Things didn’t go quite as planned during the month of June.  I didn’t get nearly as many posts up on my sites and to add insult to injury I didn’t completely finish the development/design of the two websites I was working on.  Anways, enough excuses lets get on to the stats and goals for next month.

Income – June 2009

AdSense – $123.40

Amazon Associates – $12.35

Total – $135.75

My AdSense totals were going strong through the middle of the month and I was looking like I was on pace for my goal of $150.  However, the end of the month my revenue and pageviews began to sputter possibly due to the low number of posts.  I’m going to stick with the same goal for June and shoot for $150.

Subscribers

May 31 – 1094

June 30

• Blog 1- 1240
• Blog 2 – 4
• Blog 3 – 1

The final total for my three blogs is 1245.  I exceeded my goal of 150 for the month with a whopping 151 new subscribers.  I could definitely have done much better had I produced more articles and done more marketing.  Lets go a little more aggressive this month and shoot for 200 subscribers.

Traffic

Site Usage

Visits = 19,827 -1,306
Page Views = 34,826 -1,374
Pages/Visit = 1.76

Traffic Sources

Search Engines = 15,496 (78.16%)
Referring Sites = 3,666 (18.49%)
Direct Traffic = 663 (3.34%)
Other = 2 (.01%)

I know my numbers are down, but I can attribute that to two things.  First, I haven’t worked on my sites as much as I want to.  I had one post on one site, two posts on another, and 8 posts on the third with no marketing efforts.  This month I’m going to set a goal of 1 article every weekday of the month per blog.  That amounts to the magical number of 69 total post for the month of July that’s versus only 11 total posts during the month of June.  I’m hoping that will bump the numbers to a higher level.  Also, we had a little issue last month when upgrading to WordPress 2.8 and our Google Analytics plugin.  Needless to say the plugin failed and brought down the admin panel on my WordPress blog.  Google Analytics was down for about 1 days and we saw a drop in stats.  Minus the Google Analytics snafu we were probably up slightly from May’s totals.  Probably something like 22K Visits and 36K Page views.

Lets stick with last months goal 25,000 visitors and 45,000 page views.

Here is my month-by-month comparison chart:

So overall the number’s are down for a second consecutive month. I have no one to blame, but myself. Rather than focusing on the numbers I plan on making a concentrated effort on producing more content and put some emphasis (vs none last month) on my online marketing efforts.

In my lifetime information has always been readily available whether it be through the Library, Encyclopedia’s, or the Internet.  Today it’s easier then ever to get at any information in the comfort of your own home.  This can be good and bad.

Back in the day…I’m talking 80’s and early 90’s I used a thing called the library when searching for information.  I often times ask some of my younger friends (you know the type – social media savvy, under 22 years old, internet power surfers) if they’ve used card catalogs, microfiche, or any general library skills.   Usually they have no idea what I’m talking about.

Information In My Youth

I was among the lucky one’s throughout grade school.  As I recall my parents purchased the 1981 edition of the World Book Encyclopedia.  Our household was the envy of the block.  No longer did we always have to trek to the local library for information.  Every bit of history was right there, readily available in the World Book Encyclopedia.

Ten years passed…I used the Encyclopedia’s as if they were gods word on what was fact and fiction.  I still had to check out other supporting resources from the local library (newspaper articles, books, magazines, etc), but my time spent there was limited compared to my friends and fellow classmates.  I was able to work faster and get things done much quicker then everyone else for ten years.  Ten years…of reports and school work.  Ten years…as the main source in my bibliographys.

The year was 1991…10 years after the purchase of our beloved World Book Encyclopedia’s.  1991 was the year I moved out of the house and into the college dorms.  Something happened during my time at the University.  There was a shift in how we got information.  Of course, I no longer had the use of the World Book Encyclopdias in the comfort of my home, but instead the University library was a hop, skip, and jump away from my dorm room.  This is not the shift I’m talking about.  During my time at the University I learned about computers, networks, email, and the internet.  Back then the internet was not as it is today.  However, during my time in college the World Wide Web came to be and I discovered the web browser and the vast amounts of information available at the touch of a finger.

