Review week 18-2008; Goals, blog and productivity habits

On Sundays I’m looking back on the past week. How did I perform towards my goals? How did my blog do? And how am I keeping up with my productivity habits?

I’m a day late with my weekly review, but that’s no excuse not to do it. I will focus on the past week and not include today (because I did a good run today, but you’ll read about that next week).

Blog performance

The post on Monday was short. I think some of you may even have thought that I published that post by accident. I didn’t, but I intended to write a post at first. I had found the poem and the picture to go along with the message I was trying to get across, but I couldn’t get it on paper the way I wanted it.

So I decided to do something I normally don’t do, and that was to just hit publish with only the poem and the picture. They carried the message I wanted to say anyway, and I thought it might break the pattern I was in. And it did. It took away the pressure of having a post on Monday, and gave room to find other quotes and put the message across. It turned out to be my post on Passionate People.

With that post I also redefined my blog. I will change some stuff around the blog, but it will still be my voice (even more so) and the topics that I have on my mind. I will change the categories though, so they fit the new blog definition better. I’m also going to introduce tags, to better identify the topics that a post is about. You’ll notice the difference in the coming weeks.

The stats.
Quelle surprise! Last week I really stopped caring about Technorati, and now my Authority is up. On a closer look though, it’s mostly because of sploggers so they’re not even “real” links. I’m going to drop this statistic from my weekly reports.

Feedburner was not doing a great job reporting the correct number of subscribers this week, leaving out several sources. So I had to do a little intrapolation to get to the correct stats for the subscriber numbers. And they’re moving in the right direction.

Visitors are stable, again without any stumbleupon traffic. I noticed that the time spent on the blog increased a lot in the past couple of weeks. Hmm, that might be a good statistic to start reporting.

Progress towards goals

One major change here this week. I’m dropping the subscriber goal, and for now I’m not going to replace it with something else for this blog. I’m working on launching two other blogs:

• WordPress DIY, a blog primarily about making themes in WordPress. I will cover other topics around blogging and WordPress too, but themes will be the main focus. I announced this blog a while back already, but I had to change the URL. It’s located at wpdiy.net now.
• Scraping Pennies, a blog about making money online. Well it’s an experiment really. I start with a $200 budget and aim to make a four figure monthly income from it. All the while I will give full transparency, money spent and earned, hours invested and so on. I discuss the strategies I use, my expectations, my experiences and so on.

For both blogs the designs are not ready yet. I am preparing some content already, and on Scraping Pennies I’m also publishing some. If When the blog is successful you’ll share in the success, subscribe to the feed to find out how.

Those blogs will have goals, they’re going to be more business blogs anyway. I will probably define an overall goal that I will be reporting on here.

Productivity Habits - weekly review

I’m still working with Remember The Milk in combination with Twitter and my Moleskines and Evernote. I think I’m on to my new system with those four tools. I need to sort things out some more, but I think things are moving in the right direction.

I’m lagging behind on my email though. My inbox is NOT empty, and that’s for the first time in a long while. I will get that done today!