msdanielle – just another ego blog site

MsDanielle.com has officially been up for one whole month! And what a month it’s been. From building the blog from scratch to upgrading to WordPress 2.1.2 (and now 2.1.3 is already out!), to finding the perfect WordPress theme… Whew! It takes a lot more to maintain a specialty type of blog, too, than people might think at first. (In my case, I focus half or more of the articles on topics relating to online marketing.) There’s a lot of difficulty in continually producing quality content that others might find useful, and stay interested in. That’s why I set some loose goals for myself when I started. So let’s see how I did.

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!

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