“University of Arizona – 5 or 6 of the best years of your life!” I remember seeing a t-shirt during my freshman year that had that line on it.  I laughed at the time , but just as the t-shirt predicted…I graduated in 1996 (year 5) and didn’t move back to California until 1997 (year6)…5 or 6 of the best years of my life.  Everything had changed when I returned from my life in Tucson.  Most of my friends had an AOL account and email address, a dialup connection, and at the time limited access to the internet (we payed for dialup access by the hour back then).  Information was readily available 24-7.  I could pull up a search engine (I think I was using Alta Vista at the time) and type a word and receive hundreds maybe thousands of articles on the subject.  The way we received information had definitely made a shift during my time in college.

Internet Information Overload

All of this information easily and readily available to us can be a good and bad thing.  The bad thing is what spawned this article.

While I’m sure there are many bads here are a few that were bugging me today.

• Statistics - in my case I’ve been monitoring my statistics daily sometimes even hourly this has got to stop.  Of course in the back of my mind I remember reading a recent  Problogger article specifically about Blogging Mistakes with becoming a Stat-A-Holic being number 17 on the list.
• Statistics Part II – the obsession continues as I search through several blog lists trying to compare my blog statistics to other blogs around the internet consuming hours of time.  By the way, it’s easy to see other blog statistics by checking their “Advertise” page we’re the author will often times reveal key information such as Unique Visitors, Pageviews, RSS subscribers, etc.
• Reading and Not Acting – reading can be healthy, but when it consumes your day to the point where you are not taking action.  That can be an unhealthy obssesion.

As I’ve already mentioned this list should be much longer, but I’m really just venting my own frustration and by the way…after mentioning and looking over Darren Rowse’s 21 Blogging Mistakes article I wanted to write a follow up post about all the blogging mistakes this blog currently makes.

I hope you enjoyed this little rant.  What about you?  Where did you come from? and how do you feel about the availability of information in the world today?

Google Page Rank gets updated about every three months and recently I noticed one of my blogs had a nice little PR bump from PR4 to PR5. Unfortunately I haven’t been working on this blog much so still no PR. Neither do I plan on working on building back links for this blog so we may never have a Page Rank nor any kind of following. It’s not a big deal as I’m just trying to document my results for selfish purposes.

This brings me to another goal that I can set for myself in the coming months. I’m currently working on 6 different websites and I set some money making goals in a previous post.  One additional goal I’d like to add is the PR rank for all six sites.  At the moment only one site has PR (PR2) all of the other sites are either shells or just domain names and an idea in my head.

My goal for these 6 sites is to have all sites between PR2 – 5 by the end of the year.  That gives me approximately 2 Google Page Rank updates and 7 months to achieve my goal.

My understanding is that the PR update I am talking about is only what is shown in the google toolbar and the actual page rank is always changing based on the dynamic nature of the web.

What about you?  Do you have a Google Page Rank Goal?

These stats are not for this website, but for a conglomoration of websites I am currently working on.

This is my first official month for reporting stats and offering some analysis. Up to this point my biggest concern was generating traffic to my main website not monetization. After about 1 1/2 years of blogging I’m going to start work on monetization and complementary web properties.

Income – May 2009

Adsense = $106.80

Amazon Associates = $12.30

Total Income Earned during May 2009 = $119.10

Not a staggering total, but at least I cleared the hundred dollar mark. I’ve joined several other affiliate and pay per click programs, but until this point I’ve followed the path of least resistance (probably not the best way to make money). However, the good thing is I already have accounts with some of the major programs including Chitika, Clickbank, and Commission Junction. In the coming months we’ll hopefully see some income from these programs as well.

