! Without you, I’d just be talking to myself and that wouldn’t be any fun for me!

RSS

This is the least superficial statistic that I check. If you read my site updates, you might know that I preach this is the most important statistic that I keep tabs on. Readership can indicate how well you’re keeping the interest of your readers, and as long as the number is on the incline, you’re doing well.

MsDanielle reached its all-time high on October 3rd, with 281 subscribers. Today my RSS stands at 271 and I’m hoping to cross 300 soon. I’m not sure how I’ve accumulated 271 faithful readers, but if you are one of them, thanks! Don’t forget, if you sign up for my RSS, let me know and I’ll sign up for yours as well. Just let me know.

BLOG TIPS:

Here are my Top 5 Tips on How to Make it to Being Seven, based on my own experiences.

5. Get Known

Go out and comment on as many blogs as you can, in a thoughtful and constructive manner. Give relevant and quality feedback on others’ blogs when it’s appropriate, be polite, and don’t step on anyone’s toes. No one like a snobby newbie. Plus, you don’t want to cloud your great feedback with a bad attitude.

4. Be a Specialist in Anything

If you’re greatly interested in something, or more knowledgeable in a particular sector, share it. Food, marketing, sports, business development, entertainment, etc, are all great areas to write about with passion and knowledge. One thing we all learn about blogging is it’s difficult to create quality content if the subject isn’t captivating to us in the first place! So choose your subjects wisely, but base them around things that already interest you in your life.

3. Don’t be boring

No one likes reading boring stuff. Have fun with your blog — it’s for you and your readers!

2. Create Goals

If you set out goals for your site, in mild increments, you’ll always see improvement and increased statistics, which is always motivating. My goals usually revolve around creating quality content and increasing RSS. I believe those two go hand in hand, and seeing steady improvements in subscriptions means I’m doing something right. If your goals are monetarily related, there are a million ways to make money online, just start with moderate goals and increase them monthly.

1. Motivate Yourself to Keep Going

The hardest part about blogging in the early phases is keeping the blog going. Blogs take on a life of their own, demand our time and attention, and can fall off the blog map if left dormant for even a week. Self motivation is hard and takes a lot of discipline, but you have to find your own ways to motivate yourself to keep going. You won’t make it to seven months if you don’t make it to six, and you won’t make it to six if you don’t make it to five, and so on.

Figure out the formula to keep going, don’t demand too much of yourself, and keep a balance in your life in other things non-computer related. Music keeps me sane and dancing my butt off on the weekends keeps those calories burning!

RESULTS:

“What Were The Chances I’d Win?”
In one month, this contest was able to receive a total of 74 official entries. What do I mean by official? Well, there were a couple entries that I didn’t allow because they were newly-created Blogger blogs (created the day of or the day before the entry). It’s not fair to all of you bloggers who work consistently on your blogs to lose a contest to someone who’s spent 10 minutes and zero dollars on their blog entering this contest. Therefore, a few entries were denied, and the true odds of winning was 1 in 74. In all, that’s very good odds of winning the Zune — not even 100 people entered!

How This Contest Affected MsDanielle.com
You can read my blog standings as of one month ago here. As you can see, my Technorati rank at the time I posted the contest announcement was 8,797, with an authority of 395. Today my ranking stands at 5,282, with an authority of 573.

I think a good portion of the increase was an effect of the contest, either directly or indirectly. Some people linked to me to enter into the drawing, some wrote about the contest to let others know (but didn’t enter — thanks David!), and some found my site through the grapevine and wrote about something they enjoyed here. The contest began a wonderful ripple effect for my blog that I couldn’t predict or control.

THOUGHTS:

What Should the Winner Do Now?
There are three options for bloggers who win tangible prizes from promotional contests.

1. Keep it. This is obvious. If you really need an MP3 player, keep it, or give it to someone you love.
2. Sell it. eBay, Craigslist, or your own blog are viable ways to sell whatever you won for cash.
3. Give it away. Prizes won can be recycled into future contest prizes.

If I had kept the Zune, that would have been end of story. John Chow, Jane May, Michael Kwan, and other popular bloggers wouldn’t have written about my blog. I wouldn’t have been linked by BlueFur or Andrea Micheloni, ever. MsDanielle.com wouldn’t have received as much publicity as it had, and I wouldn’t have come across so many great blogs and people along the way. Some of the entries had me almost falling off my chair, they were so entertaining!

The point is, there really is no dollar amount that I can assign to how this particular contest affected my blog. It does help that the Zune (originally purchased by Millnic Media, given away by the Affiliate Marketing Alliance, and won by John Chow) has a slight history. If I were Enkay, I’d really think about what my next move would be, and try to ride the wave that has been lovingly referred to as “The Great Zune Monomyth.” Of course, it’s difficult to predict how contesting it off again would result, but if it continues to make its way through these contests, and around the world, it could quite possibly become the most popular prize in the blogosphere. And the most famous White Elephant ever on earth.

