As of Feb 4^th, robdogg.com has been live for its first official month. My blog topic is How To Rule The World, of internet marketing, social media, pay per click advertising, affiliate marketing, blog monetization and making money online.

I am professionally employed as a web analyst and campaign strategist for companies large and small, ranging from startup companies ,to internet 50 corporations. I specialize in PPC (Pay Per Click) optimization, project management, and business development.

I started this blog with no knowledge of how to blog. I knew nothing about social media marketing, and very little on SEO. What you are finding here is my documented learning cycle so that you can see how to start from nothing and make something out of the internet. The only internet background I have is paid search marketing and ecommerce business.

As of starting this blog on Jan 4^th I have made the following accomplishments.

Google Analytics Overview

10,628 Unique Visitors
17,913 Page Views
1.69 Pages Per Visit
48.46% Bounce Rate
1:27 Avg Time On Site
91.96% New Visitors

Top Traffic Sources

Stumbleupon.com – 8,924 Unique Visits
Direct Traffic – 688 Visits
My Stumble Profile – 130 Visits
John Chow – 86 Visits
Shoemoney – 64 Visits

Top Articles

How The Stumble Button Results Are Returned – 6,688 Visits

StumbleUpon Series Part 8 – The Importance Of Understanding Taxonomy – 2,170 Visits

This Is What Real Spam On StumbleUpon Looks Like – 1,663

RSS Subscriber Count

Currently At – 54 Total Subscribers
Highest Ever – 56 Total Subscribers

My Technorati Rating

My Technorati Profile Page

Rank: 377,609

My Alexa Rating

My Alexa Profile Page

Robdogg.com has a traffic rank of: 383,214

My Social Media Profiles

Technorati
MyblogLog
Blog Catalog
Digg
Sphinn
Mixx
Delicious
Reddit
FeedEachOther
StumbleUpon

I am most excited that I have had several of my articles hit the stumbleupon buzz pages, and couple articles have gone hot on sphinn. I have made friends with some top diggers and stumblers such as Talsiach, Tamar Weinberg, and even the mogul himself, Muhammad Saleem. I hope to build a stronger relationship with them over the next coming months. Lastly, I have received link back from problogger, shoemoney and even john chow. I can’t wait to see what my PR will be on the next update.

So that is my first month in review. I am happy with my results so far. I’m sure it’s not the greatest accomplishment in the world but it’s more than others can accomplish on one month. If there is any information that I have left out that you are interested in, please leave me a comment, and I will be sure to respond.

The People Pleaser 2.0 – Learn to stop pleasing others and start doing what pleases you

Your Blog is Like a Child – Good analogy on how your blog is similar to a child

SEO eBooks – Tom explains how a simple eBook could increase readership by 200%

The Unfortunate Investment of Social Media (and its Consequences) – Tamar’s latest insight to the Digg situation

Interview With One Of The Twittertale And Politweet’s Creators, Doug March – An exclusive interview with Doug March

Why you should pay attention to a broadcasting brain – Broadcasting Brain has laid out his target audience for you. Maybe you should see if your one of them.

Banish the Snitch from the American Justice System – This article shows the corruption within the government and how low they go to punish innocent people

10 Habits of Highly Efficient Social Media Power Users – Want to be a social media power user, well here is what it takes to get the job done.

If you’re new to my blog be sure to check out the StumbleUpon series that I have started. There is a wealth of information and it will put you on the fast track to social networking.

I did a search for blogs today on StumbleUpon, and this is what I got as the results. As you can see, there are a whole bunch of penguins “SPAMMING” up the results.

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I looked within the search results, and noticed the following two results. As you can see, these one of these postings has 30 reviews, and the other has 107

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I then looked at the reviews for that submission, and noticed that all the reviews were identical, and there were lots of them

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This post is for those who are out to hate on all the SEO and internet marketers. Fellow Stumblers, THIS IS REAL SPAMMING!!! You will never find a legit SEO or internet marketer spamming the system in this way. These are the real people you should hate, and boycott. These are the people that you should be directing all your hate mail and spammy comments. I am an internet marketer, and this is shameful and gives all of us a bad reputation. Please do not ever associate this type of crap, with someone who has only legitimate intentions, such as myself, on the StumbleUpon website.

This is not SEO…

This is not MARKETING…

This is how you really abuse the system =(

I have been spending time on StumbleUpon, attempting to learn more about my next article. If you are not aware already, I have started a series on learning to master StumbleUpon.

Here are the first couple of issues on my StumbleUpon Series.

StumbleUpon Series Part 1 – A Commitment To Mastering StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon Series Part 2 – My True Intentions Are Not To Spam Or Game The System

StumbleUpon Series Part 3 – Where Does All That Traffic Come From?