My ultimate goal is to offer products of my own. Hopefully that will come to fruition by years end.

Lets go easy on ourselves and shoot for an income goal of $150 next month as I plan on hopefully seeing an increase in dollar totals on our flagship site, but no income on the other 5 sites..

Subscribers

My subscriber numbers mainly revolve around my newsletter subscribers. For some reason it has been difficult getting RSS subcribers, but I think that may just be the nature of my niche…that is…those who follow my niche are not usually web savvy.

April 30 2009 – 985

May 31 2009 - 1,094

I busted over the thousand subscriber milestone and increased my subscriber count by 109 new subscribers. We’ll keep tracking and lets go with a conservative goal of 150 new subscribers for next month putting us over the 1200 mark. I should be able to get around the same or more subscribers through my flagship site in addition 50 subscribers for my 5 other startup sites shouldn’t be a reach.

Traffic

Site Usage

Visits = 21,133
Page Views = 36,200
Pages/Visit = 1.71

Traffic Sources

Search Engines = 15,747 (74.51%)
Referring Sites = 4,674 (22.11%)
Direct Traffic = 707 (3.35%)
Other = 6 (.03%)

These totals all come from my flagship website and does not include stats from the other 5 sites I’m currently working on. Next months totals will include statistics from all six sites so hopefully we’ll see a good bump in all of these numbers.

Lets shoot for 25,000 visitors and 45,000 page views. That should also bump my Pages/Visit slightly.

Here is my month-by-month comparison chart:

After checking my monthly chart everyone probably thinks I’m a failure….how can you drop in all your stat categories…significantly and consider the month a success. Well, if you look a little deeper into my April stats you’ll notice that I had a bit of an anomaly that month. We had one page that would normally generate no more than 100 visitors receive over 10K visitors. I won’t go into detail, but we happened to be in the right place at the right time notching a huge spike in our traffic.

If we compare this month to March totals then we notice almost identical stats which is pretty good considering I only added 7 posts in May and 3 posts in April.

How did your stats turn out last month?  Do you track your stats on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis?

Yep, you heard it right. I’m setting my new years goals right now and we’re almost done with May. Better late then never! I’ve come to realize that it’s important for me to setup a plan. Lately I’ve been just kind of running around with my head cut off. That plan starts here on the Bloggers Project pages.

I think my biggest hurdle right now is information overload, and reading, but not acting upon all the great (and not so great) information on the internet.

For openers I’ve been wanting to accomplish several things on the internet and start my own little internet empire…moohaaaahaaa…

Current state of the Koala Kingdom

1. I’ve started a fairly successful blog in my niche that draws in about 1000 visitors a day.
2. I own several domain names in said niche and wish to develop each into a stand-alone website.
3. The sites I wish to develop are:
   1. Blog in the Niche – developed and going strong
   2. Blog in the sub niche – partially developed and needs daily articles
   3. Second blog in the sub niche – Undeveloped
   4. Membership Website – Undeveloped, but currently attending a highly regarded online course about membership sites.
   5. Static Service related website with blog to keep content fresh – Undeveloped
   6. Database Driven Website – Undeveloped and will require outsourcing

Instead of setting goals I think I’ll create a timeline. My end goal is to launch the membership site by November 10th, 2009