The Next Great Promotion
Now, you didn’t think that the contests were going to end just yet, did you? Of course not! For those 73 of you who didn’t win the Zune, you have another chance to win an even better prize. You might not think that’s saying much, but my good buddy Mr. Gary Lee is giving away a free iPhone! Yes, you read that correctly. A free iPhone! Apparently they’re sold out for now in stores. So, head over to his blog and check out the details on how you can enter. Maybe you’ll get this one for free!

Thanks again to everyone who participated. If you enter to win the iPhone, I wish you the best of luck! Oh and my blog turned four months old yesterday. Woohoo!

FeedBurner
With that said, my rankings to date are satisfactory, when considering everything from readership to traffic. And also considering that this isn’t a highly targeted niche blog. I’m very proud to say that I’ve crossed one threshold recently that I’ve been eagerly awaiting. My goal of attaining a readership base of at least 100 was reached on Monday, June 4th. Woohoo!! To think that 100+ people are now reading this blog proves to myself that I am producing quality content that others find interesting. Your readership number will guide you in how you’re doing overall as a blogger, as drop-off rates indicate the interest level of your readers. If you are a blogger, keep in mind Darren Rowse’s readership poll that found the top two reasons why people unsubscribe from a blog are 1. too frequent posting and 2. not posting frequently enough. Posting fives times a day can be just as detrimental to your blog as posting once every ten days, in some markets. And on that note, if you’d like to subscribe to my blog now, just click here and choose your method of subscription. I try to post about once every 1 – 3 days, so I promise I won’t inundate your reader with content, which I know could result in number 1 of above.

Technorati
As for my other metrics, my current Technorati authority is 395, and my rank is 8,797. How did I do it? With the help of other bloggers and a little online marketing. 395 indicates that there are 395 other blogs that link to my site. 8,797 indicates my actual ranking among the 70million+ blogs that Technorati is tracking. Getting your site out there through community interaction and getting others to link back to your content is good SEO. If you forget how to get people to link to your site, just remember this first and foremost, Don’t publish poor content. No one wants to refer a friend to a mechanic that knows nothing about cars. Similarly, no one will link back to your blog if they don’t consider you a good resource in one way or another.

Alexa
My Alexa ranking today stands at 92,938. This is a bitter sweet accomplishment, since I had the goal of reaching under 100k, knowing all the while that Alexa rankings don’t really mean much concretely. I could put it this way — my blog is ranked 92,938 out of the millions of web sites that are tracked by Alexa, through methods of tracking that are skewed and inaccurate, and most likely not a true reflection of my ranking, but for lack of a better source, will have to do. So…relatively speaking, it’s pretty good I suppose. At least it’s not ranked in the millions anymore!

The Next Three Months
I’m hoping that in the next three months I’ll be able to better focus this blog, consistently publish interesting quality content, and keep gaining in my readership. I’m realizing that unless you’re aggressively seeking monetization, you don’t have to worry too much about these statistics. As I’ve mentioned before, the most important thing is that you’re constantly moving forward and making progress. Keeping this in mind, all of the statistics I’ve listed are an improvement from a month ago. Thank you to everyone who’s read my blog, left a comment, or subscribed to MsDanielle. It’s because of all of you that I keep this thing going!

Anyhow, I removed the Zune briefly from its packaging to see what it looks like — I’ve never actually held one. I didn’t turn it on, so I don’t know how it performs (right now, I’m going by Michael’s Kwan’s review), but it was really bulky and kind of heavy, sort of like the first generation iPods. I know I shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but the doo-doo brown color just isn’t very impressive or clean. I think a nice olive green would’ve been a better-suited urban color choice.

I emailed John to let him know it arrived safely, and that I’d be contesting it away as well. His response: “Good to hear you have it. Now let me win it back!” LOL Let’s see if it really will get recycled back to his blog. If so, you’ll most likely have one more chance to win it. I told you the MS Zune is the new white elephant!

If you had to contest it away, what rules would you require? I’d love to hear what you all would do with it! I’ll announce my contest in the coming weeks once I figure it out…

I thought I’d just do a quick stat post, and share some thoughts I’ve had on blogging. Here we go…

Content:
There are currently 57 posts in my blog, which is almost one per day! I just realized it right now! LOL And there are 620 comments, which averages almost 11 comments per post. This number’s slightly skewed though because of the Technorati train and also my birthday post (which appeared on JohnChow dot com last week). I have to thank John for including me in that post. It’s great to see him interacting a lot lately with many of his readers. So, thanks, John!

