Just wanted to wish everyone a cinco de mayo. Took my trip to the liquor store, you know I am celebrating! I just got all of the essentials….

Enjoy

Comment Friday has become a nice success, and has really gotten a variety of readers to our blog. This week I posted forum topics, encouraging people to stop by and comment. The response again was great, we received a small decrease in comments, but more people interested in hosting their own Comment Friday.

One of those people happen to be our winner Love All Books. They decided to host their own version of Comment Friday, and linked back to us. As promised we linked back to them in our Comment Friday Post, but I felt that wasn’t enough.

Check out Love All Books for book reviews and recommendations. Make sure to stop by their blog (as well as ours) for next week’s Comment Friday.

Comment Friday is a fun and simple idea. Leave us a comment about anything you want. By leaving a comment, you will have your blog visited by me, and you may even get a link out of it. I will select a blog from the comment list to have a small post written and featured as our comment friday winner.

We have many of the same commentors participating weekly, we are getting some great and fun discussions. Not only am I visiting blogs, but other people are checking you out as well.

Last week we had 40 comments, and this week I know we can get 50!

Last Fridays blog of the week was Windy’s Food Corner. She started Comment Friday off early with a great topic. She even offered to make me Lemon Chicken! hah.

This Friday, the blog of the week could be yours!

If you’re interested in hosting a comment friday, just make sure to link back to us, or this post giving us credit. Then you can be added here, linking to your comment friday. Currently Love All Books is hosting their own Comment Friday.

You’ve heard the stories of children being victimized by the sexual predators they met online, or how cyberbullying is on the rise. Sadly, in some cases, if the parents only knew more about these topics and others, they might have helped thwart such horrible outcomes.

Teaching Web safety is just as important as a parent teaching their child not to talk to strangers or what to avoid online. Family WebWatch Blog is a source where parents can find out about such things. It offers commentary and advice on issues such as Internet fraud, cyberbullying, computer viruses, and phishing attempts.

Other things parents can find on this informative blog are reviews of sites that are safe, fun, and educational for children to participate in. Product reviews are also included to help parents know about things like parental control software and utilities to help secure their data and make them more productive.

It’s easy for parents to think that if their child is home and online, then they must be safe. What they may be overlooking is that the computer is a window that is a revolving door to their home, so care must be taken with its use. Family WebWatch Blog will give parents a little boost in that regard.

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I was sitting here ruminating, as you do, and started thinking about traffic – well there are worse things!

I saw the BAYB stats for April and where the traffic came from. It’s an interesting subject and it’s also interesting that hits don’t always come from the areas that the ‘experts’ say we should concentrate our efforts on.

My own blog my top three referrers at the moment are:

1) Google Search Engine
2) Technorati Tags
3) Blogger’s Choice Awards

With the top two I do put in some effort, every now and again, with keywords and writing about ‘hot’ subjects that people might search for. The third place isn’t long term but it’s okay for now, and all for doing nothing.

So a question …

What are your top three traffic sources at the moment?

No doubt we could all learn something from what is happening on other blogs – unless it’s all hush hush, of course.

Okay that’s it for now, ruminating over.

Good luck,
Mike.
Mike’s Money Making Mission

Chad Gramling from Word Up has been chosen for the next Blog about your Blog author interview. I have asked Chad a series of questions about some personal things, blogging and blog about your blog. I hope you enjoy the interview.

First of all, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Are you married? Girlfriend?

I am married (of nearly 6 years) and I have one daughter.

What do you do when you are not blogging?

I work full time as a product manager at a credit union. It really is almost as glamorous and exciting as it sounds. Beyond that, I’m either writing, watching baseball, or spending time with my family.

I recently enjoyed the release my first book, Baseball in Fort Wayne, from Arcadia Publishing. I have had three signings (all of which went well). I hope to continue writing and one day do that full-time.

In addition to some follow-up ideas I developed in the course of Baseball in Fort Wayne, I have written a full novel manuscript that I am currently shopping to agents and publishers. For information check out Distant Replay.

I wish you success on any of your other future ventures, as well as Baseball in Fort Wayne. I am a proud owner of your book.

