Goals D-Day

In 1 hour and 45 minutes, I will have completed my goals challenge that I set out 2 months ago. My goal was lofty, and because of that I failed. But it was a great learning experience and what I accomplished I am happy with. Here is a brief overview of the results:

Pageview Goals:
By August 11th: 10,000 Pageviews
Current Pageviews: 5,975
% of Goal Reached: 59.75%
Status: Failed

That should give you a decent run down. In two months I was to gain 10,000 pageviews across all of my blogs and articles. I reached roughly 60% of that goal. My biggest obstacles were getting out of the Google Sandbox, getting decent links, and the hardest of all, balancing my regular everyday life while generating enough content.

I could have done better with generating content but I became lax as everyday life caught up with me. I've learned how to use many great tools, and I've also learned how to better use Google Analytics. I've thought of many great things and I hope that this is just the beginning of a very successful webmastering career. I would like to thank anyone who followed a long and invite you to continue reading. And feel free to comment as well! It gets lonely without comments!

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How To Gain Readers To Your Blog or Website & Minimize Bounce Rate

You want readers but you don't have any and you continuously ask yourself why. If this sounds like you then I want to provide you some guidance. Your writing needs to have valuable content and to be focused. This sounds easier then it is!

First let us examine the main reasons that people use the internet:

• Communication
• Buying Products
• Needing Information
• Needing Entertainment

Those are the four major reasons that people go online.

Choose Your Goal:

Many people will start up personal blogs, better known as journals, and try to monetize them. This goes over like a lead balloon because people, outside of friends and family, have little interest in what is going on in your personal life. The only caveat to that statement really only applies to celebrities, because, for some ungodly reason, people have an obsession with what celebrities do in their spare time.

If your blog or site does not offer one of the four services above, then you need to make a decision. What will your blog or site offer? Choose your goal. Journals will not necessarily fail, but they are more likely to. You need to offer something that people need. People need information about things that impact their lives, people need entertainment, and people need it concise.

Focus The Content:

What makes your content unique, and what makes it better than anyone else offering it? If you cannot answer these questions, or you cannot answer them well, then you need to refocus what you are writing.

How well does your site offer your service? Are you providing information that people will be seeking out, like tutorials? How clear and well worded are they? How specific are they? Do you provide screen shots or pictures to help clarify? Is there another site that offers the same information, but in a better way?

You must focus your content and make it very consistent. People need information, and you have one shot at making these people returning visitors, or just another bounce in your Google Analytics.

Is your site offering entertainment? This is a competitive field. Another problem is it needs large amounts of content, and consistently new content. A good example to consider is a joke site. When the average person goes to a joke site, they don't read just one and leave (unless it is horrible) they want to read many jokes. You better have lots of content, and it must be good.

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We Have Gone Windowless! Bye, Bye Microsoft and Hello Ubuntu!

Today we've switched all of our computers over from the horrid Windows Vista over to Ubuntu 9.04. So far everything is amazing. The interface is nice and Ubuntu is very fast! Windows Vista was a behemoth! I will admit, at first I liked Windows Vista with its sleek interface and comfortable feel. But after the honeymoon, everything went downhill. It booted slowly, the interface was cumbersome, and explorer began to crash repeatedly. I'm so happy to finally be rid of Windows.

Ubuntu is a free open source operating system, and it comes with great software like Open Office (A comparable suite to Microsoft Office, except it is completely free). Microsoft did such a good job of cornering the market when it comes to getting their Windows software and office programs on new computers, but this change is certainly worth it. We are now completely off of Windows, and not a single crash yet! Windows Explorer would crash at least 6 times a day while doing various activities. Well, no more! Goodbye Windows, and good bye Microsoft. No more money mongering corporation in this computer.

We don't need Windows, we don't need Microsoft, and say no to 7! (Windows 7 for those that aren't in the know.)

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Feeding RSS To Twitter Via TwitterFeed.com

Have you wanted to have Twitter automatically send a tweet when you publish a new blog post? Most likely you currently go on and manually tweet your new posts. You do not have to do that any longer! Twitterfeed.com allows you to sign up for free and send your RSS feed from your blog to TwitterFeed.com and Twitterfeed.com will then submit any new posts to your Twitter account.

It is pretty simple. All you have to do is go to Twitterfeed.com, sign up, provide it with your twitter account, allow Twitterfeed within Twitter and then post new blogs. If any of that sounds complicated, believe us, it is not! The whole process is very seamless and not confusing at all. Once you have Twitterfeed.com and your Twitter account linked, Twitterfeed.com will check your blogs RSS feed and if there is something new within the time that you specified, it will grab that post and send a tweet to Twitter for you.

The only draw back right now is that it does not do it in real time, but that is an option that they might start doing. Currently it will check your RSS feed every half hour, hour, or a few other options. The best part is that it is free.

TwitterFeed.com also has some advanced options that allows you to customize how the tweets are worded for maximum customization. We definitely take advantage of that!

So, the answer is Yes! You can RSS feed your blog posts over to Twitter!

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Traffic Update: Google Is Cranking

The page view count is up 22.6% which is surprisingly consistent. It exceeded all expectations that traffic could maintain a 20%+ growth. While this growth is nice to see it is beginning to look like the 10,000 page view goal may have been too lofty. Either way, we will continue forward and try our hardest to reach this goal. The biggest mover and shaker has been Google. Google has provided a ton of traffic in the last two weeks and has exceeded all of our other traffic sources.

Twitter will get an honorable mention as Twitter has provided very consistent traffic (not large amounts but a consistent small amount). This has helped to keep a steady pace. We have collaborated with a great online tool to help feed all of our new posts directly to Twitter in an automated fashion. I'll write another post about that entirely! Hubpages has been very good to us. Our articles have been performing well and are maintaining very steady traffic.

Our eHow articles are picking up in traffic, but are still very modest in the amounts they receive. Unfortunately, eHow doesn't offer very much in the way of reporting so pulling useful data is still basically impossible. The various blogs are doing well, they are still inconsistent, but this is most likely due to a lack of content (as they are basically new blogs) and they probably are not very high in the search results. This will hopefully remedy in time, but we won't hold our breath.

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Traffic Report Update For Goals:

The numbers are looking a little more promising. This week we've experienced a nearly 22% increase in traffic which is very nice. This is due in part to a more steady flow of traffic from Google and Yahoo. I thought Bing was going to be a lot more friendly but it has run dry for us for the past week or so.

The Hubpage articles have been receiving a large amount of traffic lately. Much of the new traffic is attributed to Google which has caught up with referrals from the Hubpages community itself! This was very surprising as we expected the most traffic to come from Hubpages. Yahoo has played a slight role in the Hubpage traffic, but surprisingly Ask.com popped up as well. We've never really used that search engine, but out of gratitude for the traffic we may need to start.

Across our Various Blogs Special Her has gotten the second largest % increase in traffic, while U.S. Elephant got the highest percentage increase in the last week. We've refocused our writing for Debris Central as it began to deviate. It has now been refocused to specifically provide survival information and tips. For this blog we are trying to provide more detailed information that will hopefully give good tips to new webmasters, and bloggers alike. That's all for today.

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