How cool is that? My blog has been nominated “Best Blog about Blogging 2008″ on BloggersChoiceAwards. It was Diana Bajenaru from 134u.com who nominated me for this. Thanks, Diana. Diana´s blog is almost exactly the same age as mine, she is blogging since September 2007, but made it to #60 on my Blogs about Blogging Toplist.

Please vote for marcorichter.net, if you like it. Thank you so much.

Thank you for visiting my blog. There are new posts here every day. Staying updated is easy: Just subscribe to my RSS feed or subscribe to FREE eMail updates. Thanks for visiting!

I have just received an email from George Manty over at Can I Make Big Money Online. They are holding a contest for their new barter site called “Barter Genius“. They are giving away 500 dollars to one lucky winner. This is an entry into the contest. For more details about the contest click here.

From the contest site:

The contest is open from today until the end of the month. A winner will be chosen at random from the entries. The winner will receive USD $500. The winner will be announced by January 15th.

The year heads to its end quickly and another month has passed by. November was a quite successful month for me. Again, I´d like to thank those who sent visitors to my blog and made more popular. I grabbed some stats from my Google Analytics and here´s the list of blogs, which sent me more than 10 visitors during November:

Many thanks to:

1. A. Manickavel from assessmyblog.blogspot.com (60 Visitors)
2. John Cow from johncow.com (59)
3. Daniel Scocco from dailyblogtips.com (49)
4. Diana Bajenaru from 134u.com (44)
5. Caroline Middlebrook from caroline-middlebrook.com (25)
6. Kevin Muldoon from bloggingtips.com (23)
7. Tay Fuller from superbloggingtips.com (23)
8. George Manty from canimakebigmoneyonline.com (22)
9. Satya Narayan from bloggingtruths.com (18)
10. Carlo Selorio from carloselorio.com (17)
11. John Chow from johnchow.com (16)
12. Mohsin Naqi from bloggingbits.com (14)
13. Neil Galloway from thoughtsfrommylife.com (13)
14. Wayne Liew from wayneliew.com (12)
15. Courtney Tuttle from courtneytuttle.com (11)
16. Ben Cook from bloggingexperiment.com (11)

The numbers
This adds up to 417 (383) unique visitors from these blogs alone which represents 9.79% (8.63%) of my total unique visitors in November. Thanks again, keep it going. (Numbers in brackets refer to October count)

Visits were up 12.42% and PageViews climbed 18.03% against last month. Direct traffic to my blog raised by 26.09% and - best of all - traffic from search engines went up 30.38% with google bringing in almost 90% of total traffic from search engines.

The number of RSS readers climbed from 88 to 142, which represents an increase of 61%, thanks to all readers for that.

Popular posts in November
These are the most popular posts from November 2007, I hope you didn´t miss them:

• Top Blogs About Blogging
• Things to do before hitting publish
• 30 Social Bookmarking Sites You Need to Know
• How Google Analytics Gets You More Visitors
• How to speed up WordPress easily
• 12 Blogging Tips I Have Learned

What I am Planning for December
I set several goals for myself this month. First of all, I want to keep up my posting frequency of around 5 posts a week.
Number of RSS readers is targeted to break 200 by the end of the year and I aim for reaching an average of 200 unique visitors on my blog in December.

The blogging mistakes series will start in the second week of December, don´t miss it.

What are your goals this month? Anything you want to achieve in your blogging?

If you use google analytics on your blog, here is a small clue on how to get your own visits to your blog filtered for it.
As a blogger, you will probably visit your own site very often, to answer comments or check design tweaks or what ever.

All these hits are being tracked by analytics by default. But with this little trick, you can trigger the analytics code only when another user visits your blog, but not when you visit it.

Put this to your footer.php just before the </body>-Tag.

<?php
get_currentuserinfo() ;
global $user_level;
if ($user_level != 10) {
echo'
<script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js" type="text/javascript">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
_uacct = "UA-XXXXXX-X“;
urchinTracker();
</script>
‘;
}
?>

And replace the XXXXXX-X with your actual analytics-ID. From now on, every time when you visit your blog, while you are logged in as an admin, the analytics code won´t be triggered.