• May 21-31, 2009 – my goal for today is to work on developing blogs number 2 and 3. Put together at least 1 article for blogs 1, 2, and 3. Create a list of top 100 bloggers in my niche and start forming relationships. Create a list of top 5 forums in my niche and start networking and creating relationships.
• May 22, 2009 – May 25, 2009 – Memorial weekend I’m playing in a hockey tournament, but I’m bringing my laptop so all is not lost. Don’t expect much to get done during this time period.
• May 26,2009 – Write articles for blogs 1-3. Continue development on blogs 2,3.
• May 27, 2009 – Write articles for blogs 1-3. Continue development on blogs 2,3.
• May 28, 2009 – Write articles for blogs 1-3. Continue development on blogs 2,3.
• May 29, 2009 – Write articles for blogs 1-3. Continue development on blogs 2,3.
• May 30, 2009 – Write articles for blogs 1-3. Continue development on blogs 2,3.
• May 31, 2009 – Write articles for blogs 1-3. Continue development on blogs 2,3.
• June 1, 2009 – Finish development on blogs 2 and 3 including all pages completed and at least 5 articles
• July 1, 2009 – Start creating content for Membership site,
  • start list of beta testers for membership site
  • start membership site design and development
• August 1, 2009 - Launch membership site for beta testers
• September 1, 2009
• October 1, 2009 – Complete first 3 months of content for Membership site
• November 3, 2009 – Begin Membership Site Pre-Launch
• November 17, 2009 - Launch Membership Site
• December 1, 2009 – Membership site maintenance
• January 1, 2009 – Begin work on Service and Database driven sites.

The Koala Kingdom Goals

• 20-30 hours a week into the Koala Kingdom – possibly more if I feel I’m coming up short on deadlines
• End of year goals – complete membership site and blogs 1-3. Service and Database Driven sites are secondary for now and at the latest should be complete by the middle of 2010.
• Create a list of goals and accomplishments on the 1st of every month to keep on schedule.
• Create a day by day timeline using calendar software at the start of every month.
• Read less do more!

Some other Random Goals

Sorry if this doesn’t make sense to you. Unfortunately, this is something I wanted to write for myself to prioritze and organize my thoughts. Now moving forward may I suggest adding a timeline to Google Calendar or maybe the Zoho Calendar.

That brings me to a question that I’m sure others have asked before me Zoho or Google? I’ll see I’ve I can answer that in an upcoming post.

Is there a Google AdSense Bug going around?  I don’t about you guys, but yesterday I noticed my page impressions in Google AdSense were spiking (too bad my click through wasn’t doing the same).  I figured…”another spike from StumbleUpon”, but upon further analysis I noticed that my channel numbers did not add up to my total page impressions.  In fact I had approximately twice as many page impressions as I should have had according to my channels.

I dug a little deeper and took a peek at my Google Analytics data and sure enough I had way more page impressions according to Google AdSense compared to Analytics.  One final test…my AWStats.  AWStats were also at a normal level leading me to believe that there was an issue with Google AdSense.

Google AdSense Bug?

My initial thought was that someone copied some of my pages and pasted it into their own site Google AdSense code and all thus accounting for my increased page impression number.  I did some research and sure enough came across a few forums mentioning this possibility.  Hmmm…time to contact Google and let them know that trouble is afoot?  Nope…time for more research.  I went to the Google site and while looking for a contact form I came across AdSense Help.  I searched the forum and found that people were having a similar problem in a thread started yesterday.  Here’s the thread I came across: Unusual Page Impressions.

People in the forum are calling it a Google AdSense Bug, but I don’t think anyone is really sure what we’re experiencing.  My main concern was that someone scraped my publisher ID and I was afraid of a Google Ban.  However, if it’s a Bug or Google just making changes to the way they report AdSense statistics then I’m not really concerned.

How about you?  Is anyone else experiencing this phenomena?  Is this a Google Adsense Bug or something else?  If you know what’s going on or have any theories please let us know in the comment section below.

Is it too late for New Years Resolutions?  I’ve known for years the importance of networking and building relationships after all I did work in sales for four years.  However, knowing the importance of something and acting on it are two completely different things.

So starting today I’m going to work on networking and building relationships.  I’m the shy type, but I figure as long as I put this down in words I’ll start changing my actions.

Why Networking And Building Relationships Is Important

There are many reasons, but I just want to point out the thoughts that have been bouncing around in my head.

