Well, another month comes and another month gone. There were two major events for me in August, both of them on the personal level. First, I started a new job the last week of the month. I know this isn’t directly blog related, but the new employment did contribute to my lack of posts as the month of August ended. The second event of last month was my 34th birthday. Thank you all to everyone that wished me well on that day. I will hopefully, get back in the swing of things and make regular posts throughout September, so hang in there. As for the goals and achievements section, here ya go:

Here are the goals I made for BlissLogs for the Month of August 2007:

1. I want 65 RSS Subscribers by the end of this month.
2. I want 600 unique visitors to my blog during the month.
3. I want to earn $5 dollars by the end of this month. (I am sneaking in Google Adsense)
4. I want 120 blogs to link to my blog by the end of this month as reported through the Technorati Authority.
5. I want to write at least 5 posts every week.

And the August actuals:

1. I had a couple weeks where I averaged in the mid-40’s, but had an average of 38 for the month. That’s a slight improvement of last month.
2. I finished with 336 unique visitors in August, 446 visits, and 890 pageviews.
3. $0.11 earned.
4. Technorati reports an authority of 120 as of the end of the month.
5. 14 posts in 31 days. 3.1 posts per week.

And for my September goals:

1. I want 65 RSS Subscribers by the end of this month. (again)
2. I want 600 unique visitors to my blog during the month. (again)
3. I want to earn $5 dollars by the end of this month.
4. I want 150 blogs to link to my blog by the end of this month as reported through the Technorati Authority.
5. I want to write at least 5 posts every week.

What’s been going on with BlissLogs over the past month? It’s been a pretty uneventfull month as far as blogs go. Which is both good and bad for a blog. I lowered my post frequency over the month, which was due more to the nice weather than to anything else.  I couldn’t have asked for better weather during the month here in central Illinois, so I took advantage of it and spent some time playing with the kids outside.  If my kids challenge you to a game of laser tag, just concede immediately as they will most likely kick your ass.  Did I mention that they are 5 years old?

July saw the introduction of Google Mondays and WordPress Wednesdays. These two memes are pretty self explanatory, but this would be a pretty useless post if I didn’t tell you about it so sit back, relax and soak it in.  Google Monday will bring you a new post every Monday about anything Google.  Google has such a huge footprint on the web and on bloggers, that posts dedicated to it seems fairly logical. I may tell you about a new tool on Google, an old tool, a new feature, or new news.  Whatever it is, Google will be the centerpiece. WordPress Wednesdays is just what IT sounds like. Every Wednesday will bring you some tip/news/review of anything to do with WordPress. I picked WordPress because it is the blogging platform that I use, it is the most popular self hosted blogging platform, and . . . well WordPress Wednesday sounds good. :lol:

Here are the goals I made for BlissLogs for the Month of July 2007:

1. I want 65 RSS Subscribers by the end of this month.
2. I want 600 unique visitors to my blog during the month.
3. I want to earn 0 dollars by the end of this month. (I�m still amateur)
4. I want 120 blogs to link to my blog by the end of this month.
5. I want to write at least 5 posts every week.

Now for my July actuals:

1. I had a peek of 44 subscribers, but averaged only 35 over the last few days of the month (no change from last month).
2. I finished with 534 unique visitors in July, 639 visits, and 1,082 pageviews.
3. $0 earned.
4. Based on the Technorati Authority, I only made 89. (I know I have more total links, but Technorati only seems to count the last 90 days)
5. 21 posts in 31 days.  4.7 posts per week.

Now for my August goals:

1. I want 65 RSS Subscribers by the end of this month.
2. I want 600 unique visitors to my blog during the month.
3. I want to earn $5 dollars by the end of this month. (I am sneaking in Google Adsense)
4. I want 120 blogs to link to my blog by the end of this month as reported through the Technorati Authority.
5. I want to write at least 5 posts every week.

It’s time again to recap the previous month. Many blogs use this post to state their blogs earnings for that month, but since my blog isn’t monetized, I’ll use the time to give you a rundown of what’s been going on and to make some goals for the next month.

I didn’t make too many cosmetic changes to the blog over the past month. I did, however, upgrade WordPress to the most recent version of 2.2.1. In doing so, I also verified that all my plugins were up-to-date with the current version. This was the first time I had done that since launching the blog.

Here are some posts from the past month that I think deserves another look:

• Blog Customization Tip
• Choose Your Anchor Text Wisely When Commenting
• Duplicate Content != Supplemental Index
• What is StumbleUpon

Here are the goals I made for BlissLogs for the Month of June 2007:

1. I want 65 RSS Subscribers by the end of this month.
2. I want 250 unique visitors to my blog during the month.
3. I want to earn 0 dollars by the end of this month. (I’m still amateur)
4. I want 100 blogs to link to my blog by the end of this month.
5. I want to write at least 5 posts every week.

Now for my June actuals:

1. I had a peek of 44 subscribers, but averaged only 35 over the last few days.
2. I finished with 450 unique visitors in June.
3. $0 earned.
4. Based on the Technorati Authority, I only made 87.
5. 27 posts in 30 days.

Now for my July goals:

1. I want 65 RSS Subscribers by the end of this month.
2. I want 600 unique visitors to my blog during the month.
3. I want to earn 0 dollars by the end of this month. (I’m still amateur)
4. I want 120 blogs to link to my blog by the end of this month.
5. I want to write at least 5 posts every week.