My next article is to be based on learning how to create an inner circle of friends, and develop a fan following. I am still doing a lot of research on this subject. I have been asking many long time stumblers questions, about how to stumble like a pro, of which, I hope to post a few interviews in the near future.

I have been talking, and getting to know, many bloggers that use StumbleUpon all day. I have also began to read through many of their blogs, and I’m finding many interesting articles. Today, I would like to share some of those articles with you. The following links are from bloggers that I have met on StumbleUpon. All of these are original articles, and they are about the subject of… Stumbling.

Here are the 8 articles about StumbleUpon from StumbleUpon users

5 Reasons Why I Used To Suck On StumbleUpon

5 Reasons my StumbleUpon Profile Stands Out

7 Tips for Finding and Submitting Great Content to StumbleUpon

9 Approaches To StumbleUpon Niche Marketing

Monetising StumbleUpon traffic

StumbleUpon Will Love Us Even When Google Doesn’t

Social Media By the Numbers: StumbleUpon

Please Don’t Urinate In The Pool: The Social Media Backlash

Let me know what you think about StumbleUpon. How has it benefited you? If you have a lot of StumbleUpon experience, I would love to do an interview with you about your experience, and advice.

I also had the privilege to be included as a testimonial at the end of the bloghology, giving my 3rd person perspective on what bloghology can do for newbie bloggers. Be sure to check out bloghology today and my testimonial ;-b

If you were wondering how I was able to get included in the 1st edition of bloghology, the answer is stumbleupon and networking with other bloggers. It just goes to show, how powerful getting to know your readers can be.

There are many unnamed bloggers that I am a regular RSS reader of and if you are not using RSS and keeping up on these guys, then shame on you!!! Here is your chance, start reading up and subscribe to their blogs. I hope you enjoy the list. If you are a pro blogger and not on this list then learn to make a year end recap and make it easy to find. If you did make a recap then I just don’t know who you are, you need to do better marketing and networking because I am very thorough in my research ;b

Here they are in no specific order:

Daily Blog Tips: Best of 2007 – A site dedicated to bringing you one new blogging tip per day.

Best Of EverybodyGoTo – 2007 – A blog about Web Startups, Technology, Internet, Open Source, Web Applications, Blogging and Design.

2007 shoemoney.com Blog Year In Review -One of the most famous names in blogging, shows you how to blog for a living.

The Best of Skelliewag in 2007 - One of my most favorite blogs. He teaches you how to write compelling content that your readers will enjoy reading.

ZacJohnson.com 2007 Blog Recap – This blog shows you how to master the world of affiliate marketing

Yaro Starak – A World famous blogger dedicated to educating you on how to make over 20k a month. Apparently he needs 3 article to complete this. LOL…

How I Made Six Figures In One Day – 2007 Year In Review Part 1

What Do You Do When Everything Happens At Once? – 2007 Year In Review Part 2

You Can Make $20,000 A Month Online – 2007 Year In Review Part 3

So there you have it. The top 6 year end recaps of the best pro bloggers on the net =)

However let’s look at this from a mathematical point of view. What does it take to really make $100, $1,000 or even $10,000 per month? Did any of use ever really do the math and realize the dedication it’s going to take? I think not, so I decided to put a few calculators together to figure out what I really need to do so I can reach my goal of generating a minimum of $100 per month.

Basically there are a couple main ways to generate an income from your website or blog, but after all the number crunching it really boils down to… Impressions! Amazing isn’t it, all you need to do to estimate your monthly blog income is know how many impressions you are getting per day. If you don’t know how many impressions you are getting per day I highly recommend reading my article on How To Track Your Blog Traffic Stats because without this number you are blogging in the dark.

So let me explain how this works. Let’s assume you want to make $100 per month, here are your critical success factors for both CPC and CPM Model payouts. In this example I used a low 1% CTR and $.50 CPC/CPM.

If we don’t want to be so generous how about a $.25 CPC/CPM with a 0.5% CTR

So how many impressions per day are you getting? If your not getting somewhere between 667 – 2667 impressions per day then you have a lot of work to do! If you would like a copy of this calculator, which is in excel form. Please get in touch with me.

