I’m making good progress on my Q1 goals:
1) My RSS subscribers is now up to 280 as of today. I’m still looking to hit 350 by the end of March. I hope the podcast will help in that department. If I count podcast subscribers from iTunes (and there is no reason why not), I’m guessing I might be able to hit it.
2) I’m on page 3 for Google for the search term “travel blog”. My goal was page 2.
3) My Technorati Authority is now over 200 and I’m in the top 30,000. I also have 66 Technocrati fans. (if I really pushed this, I could get in the Technorati Top 100. #100 is only like 240). Again, this is pretty much meaningless to me now. After pouring over my stats, I’m going to just focus on quality links.
4) Major mentions. So far, nothing.
5) 1,000 visitors per day. It is hard to do this and have lots of RSS at the same time. I think I might hit 500 on an regular basis by the end of the month.
6) 2 of the 3 site improvements are done. The third and big one should be up in 2 weeks.
I’ve spent a lot of my time in Melbourne working on things like search engine optimization for the site, building a site map for search engines, etc. It is mostly work which is only necessary to do once. Once I’m out of Melbourne, I don’t think I’ll have a lot of time to work on that and I’d rather focus on actually doing content, which has been rather light this month.
I’ve also begun to lay the groundwork for eventually adding ads to the site. I’m not going to do that for a while. I think it is silly to put ads on your site if you don’t have sufficient traffic (and I do not). The earliest I can see doing that is in 3 months. I’m very concerned about contextual focus of the ads. I’m going to really go out of my way to make sure everything is targeted to travel and not to “punch the monkey”. I want things to look like they belong there. So much of what makes web ads annoying are the fact they have nothing to do with what the focus of the site is. I’m going to line up affiliate programs with various hotel and airline companies, as well as sites like National Geographic and Lonely Planet.
I’ve been helping my friend Scott with advertising. He has a very popular site and runs a lot of Google ads. They really aren’t as great of a deal as they used to be and that seems to be the consensus everywhere I go.
The Where On Google Earth site is gaining some traction, but slowly. Its fun so I don’t worry too much about it.
2 replies on “Q1 Goal Progress Again”
Does tracking all of these metrics ever make your trip feel less “fun” and more like “work”?
Well, it isn’t like I’m really doing anything while I’m stuck here. A lot of the SEO stuff is a one time occurances as is submitting sites to directories. So I might as well do it now.
It does get in the way of just writing and taking photos, but I’ll be back to that soon.