It’s time for another annual poll here at ProBlogger - this one asking readers how much they earned in October 2008? I’ve run this poll a number of times over the last couple of years and the results are always interesting.
Just to qualify it - I’m asking about ALL blogging revenue that you can tie to your actual blog. Advertising, affiliate revenue, revenue that your blog might have brought in in terms of consulting etc. As long as you feel your blog drew the money in then I’m happy for it to be included.

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Today Dr. Nicole from Kitchen Table Medicine shares her story of overcoming her Stats Addiction and gives some tips on what to do with your time to build your blog instead of checking stats.
Do you obsessively check your blog traffic stats throughout the day? Do you optimistically expect your Alexa ranking to drop every four hours? Do you frequently fret over your Google Page Rank? Do you watch your Adsense account like a hawk throughout the day? Well as much as these statistical markers may be helpful in understanding the success of your blog, they may also be interfering with the long term growth of your website.
Not only is checking stats a total time kill, but it can be a real buzz kill too when it doesn’t turn out the way we want.
In a month’s time, I stopped checking my stats only to return and find that my page views had doubled if not tripled, and my Alexa ranking had dropped from it’s consistent 252K to 151K! WOW!
So what happened? Had I actually changed anything I was doing…no not really I had just freed up a few extra hours to spend doing something more productive for my blog then obsessing over my stats.
First of all as a recovering stats addict I can’t stand before you all pure and pristine that I actually decided to give up stats all on my own, I never stopped obsessing over my stats intentionally. Actually, I was locked out of my stats program when my […] Read more »

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Search on blogs is a relatively simple concept. You type in a few keywords related to a post and results are presented to you that are local to that blog. However, what if you could extend the functionality of the search function to go beyond your blog to cover the videos you have published on YouTube, your Twitter account, bookmarks, network of friends, and the blogs you read in your RSS reader? That’s exactly what  Lijit enables you to do.
Company Info:
Lijit is based out of Boulder, CO which is a surprise to many considering silicon valley is typically the home for most Internet based businesses. Using the power of people, their content, and their connections, Lijit aims to enhance the way your readers search for and discover information on the Internet. You serve as a filter for all of the results your readers could possibly receive, ensuring they only receive the most relevant results from the source they trust. That source being you.
Signing Up And Configuration:
Before we get things underway, be prepared to spend 15-30 minutes to not only create an account but also to configure the search widget. The first thing you’ll need to do is submit your blogs URL. Once you provide the URL, the next configuration page has a list of services that are grouped by purpose. For each site/service that you have an account with, you’ll need to tell Lijit what your user name is for that service. If you have an account with a site […] Read more »

Technorati Tags: blog, rss

pWe will not be publishing on Thursday, November 27, or Friday, November 28, in observation of Thanksgiving Day. I hope those of you that are celebrating the holiday can stay off the Internet and spend some time with those you love./p
pFor those of you that aren’t celebrating Thanksgiving, or have had enough quality time with your family, here are a few things you might find interesting:/p
p* If you haven’t checked it out lately, I suggest looking over the articles in our a href=”http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters”Search 101/a section. It’s been updated with articles covering the basics of search engine optimization, search advertising, and several other topics. Keep an eye on that section, as it will continue to be updated on a regular basis./p
p* We’ve been collecting quite the archive of a href=”http://searchenginewatch.com/webcasts”Search Engine Marketing Webcasts/a. We’ve got one-hour presentations with QA available on demand on topics from Holiday PPC campaigns to search trends, to Profitable PPC fundamentals. You can also sign up for upcoming webcasts, including one next week on Advanced Keyword Research./p
p* Catch up with other Thanksgiving refugees on the a href=”http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/”Search Engine Watch Forums/a, or browse the archives to find the best advice on a range of search marketing topics./p
p* Head on over to Facebook to join the a href=”http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=7333711749″SearchEngineWatch Facebook Group/a or the a href=”http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=20708297624″Search Engine Strategies Facebook Group/a. Or check out our LinkedIn Groups for a href=”http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=59485″Search Engine Watch/a, a href=”http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=61126″SearchEngineWatch.com Forums/a, or a href=”http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=40344″Search Engine Strategies Conference Expo/a./p
pWe’ll be back on Monday with plenty of new a […] Read more »