-Rob

Step 1 – Setup Your Website

• Get your domain name – A unique domain name is very important for branding issues and it looks a lot more professional. I use godaddy.com for my domain name registrations. They are cheap and easy to setup.
• Get a hosting account – Its best to host your own domain so that you have total control over your server, or at least most of it. In my situation I am hosted with godaddy and I have the ability to host an unlimited amount of domains under 1 hosting account. I am sure the bandwidth is not as strong as it could be, but I don’t expect any digg effects any time soon.
• Upload wordpress to your domain -Download the wordpress zip file from their site and upload and install wordpress to your server folders. Putting it in the root directory is probably best, but you can also set it up under a folder /wordpress if you want. This is not a technical tutorial so I will leave it at that. If you need help with this process I recommend getting in touch with some tech savvy people as you will need to learn how to use and setup an FTP and MySql Database. Here is a helpfull article on setting up wordpress.
• Wordpress Post Installation – Wordpress has many configurations to mess with so here are some posts on how to tackle post installation like a pro.
  • How To Configure WordPress Post-Installation
  • WordPress: The Complete Post-Install Checklist, Redux
• Wordpress Themes – Once you have your wordpress installed and configured be sure to give it a unique look, at least anything other than the default look. Checkout The Wordpress Themes page, download your favorite template and install.
• Wordpress Plugins – Wordpress plugins lets you add more control over your wordpress front end and backend. There are thousands to choose from but the home page features some of the most popular. Also if you want to search for plugins by keyword, be sure to look towards the bottom of the page… haha took me forever to figure that out :-b
• Tracking and Statistics – Before getting anyone to visit your site you will want to install some traffic and analytical software. Basically so that you will know that someone has just visited. Without it you will never know if you are just talking to yourself, or if you actually have people reading your nonsense. I wrote an article covering this subject.
  How To Track Your Blog Traffic Stats
• RSS Feed – The final step in setting up your blog is getting an RSS feed. Wordpress comes with one pre-installed but I recommend removing it and using feedburner instead. It will provide you with some in depth stats about your RSS feed viewers and in the future it will allow you to monetize your feed, make money, through adsense. I wrote a great article that covers RSS.
  How To Rule The World Utilizing RSS Feeds To Your Benefit

Step 2 – Start Adding Content

Now your site should be up and running, it should have somewhat of a unique look and feel to it and it should be customized with all the advanced features that you like. Now it’s time to start adding content. Content are articles for people to read, basically something to look at. At this time there is no point to start getting traffic to your site because nobody will have anything to read or look at and they will leave and never come back again.

Start of with writing 5 – 10 interesting articles. They can really be about anything you want. I started blogging about my learning process on how to startup a blog. In the future I plan to share many articles about money, finance, business, PPC, SEO, affiliate marketing and etc… These are the topics that I am familiar with. Write articles that you can write with your own words. Do not steal content, paragraphs or even sentences from other sites. For one, it looks really bad and unoriginal and secondly Google knows when you have copy and pasted. If you copy and paste you will never get into the search rankings and site visitors will never come back because they probably read what you just copy and pasted before. Make every article your own.

So what happens when you get writers block? Write about anything. Read a news article and comment on it. Read a blog and write about your own thoughts about that blog. If you are really having trouble, try some of these articles for inspiration.

• Baby Got Blog: 100 Suggestions for Blog Subjects
• 10 tips to improve your blog post quality
• 11 Essential Tips to Writing the Ultimate Tutorial
• 15 Fantabulous Tips to Better Writing
• 7 Types of Blog Posts Which Always Seem to Get Links and Traffic
• Five Tips for Writing Blog Articles the Easy Way

Step 3 – Commenting

Ok so you have read the recommended reading and you created your first five articles. No doubt if you have been reading the articles I just sent you to, it has brought up questions and probably made you read some additional articles on those publishers website and others. So the first step is to start commenting.

Most of my initial traffic came from comments and questions that I posted on other bloggers websites. Get to know the publishers and their readers. Comment on their articles, the publishers love comments and readers will usually read your comment and then visit your site. But here is the trick. Make your comment interesting and do not spam the publishers. Spamming the publishers articles and making short comments like “Good Article” will only reflect on yourself. Only comment on articles that are of real interest and post good comments. It might be time consuming but 10 real comments will get you a better quality of traffic then 100 “Good Article” comments.

Check out these articles on what other bloggers have to say about commenting

• 10 Reasons Commenting is Good For Bloggers
• The Fine Art of Blog Commenting

Make it a daily practice to comment on 10 articles per day of which at least half of them should be from new publishers. That way you are not commenting on the same site every single day and it will help you network and meet new bloggers and in essence develop a mini community of bloggers.
Step 4 – Social Bookmarking

Now that you have been commenting, on 10 articles per day, you might see a small trickle of traffic starting to come to your site. You may even have some RSS subscribers if your first 5 articles you wrote were interesting. Next step is to start developing your profiles on social bookmarking sites. Here is a list of 30 Social Bookmarking Sites You Need to Know. But in this article I will talk about the ones I have had some small success with.

Digg.com - Become familiar with Digg. Signup, create a profile and start making friends. Digg has the reputation for hitting bloggers with the “digg effect“. This happens when you hit the front page of Digg and you are on a slow server that cant handle the load. You get so much traffic, your site slows down to a halt. Meaning you lose a lot of valuable traffic. But since we are just starting to blog, we can expect no digg effect any time soon. It is well known that only Top Digg Users cause the digg effect, so you need to start becoming a top digger yourself and try to network your way to getting to know a top digger so he will visit your site. I have not mastered this yet so I can’t say how to do it but I recommend networking with digg users and submitting diggs of all your favorite articles. Since I have started to digg a couple days ago I am getting about 5 – 10 unique hits per day from 2 articles. Not to bad… Also DO NOT DIGG YOU OWN ARTICLES!!! I learned this the hard way, but it looks tacky and unprofessional.