Is it just me or is that car hot? Here we are again at the begining of the month and another installment of BMIR. Man, that car looks good!

On the advertising front, BlissLogs had a pretty good month. My RSS subscribers doubled in the month and site visits slowly improved. You know the old saying. . . More is Better? Well, I gave you more options to subscribe to this feed. You can now receive all BlissLogs posts via email. This is a great feature offered by Google’s newest acquisition, FeedBurner. I also spent a lot more time on other blogs this past month. That has got to be the best part of blogging, reading other blogs. One thing I found on many blogs is that many have recently removed the nofollow tags from all comments. I decided to follow suit this past month as I found that this makes the blog that much more appealing to visit and comment on.

The other major change on this blog in May was the claim of “amateur blog status“. The amateur does it for the love of doing it and that is the stage I am at now. I have removed all forms of monetization with the exception of ReviewMe. Which doesn’t really matter as I haven’t received any ReviewMe requests yet.

I’m really looking forward to June and everything that is to come this month. I don’t have much planned yet, so we will all be surprised at what the month brings.

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Update: I posted this yesterday, but ran across this list from Rob’s Blog, who in turn got it from HarpzOn. It will be a regular addition to BMIR.

1. I want _____ RSS Subscribers by the end of this month.
2. I want _____ unique visitors to my blog by the end of this month.
3. I want to earn _____ dollars by the end of this month.
4. I want _____ blogs to link to my blog by the end of this month.
5. I want to write at least _____ posts every week.

Here are my goals for June 2007:

1. I want 65 RSS Subscribers by the end of this month.
2. I want 250 unique visitors to my blog during the month.
3. I want to earn 0 dollars by the end of this month. (I’m still amateur)
4. I want 100 blogs to link to my blog by the end of this month.
5. I want to write at least 5 posts every week.

Happy Blogging!

Who doesn’t like a BMW 6 series? That car is shooting up my list of fairly attainable dream cars. Funny how that list is mainly German cars. Anyway, we all know that the common pronunciation of these cars is a Beemer. Well, my interpretation of it is going to be BMIR (pronounced the same as Beemer). But for me, this will represent “BlissLogs Month in Review”. BlissLogs is only slightly older than 2 months old, but that second full month was packed full changes.

The site went through a wide range of small cosmetic changes. I’m still happy with the Vertigo Enhanced 2.0 theme that I’ve been running since the BlissLogs beginings. What I did change though will hopefully improve your experience here.

The first of these changes was removing the About section from the right sidebar. This section became expendable once I created a full about page and placed a link to it from the header.

I also moved the link to my RSS feed to the header, making it easier for you to subscribe to my blog.

I moved the “Recent Posts” sidebar section down lower in the sidebar. I toyed with removing it completely, since all of the posts that are in that list are on the front page of this site.

I tried cleaning up the top of each post by moving the posted date and categories to the bottom of the post. This lets you get right to the meat of the post.

Did anyone even notice that there was a links page on this site? I hope not, because that was a page I created in the first couple days when I was signing up for all kinds of link exchanges. I soon realized that growing the blog more slowly through better posts was a better option than the quick hit of appearing on a link exchange site. More fun too!

Oh yea, I added some new plugins: WP Grins to make it easier for me to add smilies to my posts and for you to add them to your comments. Democracy to add polls to my posts whenever I’m in the mood. And the ever-important Akismet to stop the Spam. I know Akismet came pre-loaded with Wordpress, but it took a while for me come to the realization that comment spam was out of control. There are now over 600 spam comments trapped by Akismet.

You may want to consider some of the above mentioned changes on your site as they all have merit to improve navigation and the reader experience.

I joined a couple trains last month as well. The Technorati Fave Train and the Feed my Feed Train. Both of which noticeably increased my readers (site visitors and RSS readers).

There were a couple blog reviews in April as well. Smart Guy and PureBlogging.  I hope to do more of these in the future in preparation for that much anticipated first ReviewMe review.

I tried, and failed, at a couple initiatives in the hopes of increasing reader participation. I tried to follow the lead of blogging’s resident evil blogger, John Chow, and get a few reviews of this blog. It started off as a “Make money at home” campaign, but turned into a “Create a Blog” campaign. I was hoping to generate more traffic for these search phrases, but didn’t get any interest. Maybe I’ll revisit these in a few months, once there are more of you out there. There was my ingenious “Hitchhiker’s Guide Reference Hunt“. Nobody picked up the first reference, which I felt was blatently obvious, so I’ll revisit this again at a later date with some tweaks.

Last but not least, Google performed their sweep of PR updates. BlissLogs finally got out of the Google sandbox and is primed to play with the big blogs. We went from a non-existent PR 0 to a respectable PR 4. We’re on the map now, lets see what we can do with it.

These BMIR’s will normally give you a sneak peak as to a few things I have planned for the upcoming months, but this post is long enough so I think this is a good time to bring it to an end. For those of you that made it this far, give yourself a pat on the back and . . . if you leave a comment to this post, I’ll make a speed-linking post in the near future and include your site in it. See, sometimes it does pay to read the entire post.

Happy Blogging!