Writing posts nearly everyday is time consuming, and can sometimes feel overwhelming at the beginning. But from my experience, I’ve seen that my writing has gotten a little better and the writing starts to flow once you find your rhythm. Pushing through it and making it a habit helps get through the slumps, and makes you feel more accomplished in the end. I think a great measure of how your blog is doing is the number of people who subscribe to your blog. As of yesterday, my subscription count is 66, which surpassed my last goal of reaching 50. I’m a little shocked in a way that 66 people are reading this blog.

Links:
Right now I have 215 backlinks in Google which I think is amazing. I was checking everyday for a month before the PR update, and I consistently had a whopping 2 backlinks! These new backlinks have contributed to MsDanielle receiving a PR4, which I’m really excited about. Thanks go to everyone who’s linked to my site!

Ranks:

My Alexa ranking has been fluctuating a lot these days, I think from appearing on JC’s site twice, plus a few of the link trains floating around have been giving me some really great quality traffic. I’m trying to visit as many blogs as I can these days, but it’s tough when there are so many really awesome blogs in a bunch of different areas that I enjoy reading about. I will say that if you leave a comment here I’ll most likely check out your blog since there’s a footprint of your visit. It helps me when I have down time to check out those who share some interesting thoughts with me.

You may have heard that Technorati recently changed their ranking system. My ranking as of today is 13,253. My last goal was to reach 50,000 which I can safely say I’ve achieved.

My next goals:
I have a few things in mind when thinking about what I’d like to achieve with this blog. I think the top two goals are to continually try to create content that people are interested in reading, and to do it in a way that’s easy for me to write. If I can combine these two things in a focused way, I think I’ll be able to grow my readership and keep a great group of people around here for awhile.

You might notice I haven’t posted any monetization stats. Well, at this point, I haven’t really focused on trying to make money. I barely posted some AdSense ads under my header yesterday, and put a larger skyscraper block in the right side bar. I’ll see if I can make some money in the next month in text links and maybe a paid post or two. But paid reviews are something I’ll only consider if it’s something that I’m truly interested in, that I think my readers will gain from. I’ve done a few free sponsored reviews so far which is practice for me. If they suck, please feel free to let me know

Anyway, my baby is now two months old and growing. Thanks to everyone for helping me take such good care of her!

Reasons why I’m having a great week:

• I turned 30 on Monday!
• Jim found my shoes!
• I won the MS Zune from JohnChow dot com!
• I bet Gary that the combo price of a local Chinese restaurant went up by $1 (he didn’t believe me), and I won! He bought lunch today!
• SEO-Theory included me in their Honor Roll! And boy am I honored!
• I told my friend Michelle that BCBG is my current favorite clothing brand, and since she works there, she said to let her know whenever I want to cruise the sample room in downtown LA!

Shoes, clothes, food, gadgets, links… If this week goes any better, I think I might die of excitement! Woohooooooooo!

The plugin works great. Thanks, Bob! And it’s as simple to install as the name implies. I hope it helps with my site nav. Now I just have to get my RelatedPosts working, and create my favicon. Jez…Bobs…help??

Breaking Technorati Top 100,000
When I first started my blog on March 8th, I was ranked over 2,000,000. One week later I’d moved all the way up to 1,812,587. Here’s my ranking as of today:

I did it! I broke Technorati’s Top 100,000! So a very special thanks to everyone who’s linked to me and supported my blog along the way, and helped me rise in the ranks. Technorati, of course, isn’t the most precise metric, but like Alexa, it’s got a large amount of tracked data which gives a relative ranking. My ranking of 97,960 indicates “the number of blogs, plus one, that have more than 44 blogs linking to them.” Technorati currently tracks over 70 million blogs, and this number only accounts for blogs that have been “claimed” by their owners at Technorati.

Breaking Alexa Top 100,000
Unlike Technorati, Alexa ranks all sites against each other (not just blogs) using their own set of user generated metrics. But because the data can only be gathered from users running their downloadable toolbar, the data will always be naturally somewhat skewed. But for lack of a more popular tool, everyone uses it! Here’s my ranking:

So I haven’t quite broken Alexa’s Top 100,000. But that’s OK. I’m making progress, which is what matters. One week after MsDanielle started, my 3-month estimated average was 8,006,146, and my 1-week average was 892,803. So now my 3-month average is much closer to 100,000 than it is to 8,000,000, so hopefully baby steps will get me there!

100 Unique Visitors Per Day
I think this goal is achievable, but kind of high for a small niche blog that’s four weeks old. But you have to aim high to get anywhere, right?! So, I didn’t reach the goal, but I’m inching toward it. Here’s a screen shot of my Google Analystics stats:

My average for the month was 37.94 unique visitors per day. I passed 100 uniques only twice. But an average of 38 is better than say, 10, so I’m OK with it. If I can build a strong readership, it should help get me closer to this goal.