• I look at the success of Linkin and think about the connections and relationships made there.  Today’s connection can lead to tomorrows job.
• I see Joint Ventures all the time.  If I don’t build relationships there will never be a joint venture.
• I’m not a natural when it comes to building relationships, but I do meet people through friends and sports teams.  Recently I’ve come into contact with three contract jobs and some possible volunteer work.  That’s without trying…imagine the kind of work I could get if I set my mind to building relationships.
• People you trust are more likely to give you work.  This might be a bad example, but I recently heard that a local school district were bidding for a new payroll system.  Unfortunately, they received a system that didn’t cover there needs and required a lot of work to get working properly.  Why did they choose such a poor fit for their new payroll system?  Someone had built an existing relationship with one of the decision makers and made millions on the sale of their payroll system.
• Another point I’ve noticed and you can ask this of yourself.  Who gets the job?  The best qualified?   From what I’ve seen the best qualified doesn’t usually get the job, but the person who knows or has a relationship with the boss.

I know there are many other important reasons for building relationships, but for some reason the points listed above have been really standing out in my head.  Please feel free to leave comments and let me know what you think and please add to the list.

How I Plan on Networking And Building Relationships

Offline

• Just be more friendly with people
• Work on remembering the names of new people I meet.
• Engage people in conversation
• Attend more social outings

Online

• Blogs – Use a commenting strategy to make a connection with key bloggers.
• Forums – Respond to relevant posts and add to the conversation and make contact with key members.
• Websites – Make contact with key website owners

This is a great start, but I also know the importance of organizing and tracking the people you meet.  For now, I’m going to test out Zoho CRM and see if that will suit my needs.  After a thorough testing period I’ll add my thoughts on Zoho CRM.

Anyways, this is just another rant and something I was thinking about today.  Let me know what you think and please add to the conversation and start building a relationship today!

I’ve been managing websites for years manually changing the copyright date as each year passed by and surprisingly this is the first year I thought about how to automatically update my WordPress copyright date.  It’s a very easy process and I’m not sure why I didn’t think of it sooner.  All you have to do is take your WordPress footer include page and replace the copyright year with a little piece of PHP code.

Here’s the step-by-step process:

How To Automatically Update Your WordPress Copyright Date

1. Log in to your WordPress Blog
2. Click the Appearance Hyperlink in the left navigation bar.  This will bring you to the Appearance page and also expand the Appearance dropdown.
3. Click the Editor Hyperlink under the Appearance drop down.  This will take you to the edit themes page.
4. In the right navigation you will see your theme files.  Depending on your theme these files may differer, but all themes should have a file named Footer (footer.inc).  Click this hyperlnk to open the file in the theme editor window.
5. As I mentioned everyone will have a different theme and the contents of your Footer file will most likely be different then mine.  However, if you have either a static (meaning you’ll see the actual date like “2008″)  copyright date then you need to change this to a dynamic (meaning depending on the year the date will programmatically change to the current year) copyright date.
6. You can automatically update your WordPress copyright date by adding the following code instead of the current year you see in your footer.inc file.
7. Delete the year (for instance “2008″).  Replace the year with <?php echo date(”Y”) ?>
8. Click Update File

*Note – depending on your theme you may not have a copyright date or your copyright date may already be automated.  To verify your copyright date just take a look at the bottom of your blog and make sure you see the current year.  If you’d like to add a copyright date just follow the same steps as above and add the following code where you’d like to see the copyright date:

Copyright &copy; <?php echo date(”Y”) ?>

That’s it!  Now you no longer have to worry about updating the copyright date in your future years of blogging.  It may seem trivial, but the copyright date is something I usually remember to update around February.

I always try to keep my blogs up to date and up until now I’ve used the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin.  A great little plugin that simplified the WordPress upgrade process.  Recently WordPress has added automatic upgrade functionality as a standard feature.