The if ($user_level != 10) checks, whether the visitor is an admin (WordPress-UserLevel = 10).

This time, I´d like to give back some honor to those who helped making my Blogs about Blogging Toplist popular and posted about it on their blogs. Thanks to all of you!

• www.crenk.com
  
  
• www.wayneliew.com
  
  
• www.blogigs.com
  
  
• www.marketfederation.com
  
  
• www.blogresourcesonline.com
  
  
• www.johncow.com
  
  

Also thanks to those who provided link love for the list:

• www.bloggingtips.com
  
  
• www.aaronemerson.com
  
  
• www.blogaboutyourblog.com
  
  
• www.dailyblogtips.com
  
  
• assessmyblog.blogspot.com
  
  
• onlinepresence.blogsailor.com
  
  

Bloggers:
Do you think you have a blog post which should be mentioned here next week? Just contact me and let me know.

Wayne Liew has written an article about my new Blog Top List on his blog today and he asks several questions about the list.

Of course, I am going to answer all of them. He guesses, the list might be a clone of Marks Make-Money-Online list over at 45n5.com. Sure, my list is not the first on this planet and it won´t be the last one. But they are two different lists. One is listing blogs about making money online and the other one lists blogs about blogging.

You think, both is the same? Wayne does think so. I want to clarify that, as it has been also misunderstood by some bloggers, who contacted me for being on the list. I wrote, I´ll take only blogs on the list, which are about blogging.

About Blogging? About Making Money?
Blogging about blogging CAN include blogging about making money online. Many blogs out there do not only show how to build up a blog and a readership to it, how to improve the blogs theme and so on, they also provide information about how to make money with that blog. (These blogs would qualify for my list)

Also, there are many bloggers - and I read some of them regularly - who write about how to make money on the Internet. How to write an E-Book, how to build up an E-Mail list or about making more money from affiliate programs. These can be great blogs - but are they about blogging? Does making money online neccessarily include having a blog? No. (These blogs would not qualify for my list)
Shouldn´t these blogs better be listed on Marks List? Of course, it´s about making money online and these blogs are about that topic. But they are not about blogging.

Wayne, could I make this more transparent for you?

Metrics & Source of Data
Wayne also wondered, why I chose to take the bloggers name for the links instead of their blogs title. And he is right, I wanted to give some credit to the blogger behind it.

The list does use several different metrics to determine the individual ranking of each blog. 3 of them are being shown on the list, but not all of them. I chose to publish the number of incoming links and the number of blogs these links come from, which I fetch from Technorati via their API. The RSS subscriber count is being taken from - guess what - FeedBurner, again using the API to get the data.

These metrics together with the other invisble data is being weighted by specific percentages, so Wayne is right on this again. That´s why Wayne is listed below Patric Herber (at this moment) though according to the shown numbers, he should be in front of him.

So Wayne, I hope I could answer all your questions about the Top-List.

Note:
Did you notice? This seems to be kind of a Cross Blog Conversation.

Again it´s thursday, so here is another batch of interesting links to blogposts, which caught my eyes within the last days.
Please take a few minutes to visit and go through them, they all provide valuable information.

• Building a better Google the BlogStorm way
  
  
• So How Did I Double My Subscribers in a Week?
  
  
• Hit Scrapers Where It Hurts: Adsense
  
  
• My Blogging Advice To Connect With Your Readers
  
  
• 5 Quick Tips for Building SEO Content
  
  

Bloggers:
Do you think you have a blog post which should be mentioned here next week? Just contact me and let me know.

George Manty has just tagged me with a meme named: “5 Questions about the ONLINE YOU…” which seems to have originated at Home with Heather. Thank you George.

Here´s a description in George´s post:

First, you answer 5 questions about the ONLINE version of YOU…

1. How long have you been blogging?
2. What inspired you to start a blog and who are your mentors?
3. Are you trying to make money online, or just doing it for fun?
4. Tell me 3 things you LOVE about being online.
5. Tell me 3 things you STRUGGLE with in the online world.

Then you “tag” several bloggers, including me, and ask that they join in and spread this meme on their own blogs. When finished you simply write a comment on this post with the link to your meme post so I can then read your responses to the questions.

