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?