Throwing Down the Gauntlet!

This joust is being handled in fun! But still, a well-known website recently rejected my overture to advertise my Kiva Competition! Oh, well, I sighed. But then the blogger threw down a gauntlet by saying the following:

Unfortunately I will have to decline since I think the blogs aren’t exactly evenly weighted in terms of traffic, PR, RSS readership, etc.

Naturally, I thought my competition would stand on its own merits! But now I was piqued, to say the least. So I checked out the stats for Tyler’s blog and here they are.

Pageviews Per Day: 800
Alexa Ranking: 50,691 (Hah! His 1 week rankings are at 535,837)
Google Pagerank: 5
Technorati: 12,146
RSS Readership: 550
Backlinks: 391

Impressive enough, but there are other stats, too, that he doesn’t note. For example, what he doesn’t tell you: his pageviews are only 1.7.

Now my stats!

Pageviews Per Month: 1650
Alexa Ranking: 107,758
Google Pagerank: 3
Technorati: 113,628
RSS Readership: 38
Backlinks: 121

But guess what, my page views are at 11.8.

So, there are other big differences, too. But this is the Internet and things change quickly. A little competition is good for the soul. So, TC, what will you say? How’s about a little spar? See what’s going to change in three or six months?!

This should spur me to further develop my incomes, my readership and my blogging skills! I’m going to give myself six months to see if I can improve my ratings in those at least three of the areas listed above.

Buzz: MomReviews.net – essential for busy mothers

bloggermom-net

My recent promotion has brought forth some wonderful sites to buzz. The latest is Momreviews.net is a wonderful site with a tremendous amount of potential, really. Elizabeth’s focus on providing books, products and other essential items for busy Moms. Elizabeth’s working hard on creating a comfortable environment for her readers, with lighter, gentler colors. I’d like to see some more pictures of typical reader-types, to help make the blog feel human and personal. I think that’d increase her stickiness. It’s also something I’m trying to do here, too.

In fact, Elizabeth’s also as good as her word. I just checked the status of visitors to this blog from Momreviews.net: since last Saturday, she’s given me more than a 18 hits to this website! Thanks, Elizabeth! I’ll be asking her to check back regularly and tell us how her websites are doing!

Plugins: SRG Clean Archives 3.0.1

Recently a blogger friend, Karen from a recent buzz asked me this question:

Do you have a site map on your wordpress blog? I need to find a plugin and get one on my wordpress blogs.

Karen

So, I did a little research and rediscovered a plugin called SRG Clean Archives. I couldn’t use it before because I couldn’t figure out how to get it display tidily in Tiga’s theme, because of the left hand column.

Anyone, version 3.0.1 is just out, so I downloaded, and now you can see the Archives of all the postings. I thought that was pretty neat, and so easy to install and get working!

archives

Five simple steps to clean archives

The steps were pretty simple:

  1. upload the plugin as usual
  2. activate
  3. create a new page (yes a page)
  4. click on ‘code’ view to enter the following characters percent-markpercentmarksrg clean archivespercentmarkpercentmark (replace percent-mark with the % marks).
  5. publish the page and you should see it next time you view the main pages

That’s it. No fuss, no mess. Clean and tidy archives! Thanks, Sean.