Here are my answers:

1. How long have you been blogging?
I actually started blogging in March 2007 with my blog FitForFreedom, which I had to close for some reasons and which domain is now redirected to marcorichter.net. There´s been a little break in my blogging during the summer and I am now blogging here since August 31^st.

What inspired you to start a blog and who are your mentors?
Some day, I came upon this great article from Steve Pavlina and after reading though it, I just wanted to try that myself. So, Steve Pavlina is the one who brought me into blogging basically. Thanks, Steve!
There were several people, I´ve learned so many, so important things - and I still do. I would list up Darren, Maki and reading through the whole blog of John Chow didn´t waste my time back then.

Are you trying to make money online, or just doing it for fun?
My blog is currently not making any money, except from $65 I was paid from my hosting company BlueHost.com for referring a new customer to them.
I really enjoy blogging here, but it´s not my first intention to squeeze money out of this. At least, I surely would
not deny getting a little money from it whenever I came upon the right opportunity to do so.

Tell me 3 things you LOVE about being online.

1. I love seeing people from all over the world reading this
2. EVERYTHING is just 3 clicks away from where I am
3. Being online is what gave me the chance to do, what I do

Tell me 3 things you STRUGGLE with in the online world.

1. Too much information and too little time to keep up
2. Spammers, scrapers, forum trolls and other idiots
3. My girlfriend is starting to HATE the Internet.

I´d like to pass these questions over to some bloggers, I am subscribed to and like so much: Mark, Mohsin, Caroline, Pat, Alex and Skellie.

My blogging mentors are mentioned above, if you like consider yourself tagged too.

Time to pick a winner of my first Group Writing Project. I found, it was a fun project. Here are the participants again:

• gratemedia.com wants an eMail plugin.
• techzilo.com wants help with SEO.
• myweightlossforlife.com wants better relation between posts.
• thewritersmanifesto.com wants a social plugin.
• itlife.escrito.info wants help with insulters.

The participant also acted as the jury in this contest and I have been collecting the votes. Here is the final ranking:

1. thewritersmanifesto.com winning $20 cash.
2. techzilo.com winning 4 weeks of advertising
3. myweightlossforlife.com
4. gratemedia.com
5. itlife.escrito.info

I would like to thank all of you.

Extra surprise
I received an E-Mail from John Leavitt over at templature.com. He offers to develop one of the plugins on this wishlist, so John, here´s your chance. Thank you so much for the offer.

Again it´s thursday, so here is another batch of interesting links to blogposts, which caught my eyes within the last days.
Please take a few minutes to visit and go through them, they all provide valuable information.

• 35 Guaranteed Ways To Increase Your RSS Subscribers
  
  
• Tips in Building a Credible Blog
  
  
• Studying Spider Crawl Rate to Find Your Most Trusted Pages
  
  
• 65 Must Read StumbleUpon Articles
  
  
• 12 Basic On-Site SEO Tactics for Optimized Results
  
  

@Patrick Altoft: Would you release you Spider Crawl tool?

Talking to a fellow blogger lately I was told, visitors coming from StumbleUpon don´t really read a blog they visit. They will only have a short look on it, hit the thumbs-up or thumbs-down button and will leave again. Just 3-4 second - and they are gone.

This experiment will prove he´s wrong! - Stumblers, please help!

I told my friend, that I could get all visitors from StumbleUpon to do three things before leaving:

1. Subscribe to my RSS-Feed
2. Leave a comment on this post
3. Hit the THUMBS-UP button

So, stumblers help me convincing him, that StumbleUpon brings in valuable traffic. I´m going to come back with results on Sunday here. Please leave a comment after subscribing to RSS and add your URL, I´ll visit and stumble it to say thanks for your support.

I just wanted to quickly say Thank You to those bloggers who sent me the most visitors last month.
According to Google Analytics, there were 14 blogs which sent more than 10 visitors to my blog last month and I´d like to give back a little to you.

