Betshopboy.net

Coming back from my family vacation, it’s time to turn my attention back to blogging and having reach a new month, I need to make an update on my blog progress report with respect to my blogging goals.

I won’t try to paint a rosy picture about my blogging endeavor over the past month and will report the ugly truth. In fact, it will be the last time I’ll bore you with my uneventful progress report. To be honest, I haven’t written anything meaningful for a long while now, most of my posts are contest entries, peppered with some gaming related posts and some personal ramblings.

With many Distractions vying for my time and attention, I can’t even churn out engaging posts on a regular basis, and with this deficiency, my targeted posting frequencies had gone down the drain, dragging down both the daily unique visitors and RSS subscriber base which I’ve targeted to achieve. This lack of quality content and thus, visitors’ count and pageviews, has caused my Alexa ranking to erode from March’s level of 140k to today’s level of 208k! It is a big disgrace and I wish the earth would open up and swallow me right now!

The only silver lining across the gloomy sky is my PageRank 4 status but I’m not putting it to great use. Over the past month, I’ve contemplated to sell this blog and give it up to someone who can revive and grow the blog to its fullest potential. Another option available to me would be to milk every dollar out of this PR4 blog by selling text links and writing paid reviews, before the eventual Google bitch slapping caught up with me.

As to which direction the blog will eventually be headed remains to be seen. In the meantime, I’m still feeling LOST.

It has been a long while since I posted anything meaningful. Initially I thought of apologizing to my readers but on second thought, do I still have any readers left? Save for the occassional EntreCard serial dropper that arrives and exits faster than you can spell D-I-S-T-R-A-C-T-I-O-N-S, I highly doubt anyone cares or bothers about my lack of postings.

For the past couple of weeks, I was tied down with entertaining clients from Japan on business trip here, as well as busy running around planning for a short family vacation next week.

But the main culprit that stole my motivation for blogging was caught on film and publicly shamed here.

These are my “drugs” for my Wii gaming fix!
Were you distracted or have you suffered from “backslide” in your blogging venture? What is or are the cause(s) of your blogging demotivation? How did you rediscover your blogging groove?

Photo by urban_dataSince it’s the beginning of a new month, I will do a progress report of the SMART blogging goals I set this blog for this year. I’ll recap each goal as I go along together with the progress and current standing of each goal.

Posting Frequency
Before the B-monster caught up with me towards the end of 2007, I was comfortably doing 3 postings per week. Ever since, I must admit I didn’t quite recover from the blockage and even setting this goal as a respond to reawaken the writer in me didn’t quite produce the desired effect so far. Instead of progressing and increasing on posting frequencies, this area has been on a regress. Celebrations for my birthday and the Chinese Lunar New Year in early February didn’t exactly help the cause but I will not take those as excuses.

Interim result: Thumbs down

Average Daily Unique Visitors
When a blog don’t consistently publish quality content or killer posts, it cannot expect to attract and increase its unique visitors’ count. This is exactly what is happening to this blog at this point, in fact, the daily unique visitors in February averages 30, another regress compared to the previous months’ averages. My target of getting 100 daily unique visitors on average for the whole year of 2008 seems like a steep mountain to climb at this point.

Interim result: Thumbs down

RSS subscribers
This is another sore point to report as you can well imagine the RSS subscriber base is not going to improve with limited postings and the content mostly crap (as confessed in the above 2 points)!

Interim result: Thumbs down

Alexa Ranking
At the time I set those blogging goals, the blog’s alexa rank was 163k+ and I’m happy to report that the current alexa rank has improved to 140k+. My goal is to hit below 100k by July 2008, so there’s still some way to go.

Interim result: Thumbs up

Google PageRank
This blog didn’t get ranked during the last PageRank update but the latest update indicated a forward leap to PR4! This piece of good news came a few days after this blog crossed the 6 months mark and is the only bright spark out of the various gloomy interim results posted above.

Interim result: Thumbs up

Posting this interim progress report provided me with mix feelings about my blogging venture. It certainly gave me a clear perspective of where I stand, how well (or crappy) I’m doing with the blog, and I ended up asking more questions (as in more doubts) rather than answering the critics (I’m my biggest critics).

As I mentioned above, this blog just crossed the 6 months mark (24th Feb) and I’ve already lost the momentum that started this blog and at times during the last month, I felt I was blogging in a vacuum. I won’t deny the thought of giving up or just fading into oblivion ever cross my mind.

The fact that I’m making this interim progress report shows that letting go is a hard to do and I will stick around some more, especially after getting some encouraging comments and a seal of approval from the big G itself. Now I need to buck up and strive for the seal of approval from the community of fellow bloggers and readers without whom this blog’s main purpose will be rendered meaningless.

Today is a special day, one that comes by once every four years. It’s the leap day in a leap year and something special happened to me. I received a surprise in my mail box today and here it is:

I got a mail from Google Adsense support. To people in United States, receiving mail from Google may be a routine but for someone outside the U.S. like me in the far east, receiving it was indeed something special.

In addition, I discovered Betshopboy.net is now a PageRank 4 blog! What a timely discovery. During the last PR update where many A-list blogs got bitch slapped, this blog was only 3 months old and was either penalized (for unknown reason) or simply too young to be awarded any rank, as my PR then was N/A.

Today, checking with PR Checker, it shows a PR4!

Time always slip us by when we are having fun and Betshopboy.net will be 6 months in the making come next Sunday. Six months of blogging isn’t anything to crow about especially since I haven’t won any major blogging award, nor have I achieved world wide recognition or become a mover or shaker in the blogosphere. After six months of blogging, I’m still me - just me.

This week, I’m going to pay tribute to a few of my favorite blogs which have reached the one year mark or achieved other significant milestone which they’ve set out to achieve.

• My buddy over at Brown Thoughts just celebrated the blog’s first anniversary on 7 Feb. Happy Birthday Brown Thoughts, congrats Baron! Brown Thoughts is a tech blog and you can find news, resources, tips and tricks, games and pretty much anything related to technology and the Internet. Many of my Monday blues were overcame with the help of the weekly Time Waster post found on the blog. If you are new to Brown Thoughts and was wondering what I was talking about, head over this instance (even better, subscribe to the RSS feed) and discover a digital world of fun, informative news, and a friendly geeky community!

• Another favorite blog of mine which will turn one this week is MeAndMyDrum. Happy Birthday MAMD and congrats to Mark! In this blog, you can find topics ranging from blogging tips, software reviews, discussion on current events and many more. Besides MAMD, Mark also writes on a number of other popular blogs which cemented his online credibility and popularity. To celebrate MAMD first anniversary, Mark is running a Birthday contest where a lucky dude stand to win 1000 EntreCard credits and a review of their blog on MAMD. That is a indeed a valuable prize!

• Last but not least, I want to give my heartiest congrats to Monika over at The Writer Manifesto who has achieved the ultimate dream many of us blogger aspire to be. In a short time of 7 months, Monika has reached her target of earning a full time monthly income as a freelance writer and pro-blogger! Through sheer hard work, gumption and her talent for writing, she managed to achieve Pro-Blogger status way ahead of her targeted date, how cool is that? Unsurprising, to say the least. Read about the trials and jubilations in her amazing journey to achieving Pro-Blogger status through freelance writing.

The above 3 amazingly talented bloggers are good role models for all of us, they have set high standards for themselves, and achieved success in their own field. Their high blog rankings and considerable readership are a confirmation of such totally deserved accolades.