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Travels are over, at least for now

Yesterday was my first day back home after 3 weeks of traveling. I spent two weeks in northern California visiting family and lending a hand where I could. Then I took a trip to Washington state to visit my mother and some friends. Overall, it was a great time and I got to do some of my favorite things like eating huge home-cooked meals, hiking and sight-seeing. I am sure glad to be back home, though.

End of the month stats:

• Unique Visitors:  43,716
• Page Views: 107,112
• Pages Per Visit: 2.5
• RSS Subscribers: 176 (more than month goal)
• Technorati Rank: 48,166
• Alexa 150,510: (just above month goal)

Next month goals will be posted on the side bar.

Here are some pictures from my trip

Family cabin in northern California, a little morning breakfast.

My mother’s cat Pretty Girl and I (used to be my cat).

Blaine, Washington about 2 miles from Canada on the coast.

Popularity: 9% [?]

What a great week. The sun has been shining for at least half the week and we haven’t received any snow. Yes, believe it or not, last night it snowed an hour from here. I swear this winter lasted about 7 months. I just wonder how the rest of the seasons fit into the year.

Happy Mothers Day
Face it, without mothers, none of us would be here. I would like to say and give a special thanks to my mother for surviving the Las Vegas heat in summer to put up with me. Thanks, Mom. I hope that I do not have to remind anyone to call or do something special, but just in case. What are you waiting for? Go now and do it.

Traveling
On Monday I will be traveling to the great state of California for a couple weeks where I am going to be helping out some family members. Before you start dreaming of the ocean and sand, I will remind you that I will be in the far north area of California near Mt. Shasta. I have been looking forward to my trip and visiting family. Hopefully I can post some nice pictures next week.

Tools
I finally caved and bought an MP3 player last week. In particular, a Sansa View. I recently did an interview and had the chance to record some of the conversation with a Sansa I borrowed. I was completely blown away by how well it recorded and sounded, not to mention all the other features included. I really wanted to get a decent digital voice recorder. I quickly realized they were about $100 and for a little more I could get a device that sounds just as good recording but also plays music and movies. It seemed like a no brainer.
Alexa
I shaved off 25k from my Alexa stats for this blog. That is a good thing. I really don’t know how much weight I give Alexa anymore. Alexa even admitted that in the last two years it was completely wrong in how it valued websites and now somehow magically it is better. In the end, is your blog expanding or contracting? Do you have more readers this month than last? Do you have more comments and linkbacks? That is what really matters.

Popularity: 16% [?]

I will make this sort and sweet. I spent the last week moving out of one apartment and into another. I am sure most everyone who reads this has moved at some point and understand the labor intensive work that goes along with such activities.

Sitehoppin Toolbar was released. I have a few invite codes if you would like to try it out. Each time Max releases a new version of the toolbar, you can use the same invite link and code to download the newest version. The toolbar is only being given to 1,000 beta testers and 3/4 are left, so don’t hesitate.

I am going to be cutting back on the video posts for now and mostly stick to using videos for tutorials and guides. I feel that they have been a good success and will continue to do some posts in video form. The 10-day trial netted me about 15,000 video views. Overall, a success, I would say.

Current projects:

I am reviewing / interviewing 1-2 marketing blog each day for the next week, as well as interviewing the CEO of a local capital investment firm. I am continuing to build and promote a number of sites in various forms of construction.

Goals and achievements:

I love goals, and since April has ended, I will be revisiting those. I achieved one of the goals on my list and others that weren’t on my list. I’ll start with those. This last week Google released a new update of Page Ranks for websites and blogs. I was completely blown away that the first ever Page Rank for joshwhitford.com was 4. Not only was my blog given a PR4, but so was www.thatmutt.com. Last month I spent a lot of time building backlinks for both our blogs, and it sure seemed to help with our page rankings.  

Another cool happenings actually occurred yesterday on Tim Ferriss’s blog. He had posted about meeting Warren Buffett, the world’s richest person according to Forbes. Some might recall that around Christmas time I sent a letter and postcard to Warren Buffett. I posted a comment on Tim’s blog to which he approved and then included in another post about Becoming an Eco Bounty Hunter. I am pretty excited about all of that and had a great time reading the flood of new comments on my blog. When I woke up this morning I had 10 new RSS subscribers. Yay!

At the time of posting my goals for the month of April, I was completely on the fix that traffic means success, I now know a little better and have focused my efforts on gaining true readers and subscribers. My goal was to have 75,000 page views to which I received 54,657. I also made it my goal to be under 90,000 on Alexa. I was pretty confident that would take place until its new algorithm was released and put a kibosh on that. Now I am at 197,672, such is life. Another goal was to reach 160 RSS readers, and I am currently standing at 134. Another goal was to get a Technorati  authority of 200 with a rank under 100,000. I did get a rank of 77,789 and an authority of 106. This is also my 75th day of blogging, not bad for just a couple of months.

What a great week, and I can’t wait to see what yet another week brings. Until next time work smarter, not harder.

Popularity: 11% [?]

Well the numbers are in and for the most part a lot better than I expected. March was the first full month this blog has been up and running as well as my first full month running a blog ever.

These were my goals for the month of March as they are posted on my side bar. I felt that the goals were very ambitious and worth shooting for.

• Page Views : 30,000
• Number of Posts : 31+
• RSS Subscribers : 100  

How did the numbers play out?

Instead of posting just the numbers, I am going to post pictures, because we all know that pictures speak louder than words.