WordPress Automatic Upgrade Fatal Error

Today I was going about my daily blogging business and noticed that WordPress 2.7.1 was available.  I attempted to use the built in automatic upgrade and received the following error:

Fatal error: Cannot redeclare class pclzip in /home/mysite/public_html/wp-admin/includes/class-pclzip.php on line 171

Here’s what I did to try and fix my problem:

1. I decided to try my handy WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin instead, but it informed me that I was already up to date (even though I wasn’t).
2. I next tried upgrading one of my newer blogs.  It upgraded just fine without fail.
3. I did a little research on the internet and found that my faithful WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin was causing the problem.
4. I went to my plugins panel, deactivated WordPress Automatic Upgrade, and attempted the built in Automatic upgrade.
5. It worked like a charm!

Now my blogs are all upgraded to WordPress 2.7.1.  One final note: I also read that if you do not have the WPAU plugin and you are experiencing this problem you might try disabling all your plugins then try the built in autaomatic upgrade again.

As a new blogger one of the most basic things you need to know and master is how to install a WordPress theme.  It’s not too difficult and not too technical, but you do need to have a few skills already mastered.  If you can browse the web and you have basic windows navigation skills then installing a WordPress theme should be no problem for you.

Here’s the step-by-step process:

How To Install A WordPress Theme

I’m going to assume that you found the WordPress theme of your dreams and have already downloaded the zip file…the adventure begins…

UPLOADING YOUR WORDPRESS THEME

1. Most (if not all) WordPress themes can be downloaded in a zip file.  The first thing you need to do is extract the contents from your zip file.
2. The process for unzipping a file may vary slightly depending on your “zip program”.  I usually just double click (open) the zip file and drag the contents from the zip file to my desktop.  There are other ways to extract contents from a zip file and hopefully you already have this skilled mastered.

1. The next step is to upload your extracted file to your web server.
2. Have you used FTP (File Transfer Protocol) before?  If so, use your FTP program to upload your extracted zip file to the following directory: /public_html/yourdomain.com/wp-content/themes
3. If you don’t know what FTP is then I have an easy way for you to upload files to your web server…that is as long as your web host uses cPanel…if your host doesn’t use cPanel then your shit out of luck…kidding…just contact me and I’ll do my best to walk you through FTPing your files.
4. Access your cPanel by going to http://yourdomainname.com/cpanel.  For this blog it would be http://www.bloggersproject.com/cpanel.
5. Enter your username and password – by the way, if you don’t normally access your cPanel here you need to know your 8 letter login name.  My account uses the first 8 letters in my domain name for instance, “bloggers” would be my domain name.  If you know how to access your cPanel through your host’s front page then access it there and look at the upper left corner of your cPanel home page under stats you’ll see your username.
6. Click on the little Unlimited FTP button (grouped under “Files”).  This runs a little Java program that allows you to use FTP inside your browser.  If you don’t have Java installed then you’ll need to take care of that now

1. You should be looking at two file directories now.  The left one has your local computer file directory and probably looks similar to what you see when you use windows explorer.  The directory on the right side is your web server directory.
2. Navigate through your file directory (left side) and find your extracted zip file.
3. Navigate through your web server directory (right side) to the following location: /public_html/yourdomain.com/wp-content/themes
4. Now just use your mouse to drag the extracted zip file to the directory mentioned above on your web server.

ACTIVATING YOUR WORDPRESS THEME

1. Go to your WordPress blog admin panel: http://yourdomain.com/wp-admin.
2. Enter your username and password.
3. Click the Appearance hyperlink in the left navigation.
4. Click the Themes hyperlink under the Appearance drop down in the left navigation.
5. The themes window should open and you should see an image of your new theme
6. Click the image or hyperlink with your theme name.

1. This will open a lightbox popup with your new theme (this is a sample of your site).  Click “Activate” ThemeName in the upper right corner.
2. Test your blog by going to your live website/blog.

That’s it!  Lots of little steps that should get you up in running in no time.  Of course there are always little snafu’s so if you’re having a problem feel free to contact me in the comments area below.