Six Month Blogging Progress Review

It was my birthday yesterday, plus it is six months since I launched this blog, so I am in a reflective mood while nursing a massive hangover 🙂

Today I would like to talk about blogging goals and what we do to work towards them.

Most people would agree that it is good to have goals when publishing a professional blog. I realised I have settled into a pattern of just doing what I do. In fact, in some critical areas I have not been taking my own advice. For my own benefit this has been a good exercise!

First I will talk about my progress then please let me know in the comments how you are doing against your own goals and what you are doing to achieve them?

I do have goals and targets but I have not kept to them. As you will have gathered I do not discuss the financial side of what I do. While for many the financial side is the whole point, for me the whole point is nurturing a community and audience. Money comes as a consequence of creating valuable resources that serve that community. My metrics are reader related rather than dollar amounts.

How am I doing against my metrics? Not bad, but not great either. For blogs as a whole these are good numbers but I set myself stretch goals and against those I am not doing what I hoped.

Today FeedBurner is telling me I have 3,815 RSS subscribers. That’s not bad going, a little behind schedule (I want to have 10k by end of the year), but pretty good. Feed growth has slowed lately, could be the “summer slump” factor but I need to not rely on that as an excuse. Somehow I need to increase momentum. I will have a think about that and let you know what I come up with.

According to Technorati this blog has an “authority” of 949 and a rank of 2,478. Again, not bad considering the age of the blog and the competitive space but a bit behind schedule. I would have hoped to have a rank in the top 2k, but on the other hand I haven’t really done anything specific to work towards that so no wonder! Something I will have to fix. Of course I will document any ideas I come up with so you can also benefit 🙂

The blogging forum is doing pretty nicely since it was launched around three weeks ago. There is a lovely bunch of people participating, around 367 of them at last count. About 100 registrations a week is ok growth but I am sure with the members help we can do better.

What to fix?

• Not enough linking out – Other than my roundup and critique posts I haven’t done enough linking out. I will do more round ups and find new ways to link out more.
• Not enough attraction – My posts are pretty much always advice. Now I am not really an attention-seeking type but I need to do more to attract visitors rather than just cater to my existing audience. I need to review my referrer stats to see which posts brought in the new people and invent new tactics.
• Not enough interaction – I have done a few things to get your input, the comments, round up submissions, etc but I need to do more, to get to know you better and also allow more of a contribution.

Over to you … let me know in the comments how you are managing progress towards your own goals. How have you managed to generate links and boost your new subscribers? What do you do to create interactivity on your blog?