Thanks to

1. Courtney Tuttle from courtneytuttle.com (66 Visitors)
2. Daniel Scocco from dailyblogtips.com (63)
3. Mark Wielgus from 45n5.com (44)
4. John Chow from johnchow.com (36)
5. Kevin Muldoon from bloggingtips.com (28)
6. George Manty from canimakebigmoneyonline.com (27)
7. Michael Martine from michaelmartine.com (22)
8. Steven Wilson from stevenwilsonmarketing.blogspot.com (18)
9. Matthew Henrickson from blogaboutyourblog.com (15)
10. Pat B. Doyle from patbdoyle.com (15)
11. Sumesh from techzilo.com (13)
12. Neil Galloway from thoughtsfrommylife.com (13)
13. Monika Mundell from thewritersmanifesto.com (12)
14. Carlo Selorio from carloselorio.com (11)

This ads up to 383 unique visitors from these blogs alone which represents 8.63% of my total unique visitors in October. Thanks again, keep it going.

On the end of each month, I am going to round up some favorite posts here on marcorichter.net based on the traffic they received!

This is the second edition after September greatest. Several posts have been somewhat popular last month. In case you missed any, here they are:

• Try to be a guest blogger
• The 25 best ways to increase traffic to your blog
• Tagging your images for more traffic
• 10 Ways to Improve Your Blog’s SEO in 5 Minutes or Less
• Why I love Sphinn

If you liked these post, please share some love and stumble, or digg these. Thank you.

Again it´s thursday, so here is another batch of interesting links to blogposts, which caught my eyes within the last days.
Please take a few minutes to visit and go through them, they all provide valuable information.

• Need A Traffic Explosion? Help Forthcoming…
  
  
• The Beautiful Post
  
  
• Bloggers: We need to develop a set of reader engagement metrics!
  
  
• Google Brings Traffic - Why Boycott it?
  
  
• The Importance of Social Media Marketing: Why You Should Learn and Master it
  
  

I started this blog on August 31^st, 2007 but I had a blog before on fitforfreedom.com. I had to shut down that for some reasons, but I sticked to blogging so I decided to come back having my own name as a domain for this blog. So, although marcorichter.net is 2 months old now, I have been blogging since February 2007.

Rishiraj, over at rishiraj.info is just celebrating his first blogging by holding a contest. He asks the question How I see my blog after one year from today and I want to answer this with this post.
First prize is $111 in cash and additional prizes worth $100 dollars are in there for second and third place. Maybe you want to join in?

How I see my blog after one year from today

As you might have already noticed, this blog is free of advertising. Though, I put an affiliate link to my hoster in my article about How to start blogging, there are no further ads on this blog.
I´m not here to make money with it. I am blogging for fun and I want to try to help others to become successful with their blogs.

What do I expect this blog to look like in October 2008?
Hey, did you see? I have a PageRank now. marcorichter.net has a PR 2 since last weekend. It doesn´t really help me, because we all know, that PR is not affecting a sites ranking in results. I reached #1 positions on Google with this blog having even NO PageRank. So I don´t really feel bothered with PageRanks and updates and all this, but I want to see this blog having a PR 5 next year.

What can I expect from blogging? The last 2 month running this blog was so much fun, and I met so many nice people coming and reading it, leaving comments and writing eMails. Some reviewed my blog and participated in projects or contributed in other ways.

There is so much I have already learned within these 2 months, I will have enough to write about so others could maybe find useful advice for their own blogs. My 25 post series about increasing blog traffic is almost half-way through now and it´s doing so good, I see many more of this kind happening within the next year. Already announced the very next series here, please have a look.

Also, I´d like to get even more in touch with my readers in future. Did you know, I have a Reader´s Question section? Why not dropping me a question on blogging an get a free backlink with the answer?

Last, but not least, I am planning to enter the Top-50 in Mark´s Top-100 Ranking on 45n5.com where I am now on #141 (see the small widget in my sidebar for my current rank.). I have been moving up from #189 to #141 in just 2 weeks now, so this seems to be an achievable goal.

The even more important question
Is it really important, how I see my blog in 1-years-time? Isn´t it far more important, what YOU - my readers - expect this blog to be next year? I think it is.
So, please let me know, where you would like to see my blog going to in the future!