Let me ask you a few general questions about your blog.

When was your blog created?

WordUp was started in January of 2006. Before that, I had started several different blogs, but never stuck with any of them.

Why did you choose your blog topic?

WordUp was originally designed to help further my publishing efforts. It has evolved to become more of a creative writing outlet since its early beginnings. But I still use it to help promote my writing efforts.

Where do you see your website in one year?

Hopefully WordUp will grow in visitation from people who are looking to read it. I call that “legitimate traffic” versus the ploys and tactics used to get hits. I’d rather have 10 people who visit because they really do want to read it versus 1,000 people who stop for 2 minutes or less where they do little more than critique my design. I hope for the same with my other blogs too.

Do you have any new upcoming projects or ideas you want to announce?

At NoOtherRock, I am planning a web ring of sorts, but am still very early in the stages and cannot share the details. Sorry.

Well I’ll be looking forward to that. I’m not too much into religion, but keep us posted!

What do you rely most on to get traffic to your blog or website?

I rely on others to share the love. I do a lot of BOTB at BlogExplosion, but don’t know how much legitimate traffic that provides. I also do a lot of cross-promotion on my other blogs when there are posts of interest.

And the final series of questions, a little bit about Blog About Your Blog

How did you find us?

Matthew invited me at the very beginning while in ShoutBox at Blog Explosion.

That must of been forever ago. I just remember you as a good blogger and basically wanted you as a part of our blog.

What do you like most about BAYB?

I really like having the ability to have a forum to announce blog posts that have me really excited. Sometimes I create something and wish everyone would read it and comment on it. It makes me feel better to blog about it twice I guess (maybe I consider it to more like BRAG About Your Blog than BLOG About Your Blog).

What new feature would you like to see?

A BAYB Channels might be a nice feature. For instance, when someone visits, they can select the “Blogging” or “Sports” channel to isolate it down to posts only from those bloggers in the channel. I know the categories is kind of the same, but not sure it does it very effectively.

Not sure how we can do that, but that’s exactly why I added categories to our sidebar. With a blog ranging in so many different topics we need it.

A “BAYB Bloggers Profile” page would be cool too.

We have worked on something along those lines as you can see, however we don’t have anything solid. I don’t even have my own profile, but it’s something that will definitely evolve in the future.

What do you like the least?

Not to say they don’t provide a relevant niche’ but the “Make Money By Blogging” bloggers seem to overwhelm the blog. I’d prefer to have a little
more balance.

I’m not sure I agree, but I do see blogging as a topic seem to take over.

Who have you chosen to be the next one interviewed?

You mean I’m not last?
Simply because I think he is contributing a lot of good things to the blog-o-sphere and because I would personally like to read more about him, I am selecting Secret Simon of The Secret Life.

We had 7,400 unique visitors, which works out to be an average of 247 unique visitors per day. That beats last month by 1,000 visitors!

Our three biggest referrals were stumbleupon, Google (search engine) and linkreferral.

Our most blog referrals came from a new BAYB author. Mikes Money Rants sent us 167 visitors! No one else really came close, but our other Mike was second with 37 referrals.

Technorati rank has been going well pretty steadily. We are now on our way to the 10,000 mark with a rank of 12,981. 881 links from 279 blogs with 85 members favoriting us.

I didn’t pay much to Alexa Rank until a few weeks ago, so I don’t know what it was last month. However we are close to breaking 100,000 on Alexa! We are currently ranked 108,248.

Our feed subscriptions have significantly increased. Last month we had about 40 readers, that number has now jumped to over 100. Remember if you’re subscribed to our feed, participate in our Mini Fridge Giveaway.

Our page rank, sadly, didn’t increase like I thought it would. We will remain a PR 4 for another few months. I had high hopes for a PR5-6 but it looks like we didn’t get that. My plans of world domination are on hold until the next update, but then we will take over the world.

Blog about your Blog Goals:

I’d like to see…

Technorati under 10,000
Alexa under 100,000
PR increase (next update)
More authors on different topics
More participation (we only get a few authors posting regularly)
200 Feed Subscribers