Technorati Tags: blog

If you’re looking to upgrade the design of your blog and are interested in a premium blog design then Thesis is a theme that theme that today you can get a pretty good special price on.
For the first 150 people to take up the offer there’s a 20% discount - IF you use this code in the signup process - 20D03977D0.
This means that the personal license is $69.60, the developer license (unlimited use of the theme on multiple blogs) is $131.20 and the developer upgrade (if you already have a personal license) is $61.60.
I’ve been using the Thesis theme over at TwiTip and while I’d previously giving it a pretty positive review I am now an even bigger fan. The configurability of this theme is really great. It allows you to set it up in many different formats and by default is configured well for SEO (I started getting search traffic within days).
I’m also pretty impressed by the way that Chris Pearson has been developing the theme over time (it’s up to version 1.3) and by the forums that you get access to as a theme owner (I’ve found a few great ideas there).
This price is only available to 150 people and to those using this promotional code - 20D03977D0. Get your theme at the Thesis Page.
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pThe year-over-year gains for Google that we saw in a href=”http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/081125-122226″Nielsen Online’s October 2008 search engine rankings/a were mirrored in comScore’s rankings for the same month./p
pGoogle enjoyed a nice 63.1% share, up from 58.5% during the same time last year. Yahoo was at 20.5% down from 22.9% Microsoft was at 8.5%, down from 9.7%. /p
pThere was one major difference between Nielsen and comScore. Nielsen said the number of searches declined, while comparing comScore’s October 2008 data to its 2007 data shows that the number of searches increased to 12.6 million up from 10.5 million./p
pCheck out the rest of the data here:/p
pimg alt=”comscoresearchrankingsOct08.jpg” src=”http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/img/comscoresearchrankingsOct08.jpg” width=”559″ height=”274″ //p
pimg alt=”comscoresearchrankingsOct07.jpg” src=”http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/img/comscoresearchrankingsOct07.jpg” width=”510″ height=”315″ //pdiv class=”feedflare”
a href=”http://feeds.searchenginewatch.com/~f/sewblog?a=XPVzN”img src=”http://feeds.searchenginewatch.com/~f/sewblog?i=XPVzN” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.searchenginewatch.com/~f/sewblog?a=8yxTN”img src=”http://feeds.searchenginewatch.com/~f/sewblog?i=8yxTN” border=”0″/img/a
/divimg src=”http://feeds.searchenginewatch.com/~r/sewblog/~4/466513577″ height=”1″ width=”1″/
Technorati Tags: blog, news

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pIt’s the day before Thanksgiving, where you show up at the office, but you’re really thinking about tomorrow’s good meal. You’ve worked hard to set up those search marketing campaigns to run strong on Black Friday and Cyber Monday./p
pSo, I really hate to bring you the bad news, but keeping it from you would be a disservice./p
pLet’s just rip off the bandaid./p
pFirst up, a href=”http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?id=1006766″eMarketer has lowered its projections/a for online advertising spending for 2009. The new growth number is 8.9%, down from 14.5% projected in August. They’re also expecting a long recovery, projecting 2010 growth to be just 10.9%. In five years, things will still be slower on the uptake (than in recent years). Projections for 2013 growth are at 13.5%. Silver lining: some of the tapering off is likely due to market saturation and not just the economy./p
pimg alt=”emarketerprojections112608percent.jpg” src=”http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/img/emarketerprojections112608percent.jpg” width=”341″ height=”233″ //p
pNext, a href=”http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/11/ebay-traffic-plummeting”eBay’s traffic is declining/a. In January of 2007, eBay saw 62 million unique visitors. Last month, they saw just 49 million. Sure, not all of that was due to the economy, but dipping below 50 million can’t be good for eBay./p
pI saved the worst for last. a href=”http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/25/for-first-time-e-commerce-market-shrinks/”comScore has released data/a showing that online consumer spending for the first 23 days of November was down 4% from last year. That’s not a slow down in growth people, that’s flat out shrinkage./p
pBut I’m not a total Scrooge. Unemployment numbers were better than expected this week. And at least a href=”http://www.slate.com/id/2205186/”one Slate columnist/a explains why fears […] Read more »

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pDoes your site maintain its usability across many browsers? If not, you could end up leaving money on the table this holiday season. Browsers such asa href=”http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/080617-073044″ Firefox/a, a href=”http://searchenginewatch.com/3630764″Chrome/a, and a href=”http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/060209-163258″Safari/a (which comes standard on Macs) now make up about 30% of the browser market. a href=”http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/081105-092527″Firefox alone enjoys 20% of the overall market share/a./p
pMatt Poepsel, vice president of a href=”http://www.gomez.com/”Gomez, Inc./a, whose services test and monitor the performance of websites says that the increase of non-Internet Explorer browsers could cause some e-tailers grief./p
p”This year more than ever, websites can look and function differently from one browser to another. Online retailers can no longer assume that all shoppers are using Internet Explorer. They must ensure their sites look good and work well across a wide range of browsers - or risk frustrating customers and losing the sale.”/pdiv class=”feedflare”
a href=”http://feeds.searchenginewatch.com/~f/sewblog?a=HeFsN”img src=”http://feeds.searchenginewatch.com/~f/sewblog?i=HeFsN” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.searchenginewatch.com/~f/sewblog?a=psBPN”img src=”http://feeds.searchenginewatch.com/~f/sewblog?i=psBPN” border=”0″/img/a
/divimg src=”http://feeds.searchenginewatch.com/~r/sewblog/~4/466254626″ height=”1″ width=”1″/
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This is a guest post from Leo Babauta of Zen Habits and Write To Done.
These days my blog, Zen Habits, no longer has the problems of finding its identity and finding an audience … but there was a time not too long ago when Zen Habits was just a baby going through the inevitable growing pains.
And yes, I remember struggling to find new readers — to just let people know I was even there. The early days of a blog are the toughest, by far.
But they don’t have to be. When a blog is still young, just as in childhood, it can be freer, carefree, and fun. Everything is a learning experience. Best yet, a young blog has endless potential — it can be anything (except perhaps President of the United States).
So if you’re the owner of a young blog, here are seven things I recommend you do, based on my experiences:

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