50 FeedBurner Subscribers
I admit, I haven’t been diligent in trying to gain a larger readership, which maybe I should. But I’ve figured so far that quality will get people to subscribe, so I just do my best to crank out quality content for you all, and hope it’s useful! Here are my natural results:

My current readership is 25. Woohoo! I’m half way there. And I actually hit 36 yesterday, but it’s dropped since. Is it because I’ve lagged these last three days?? Who knows. Maybe. If you were one of the 11 who unsubscribed, let me know!

Future Goals
So as I’m looking at how my blog has done in its first month of existence, I’ve had the chance to evaluate where it’s at, and where I want it to be in the next few months. I hope to break Technorati’s Top 50,000 soon, and Alexa’s Top 100,000 (3-month average). I hope to also boost my unique visitors and FeedBurner subscribers to my current goals.

I’m not at all disappointed with my results so far, and I’m definitely not discouraged. Sure, it could have done better, but it definitely could have done worse. But the bottom line is, no matter what my numerical goals were, I made progress in all areas. I gained traction toward those goals, and I plan on sticking around for awhile until I surpass them all, and more. And by the way, don’t forget to congratulate Derek Semmler too, who’s also celebrating his blog’s one month anniversary on March 8th. Cheers, Derek! Let’s keep it going, man! We can do it!

Anyway, I asked myself, What’s a good, fair back link exchange? Well, if you provide me a review from your blog, I’ll put a site of your choice in my sidebar for 45 days with the anchor text you choose. (It’s like a free Text-Link-Ad!) And I’ll add a link to your blog in the summary batch announcing the people who participated. Only the first 10 people to ping my post and leave a comment letting me know will get in the sidebar. But everyone will still get a back link from the summary post for participating.

Sound like a fair deal?

Here are the rules:
All you have to do is write 200+ words, link to MsDanielle.com, and link to one other post on my site. Please make sure to use the anchor text “marketing blog tips” at least once. And don’t forget to leave me a comment here. Oh yeah, and the 3 P’s aren’t eligible for back links (pills, porn, or poker).

I really don’t care what you write either, as long as the content is relevant and the links are correct. You have until Sunday, April 15th at midnight to submit your review. Hopefully I can average at least one review per day to get to 10!

After that I’ll be posting the summary. Only one sidebar link per person please, but you can write as many reviews as you want for back links from the post if you have more than one blog. Let’s see how many I can get!

Two of the more popular operators are:

link:
“The query [link:] will list webpages that have links to the specified webpage. For instance, [link:www.google.com] will list webpages that have links pointing to the Google homepage. Note there can be no space between the “link:” and the web page url.”

site:
“If you include [site:] in your query, Google will restrict the results to those websites in the given domain. For instance, [help site:www.google.com] will find pages about help within www.google.com. [help site:com] will find pages about help within .com urls. Note there can be no space between the “site:” and the domain.”

“site:” can also be used to check for particular keywords within your site pages and return only those results, like [site:www.msdanielle.com make money online]. In this case, there are three pages indexed in Google with keywords related to making money online. You get the picture…

But there’s one other Google operator that I like to use that isn’t listed in their Operators page, and that’s the query modifier “allinanchor:”

“allinanchor:” returns the sites that have specified anchor text pointing back to their site. To clarify, I’m going to use my other blog PinkDeals as an example.

PinkDeals is an online coupon and deal site that I author on the side, and it’s targeted toward women like me. If I do a natural search for “online coupons” in Google, my site pretty much doesn’t show up because there’s an enormous amount of competition, and it’s a highly untargeted keyword phrase. However, if I do a natural search for “deals for women” my site appears as the fourth search result (Woohoo! Sorry, had to do that…). PinkDeals appears below DealNews, WomensDeals, and JudysBook.

Now, let’s take a look at the query [allinanchor:deals for women]. My site comes up number one! Yowzas! If and when PinkDeals gains significantly more back links and posts with “deals for women” in its anchor text, it could pass up the top three. (This is where I shamelessly beg for back links. Please link to www.pinkdeals.net for positive karma points. Or you can link to it and I’ll give you a back link from this post. Just leave me a comment to let me know. Preferred anchor text includes “online coupons for women” or “deals for women”)

Anyhow, this is an example of why anchor text is so important, and how it helps your site rank higher in natural (i.e. organic) search engine results for specific niche markets. But if you want to see an example of how powerful anchor text is for other larger markets, run a check for “allinanchor:make money online.” You’ll see John Chow is second, right below Bidvertiser, a fairly large and really crappy advertising network. His ranking is most likely due in large part to his recent back link promotion. Running an “allinanchor:” check for keywords that you’re targeting will help tell you the popularity of your site for particular anchor text phrases relative to your competition. If you’re nowhere to be found in the organic search results for your targeted keywords, you better start putting more of them in your anchor text!