StumbleUpon – This is the same theory as digg. Network and try to get top stumblers to hit your pages. If this happens you will get a slew of traffic. Just today I was stumbled by someone and got a nice little spike in traffic. about 20 unique hits in about 10 minutes.

Technorati – Same situation here. Network and add pages to the directory. I have not had much success with traffic from this site yet but I do get about 2 – 5 unique visitors per day. I really like the feature of blog monitoring and ranking. This lets you know how many other bloggers are pointing to your site and also ranks you amoung all the blogs on the net.

These are my main sources of traffic at the moment and I have developed this small amount of daily traffic in under a week. I am sure if I keep up this pace, this blog will grow fairly quick. I hope you all learn with me and we develop and grow together quickly so that we can all Rule The World.

-Rob

30 Social Bookmarking Sites You Need to Know

The 25 best ways to increase traffic to your blog

Increased Traffic With Comments

5 Surefire Ways to Get More Links to Your Blog

Simple things you must know about blogging but you might not know it.

Why You Need RSS

This is really a two part answer because there are two types of internet users that need RSS. First the publisher of a blog needs an RSS feed to help distribute his articles to people who are interested in his blog and secondly the blog subscribers needs an RSS feed to keep updated on his or her favorite publishers articles.

From the readers point of view it can become daunting to try and keep updated on all the latest posts and news written from a specific blog. Imagine you have 20 websites that you really enjoy reading articles from and every day you go and visit each site independently hoping to read some new and interesting story. Well with RSS you can subscribe to the blog or website articles through RSS and from within an RSS reader, or aggregator, you can see when a publisher posts a new article.

Essentially what happens is you can keep up to date with all 20 websites without having to visit each and every one hoping for something new to read, you will see what sites published new articles and you can read them from within the RSS reader and then visit the site to comment, bookmark and share with others.

Publishers Point Of View

If you are a publisher you want the ability to let everyone know you just posted a blog entry. This is where RSS comes in really nicely. You want to integrate a RSS feed manager onto your site. If you are on wordpress like myself, RSS is already a built in feature but the problem that I have found is that it’s not very dynamic. The most dominating RSS feed manager in the industry is FeedBurner and of course it is now owned by the infamous Google corporation. What I like about feedburner is they give you many options for look and design, they provide stats on your subscribers, how many subscribers, your reach and I now see you can monetize your feed by allowing Google to display adsense within your feed. If you are on wordpress like myself you can download the FeedBurner plugin for wordpress, install and configure.

So why don’t your subscribers just sign up via email? Well it seems there is a lot of spam going around these days and people are just so hesitant to give out email. Through RSS, no email information is required. Nobody’s privacy will be intruded upon and they don’t have to worry about you trashing another email address because they wanted to know when a new article is published.

Readers Point Of View

If you like to read blogs and news articles but want to eliminate the daily visits to the publishers website you can use a reader or aggregator to stay current on all postings for that site. RSS really does simplify the process of keeping up to date on all your favorite blogs and if you are a blogger or new to blogging I think this is a must have. I have decided to go with the Google reader platform. I am already fully integrated with google myself so this makes it really easy to keep everything I use all in one place. I utilize Googles, ipage, Gmail, Docs, Adwords, Adsense, Calender, Maps and a lot of other services from Google so using Google reader is an obvious choice and if you are familiar with Gmail, the delivery of RSS articles is practically identical.

RSS Resources

I was looking around for more information about RSS and I came up with a few sites that really helped in understanding how they work . For a really good technical point of view and history of RSS I would recommend Wikipedias artcile on RSS Feeds. It’s really in depth and lets you know a lot of nonsense but if you are really interested on how it was developed and how it has advanced over the years, they break it down very nicely.

I also read a really great article from Mashable about RSS. They go into great detail on all the services and software available for RSS. The article is called The Ultimate RSS Toolbox – 120+ RSS Resources. Be sure to check it out if are looking for RSS software solutions whether t be on the publisher or reader side.

If RSS has still left you dumbfounded I found a really great article that attempts to put RSS in the most simplest of terms. The article is called How To Explain RSS The Oprah Way. The explanantion is similar to this article but I hope I slimmed it down even more for you and cleared it up just as well.

Lastly I hope to add an update to RSS in the near future, more on the topic of how to optimize your RSS Feed and how to better monetize. As for now, I think its key to learn how to implement RSS, use RSS and educate others on RSS.