It is now official, Tumblr has more blogs on their service than WordPress.com.
Tumblr has only been around for 4 years and considering that WordPress.com has been running for 8 years its a remarkable feet for the blogging platform.
It seems as though the Gawker redesign has been hurting their sites more than first thought. Here are the latest numbers out of Gawker. All sites are down within the Gawker Network and in a big way.
There are other issues driving down reported traffic, but there’s no question that their redesign was a huge mistake.
Every blog needs to have goals. Without goals you are just shooting in the dark, trying to succeed without knowing what success really is. The problem most bloggers have is that they have very general goals that cannot be quantified. They say their goals are to make money, to never have to work a 9-5 job again, or to go on a big vacation every year from the money they make on their blog.
But there are 2 problems with that mindset:
1. Those are not really goals but a result of reaching set goals.
2. There are no numbers associated with those goals.
In this article I will show you some goals you need to start setting with your blog. Anything worth doing is worth doing right, and you will never hit a target if you are not aiming at it. Having no target in your blogging is like using the lottery as a retirement plan. Yes, some may hit the jackpot, but most will just end up losing money.
So what are some quantitative goals you can start setting?
Remember your goals need to be real numbers– something subjective and not objective.
Your goals can be to reach a certain number of…
1. RSS feed subscribers
2. Email subscribers
3. Twitter followers
4. Unique visitors in one month
5. Rank in Google for a given keyword
6. Indexed backlinks
You will notice that none of these goals have anything to do with money– at least not yet. You see, when all of our goals have to do with making money we lose focus on how to actually DO it. But when we focus on getting more email subscribers on our list and getting more targeted traffic to our blog then we will most certainly see a rise in our income levels as well.
One trap bloggers fall into is worrying so much on monetizing their blogs that they forget about the people that will be coming to their sites with the money. These are the people that will allow you to quite your day job, so your focus needs to be on them. What content are they looking for? What questions do they have? What will make them want to buy a product that you recommend?
Once you have determined what your goals are in real numbers you can set up a game plan. How can you reach that level of email subscribers? What do you need to do in order to get more quality backlinks to your site?
Your goals also need to have time frames.
Without a dead line for your goal to be reached you might as well not have a goal at all. For instance, I can say I want to have 20,000 Twitter followers as my goal. Then 3 years go by and I am still sitting at 5,000. There is no urgency to reach that 20,000 goal if I have until the rest of my life to reach it. The whole point in having goals is to reach them, and to make them a priority. A dead line will put some fire to your feet to get things done.
You cannot succeed in reaching a goal if you make it impossible to fail. It’s the chance that you might fail that makes reaching a goal so rewarding. You may not reach every goal. You probably won’t. And if you find you are reaching every goal you set in a short period of time then you are probably not aiming high enough. Set the bar a little higher and give yourself a challenge.
Set that time frame for those 20,000 followers. Try to reach that goal in 3 months, 6 months, or a year. Allow yourself the opportunity for failure, and then work as hard as you can to avoid it.
So to sum it all up:
1. Set goals with numbers.
2. Have deadlines with your goals.
3. Setup yourself for failure.
4. Will yourself to succeed and avoid that failure.
Guest Post by: Jonathan Souza is owner of CashCoach.net where you can find daily tips on internet marketing, social media, blogging, SEO, and more creative marketing techniques to get more traffic to your website.
Over at QuickOnlineTips they have put together a great list of the top 50 ways to promote your blog. All of these ways are purely online and they will provide a solid foundation for your blog.
Time magazine created a complete list about the most relevant blogs of 2010, not only the most valuable but also the “essentials”, and the “overrated” ones.
I’m pretty sure we can find a blog that was left out in any of these three lists, and some others that did not belong here; but definitely we can find here some of the references in the “blogosphere”.
In the essentials we can find some really cool examples like TechCrunch; but the interesting are the overrated ones, the mentions were for Perez Hilton (totally agree), Fail blog, and a surprisingly Mashable.
Here are the lists:
Best Blogs
Essential Blogs
Overrated Blogs
Can you make your own Top 5?
CatsWhoBlog presents a very interesting and effective option to display an average feed reader value using FeedBurner stats.
There are three facts existing in today’s 2.0 worls about feeds:
To fix this problem, we can use this code in functions.php which will use the average readers from the last 7 days, a number more accurate for our RSS feed (download the TXT for functions.php):
function get_average_readers($feed_id,$interval = 7){
$today = date('Y-m-d', strtotime("now"));
$ago = date('Y-m-d', strtotime("-".$interval." days"));
$feed_url="https://feedburner.google.com/api/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=".$feed_id."&dates=".$ago.",".$today;
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $feed_url);
$data = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($data);
$fb = $xml->feed->entry['circulation'];
$nb = 0;
foreach($xml->feed->children() as $circ){
$nb += $circ['circulation'];
}
return round($nb/$interval);
}
Once done, you can call the function wherever you want in your theme files. Pass your Feedburner feed id as a parameter (download the TXT for this example):
<?php
$nb = get_average_readers('catswhocode');
echo "I have ".$nb." RSS readers";
?>
Apple devices come with a native recording device, and even social networkslike Utterli have functioned as a way to capture audio and share it, but none have been as easy as and intuitive as Audio Boo for the iPhone and the iTouch is. The application takes voice recording to a whole new level with a press of a button. Before you know it, you just might start audio recording a whole lot more than you think.
Audio Boo is both a desktop and mobile app. The desktop app allows you to configure your account, asking you where you’d like your “Boo’s” to post. You can choose from a variety of social networks but it’s also stored in the audio stream for others to interact with and comment on.
For those of us writers who find ourselves seeking new content to relate to what we write, it was a huge breath of fresh air when Zemanta was released. Zemanta not only offered us links, but it offered up keywords we might want to highlight, along with images the engine though we should include in our post. Zemanta was unlike anything we’d ever seen in terms of its wide use and availability across browsers and blogging sites.
With content accessible on our mobile, it’s become more common for us to be productive with our mobile devices to get more work done. Cell phones and other mobile devices have become the digital leashes that collar us to work, but at the same time it also keeps us connected to life’s information flow. As we become a more connected community via social media tools, it’s always useful to hear how others have made it work for them.
Tracking mentions online is a huge market that has yet to turn any profit. Still, there are a lot of sites out there that track mentions on Twitter, Facebook, various social sites, and a few blog sites as well. Knowing what trending topics are hot and when your name or brand is mentioned is important and becomes a focal point of tracking your web presence.
Regator is both a web app and a mobile app that allows you to keep up with what is happening in the blogosphere without missing a beat. The unique addition of the mobile app ensures that you never miss a mention. They pay app ($1.99) is a functional addition to any mobile media person’s toolbox.
Regator does little to stop you from jumping right in. Search for keywords, browse the web from within Regator, search real time trends, and even set up a blog monitor for specific names and keywords for daily reports when those words are mentioned.
I also found the ability to favorite posts, entire blogs, and/or topics to be useful for when I needed to come back and read up more in depth later.
Regator definitely explores millions of posts thousands of the best sites out there. I found it an interesting tool for media, business, writing, and news professionals. But just about anyone can find a great use to keep up on their specific keyword choices or trending topics.