Posts:

I had over one post per day this month, meaning I met my March goal of 31+ posts. My top post for number of visits is the post: 10 reasons you should quit your job.

Technorati Rank and Authority, plus 30 favs:

RSS subscribers: (The last day of March, it was actually 84 but I did not take a screen shot till after I lost a couple)

 Unigue Visitors:

Alexa.com Stats:

Results:

First off, I would like to say that reaching 30K visitors was awesome in my opinion, and then to blow right past it to over 51k was amazing. StumbleUpon, Entrecard and Sitehoppinwere very kind to me for providing visitors. What amazes me the most was the traffic from Sitehoppin, which added another 3kunique visitors to my stats in the last few days of March. If you haven’t already figured out that Sitehoppin is delivering good traffic, then you need to go over there and get a Beer Stock right now. What surprised me the most between the traffic from Entrecard and that of Sitehoppin was the bounce rate percentage. Entrecard has been giving my blog a bounce rate of about 87%, whereas Sitehopping is about 45%. That is almost half the bounce rate as Entrecard. The difference between the bounce rate of these two sites is quite a bit and worth noting.

As you might of noticed, I did fall a little short of my RSS subscriber goal, I think that this is fine and that I still did quite well. My new goal for subscribers for the month of April is going to be 160. I am sure it won’t be quite as easy this month as the last because of the ability to offer that many Entrecard credits to people. With all of that said, the winner of the March RSS subscriber award for 3,000 credits is Jeff with watchandtrain.com

Congrats, Jeff. If others would like to subscribe to my RSS feed, I will give 500Entrecard credits to the first 5 people (send me a message).

April Goals:

• Unique Visitors: 75,000
• RSS: 160
• Alexa: under 90,000
• Technorati Rank: 100,000
• Technorati Authority: 200
• Posts: 30+
  

 Overall very good in my opinion and I am looking forward to continued success in the blogging world.

Popularity: 17% [?]

Sitehoppin is a cross between a paid-for Wiki, like the Million Dollar Wiki, StumbleUpon and Entrecard all rolled into one. And does it deliver. I bought a couple of pages from Max, the founder of Sitehoppin.com, and I am not disappointed in the least. I got 2,916 unique page views to our two sites in the last week. Max has also offered the viewers of the Unconventional Marketing Blog a 25% discount on all purchases using the affiliate link I have provided, here.

Getting Started

First, I signed up for a login to the site and got to know the layout. Being one of the first people to join in purchasing beer shares from the site, I had the pick of any word(s), letters or numbers I wanted. I picked a small handful of numbers and relevant words for my site (1-10, MLM, Marketing, Dogs, so on). I believe that some of the alphabet is still available, otherwise double numbers and letters are easy. I think first picking up a couple of good keywords for your blog would be the best. The pricing breaks down like this.

I spent about $40 on different shares that I listed above. Spending $40 for the 3,000 page views comes out to about $.013 per page view, and every day that drops. Each Beer Share that you purchase is equal to one page. That page can then be left alone and content will be provided for it, or you can have it redirect to a page on your site. I picked about 10 different high quality articles to be linked to. After you purchase your share(s) on Sitehoppin and set up your page by linking it to whatever site you chose, that site and page will start receiving traffic to it. How does that work?

Driving traffic

Driving traffic to your site is really simple. Your page can receive two different types of traffic from Sitehoppin. The first is by people randomly landing on your page when they hit the Site Hoppin button shown in the picture. The second way is to purchase Beer Shares.

What’s the difference between randomly hopping your page and buying Beer Shares?

Beer Share pages on Sitehoppin will receive 30% of the total traffic. This means your page and the others like it that have been purchased will receive about 1/3 of the traffic on Sitehoppin. That might not seem like a lot, but there are 95,000 pages submitted to Sitehoppin (at the time of writing). Currently, 80 Beer Shares have been bought from Sitehoppin. These 80 pages are getting 1/3 of the traffic from the whole site. Every time I log in to the site I see at least 40 registered users logged in and about 2,000 non-registered. With an Alexa rank of 17K, I know Sitehoppin is getting the traffic it boasts. I have had 3,000 page views to our sites from Sitehoppin in the last week. I don’t think there is another place that you can by a few $1 pages (Beer Shares) and get that kind of return. The fact that the traffic keeps coming in and I have invested nothing more also means that it is consistent. It is easy to see that as more people start Sitehoppin, good steady traffic will be generated.

Other benefits

•    You can site hop on your iPod Touch or iPhone.
•    You can submit each article you create, like StumbleUpon without the backlash.
•    Watch the creator of the site with all of his funny video posts.
•    Sell Beer Shares for real money, Buy Low, Sell High.
•    Set Sitehoppin on “slideshow mode,” in order to surf the web in fixed intervals. It is real easy and fun
•    Drop Entrecards while gaining traffic for your own site with “Tag Hoppin.”
•    Gain free traffic from your own “Beer Widget.”

Results

I have gotten far more traffic from Sitehoppin when compared to Entrecard. The bounce rate between the two sites is comparable. The major advantage Sitehoppin has over Entrecard is the amount of time invested. I probably spend 1/4 the time on Sitehoppin for the same number of visitors. The Ability to Tag Hop on Sitehoppin allows you to collect Entrecredits and gain extra traffic by collecting beer credits (very cool, two birds one stone). Hurry, while it lasts, because this site is giving away a lot of traffic to be kept hidden.

Popularity: 22% [?]