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.

State Convention

What a week and weekend it has been here in Fargo, ND. Leading up to this weekend I have been preparing and helping to organize with the state convention for the Republican Party. This is my first election cycle involvement apart from marking a ballot with a check. The primary purpose of my involvement wasn’t due to my love of the Republican Party but rather to promote and represent the Ron Paul campaign. I am happy to report that Ron Paul will be receiving 11 of the 23 delegates up for grabs at the National Convention this September in St. Paul, MN.

End of the Month

With the end of the month being tomorrow I will be posting the final stats and accomplishments for March on April Fools Day . I will say that I have accomplished way more than I ever though possible for my first month of blogging.

A great April Fools Day prank

Here is an awesome prank and maybe a last minute idea any of you who don’t have a prank already lined up.

With another Sunday already here, that puts a cap on another week on the Unconventional Marketing Blog. I have to say the there has been some great progress in the stats over the last week. We jumped up almost 280k in alexa, 8k in unique visitors (meaning we averaged over 1,000 a day), RSS subscriptions went up by 20 and some gains with Technorati were pretty favorable.

March stats for JoshWhitford.com:

• Day: 26 of blogging
• Posts: 38
• Comments: 151
• Alexa: 232,510
• Technorati Favs: 14
• Technorati Authority: 29
• RSS subscribers: 71 (just 29 short of my March goal)
• Visitors: 18,907
• Page Views: 45,061

Blogger Help Bloggers

As some might have noticed, I have a new widget on my side bar that randomly shows an image like Spottt. The major difference between the widget here and Spottt are the blogs being shown. Each blog that is displayed is in some way related to the others. The overall idea is to build a network of blogs that are willing to help and work with each other from time to time. Some of the blogs do guest posts for each other or simple promotions to give a little link love. The goal is to get the most mileage out of visiting traffic as possible. Anybody can ad the widget to their site by clicking the “get widget” and posting the code. If you are interested in being a part of the BHB, send my a message. Note: this is a participatory thing. If you are not a participator, you will not be included.

Random

On a nonblog related topic, my cat Beamer is 5 years old this month. I actually don’t know for sure, since I got him at the Humane Society in 2004. According to them, he was about 1 year old when I adopted him. I grew up with cats for the majority of my life and view them as a great addition to a house, unless you are allergic. So, happy birthday Beamer.

P.S. If anyone is in the market for a noisy orange cat I might know of one available.