U-Turn Ahead Goals for 2008
Written on January 1, 2008 – 4:10 pm | by Coryan |
It seems that every blogger I know is posting their blogging goals for 2008. Well, I’m not one to break tradition. But before I give you the goals for 2008, I want to give you a brief history of the blog and the final numbers for 2007. BTW, if you are not a numbers person (like me), you can stop reading after the history:
History of U-Turn Ahead:
- October 21, 2007 - I decide to start work on some Internet projects as a second source of income. One idea is for a blog about making a career change.
- November 11, 2007 - I purchase the domains uturnahead.com and u-turnahead.com.
- November 12 ,2007 - I register for a Blogger account, create a blog in about an hour and publish my first post at uturnahead.blogspot.com.
- November 13, 2007 - I placed Google Ads on the U-Turn blog.
- November 14, 2007 - I made my first penny (29 cents to be exact) from the blog. Okay, it was a mis-click that I made, but an honest mistake. Sorry Google.
- December 5-7, 2007 - After averaging only 3 visitors a day (and those still include my own visits!), I have an unexpected three day spike of 22, 65 and 36 daily visitors. Nearly all were referred from Google Blogger, so I think my site was in the rotation of random site visits. Oh, on December 5th I finally got Google Analytics to stop counting the visits I made to the blog.
- December 18, 2007 - I begin work on moving the blog over to the UTurnAhead.com domain. I complete the “five minute install” of WordPress in just under three hours due to multiple problems with my GoDaddy hosting setup.
- December 23, 2007 - I begin posting U-Turn content on the Blogger page and the new domain. I expect to do this for a couple weeks.
- December 25, 2007 - A couple weeks, a couple days, what’s the difference? I make my last post on Blogger and inform the readers (average of 4 a day) that the blog has officially moved to UTurnAhead.com.
- December 29, 2007 - I begin submitting my blogs to several online social networks and I see a tremendous increase in readership! I finish the last three days of 2007 with daily visits of 150, 55 and 185. I am now averaging 60 unique visitors a day since moving to my own domain. That’s a 1500% increase in one week.
Final Stats for 2007 (with 2008 goals in parenthesis):
Visitors: 638 (60,000)
Subscribers: 7 (900)
Revenue: $3.28 ($2,500.00)
Technorati Authorities: 2 (200)
Technorati Rank: 2,910,025 (<20,000)
Google PageRank: N/A (5/10 or better)
Google Search Rank for “midlife career change”: >200 (<20)
% Visitors Subscribing: 1.10% (1.50%)
Average Post Per Day: .65 (1 a day)
FINAL GOAL: Improve quality of career change content!
So, what do you think? Any comments on the Technorati and Google goals? Those were hard to determine. Well, as you can see, I have my work cut out for me. Of course, I only had the blog up for seven weeks in 2007, so don’t let the huge increases fool you. I will let you know how I am doing throughout the year.
2 Responses to “U-Turn Ahead Goals for 2008”
By Shari Voigt on Jan 1, 2008 | Reply
Coryan, You are going to be very busy in 2008! I wish you the best as you move toward these goals. Technorati authority depends on the number of other blogs linking to you in a six-month time frame. And your Google search rank will improve with search engine optimization, which includes having many quality inbound links to your blog. So keep writing quality content and keep up the networking!
By Coryan on Jan 2, 2008 | Reply
Thanks Shari. You are right; I will have to work very hard to reach these goals. As you can see, my goals focus on readership and links and not so much on money. Although making some income from the site is important to me in the long run, I realize that my energy has to be in making the blog worth visiting. So, 2008 will bring a lot of changes and improvements to the content of the site. Thanks for visiting.