The goals I set out for 2009 were as follows:

1. 5,000 RSS subscribers. (5x increase)
2. 7,500 Twitter Followers (2.5x increase)
3. Average 100,000 visits per month (5x increase)
4. Have a book published
5. Get my podcast on a regular schedule and done in a quasi professional manner

Goal #1 is on track. If you look at my Feedburner numbers it is over 9,000 but that is mostly due to them adding FriendFeed numbers. If you substract the non-FriendFeed numbers, I’m still on track to easily get 5,000 by the end of the year. The RSS + email newsletter numbers are around 4,300 but I haven’t actually checked lately. With three months to go, I’m pretty confident about this.

Goal #2 has been demolished. Not much more to say about this. I have been putting more effort into Facebook than Twitter lately. Facebook is showing a higher rate of response from readers than Twitter. I think Facebook will be in my 2010 goals and Twitter will not.

Goal #3 is looking better but might still be difficult. This was always a long shot, but things have improved greatly in the last few months. In September I had 64,000 visits to my site and over 105,000 pageviews. 75,000 visits per month is easily in reach. Getting to 100,000 in December might require something I haven’t thought of yet. I am making some big changes, but I don’t know if they will kick in, in time. My Alexa and Complete rank should be below 50,000 when the dust settles. See below.

Goal #4 is in holding. I’m still going to do it, but I’ve been occupied with other things.

Goal #5 was achieved, but not in the way I thought. I launched This Week in Travel which is a podcast, and it is released in a consistent manner and is quasi professional. I was thinking in terms of something with video and about my travels when I made the goal. Nonetheless, I’m call it a win.

You may notice that none of my goals have dealt with money. I haven’t made monetizing the site a huge priority. I’ve been working on gathering an audience more than trying to make money off the site. The theory being that if you have an audience, you can always make money. Well, that time is now.

One problem I’m having is trying to get work done when I move every other day. It doesn’t lend itself to productivity. I’m going to take the first few months of 2010 and get an apartment, probably somewhere like Bangkok and work. I’m working on several new projects:

1) A massive SEO overhaul of my site. Most people who are regular visitors to Everything-Everywhere.com will not notice a thing. Currently, my navigation to all the places I’ve been is just linking to the category page in WordPress. This is horrible. I’m creating landing pages with all the content I’ve created for each country, city and attraction. I have a list of over 250 already. I’m also going back and working on my internal links for all these landing pages. This is something I’ve never done, so I’ve never really harnessed the power of my content. I’ll be putting ads on the landing pages and not on the front page of the site. This should dramatically increase my targeted search engine traffic.

2) Finish the move to Smugmug. I’ve removed (as far as I know) all the links to images on my self hosted photo site. I’ve also mapped my own domain to my Smugmug accounts (TravelPhotos.Everything-Everywhere.com) The next step is to remove all the Flick links from the blog. Once that is done, every photo on my site will be hosted under my own domain. I will also then work on reorganizing my photos into better sets and changing the layout of my photo page. I’m getting more traffic from Google Image search already and that should increase dramatically once this is all done.

3) I’m launching a new blog. I’ve been thinking about launching a multi-author blog but I didn’t just want to copy what other sites are doing. I thought about how I as an independent blogger would want to work with a multi-author blog and have come up with some unique things which should make it compelling to every independent travel blogger. If successful, it will drive traffic to their sites.

It will be interesting to see how the next three months pan out. I have a lot of work to do, but I’m moving in the right direction.

• 5,000 RSS subscribers. (5x increase)
• 7,500 Twitter Followers (2.5x increase)
• Average 100,000 visits per month (5x increase)
• Have a book published
• Get my podcast on a regular schedule and done in a quasi professional manner

The Twitter goal has been smashed, crushed and otherwise made a fool of. Instead of 7,500 I’ll probably end up with over 100,000. While having a lot of followers is good, it isn’t quite as great as everyone might think. That is another post however.

I am on pace for 5,000 subscribers by the end of the year. As of May 31 I had 3,115. The progression has been interesting. I hit the 1,000 subscriber mark on December 31. I hit the 2,000 mark on April 28, and the 3,000 mark on May 30. That is almost 1,000 subscribers is a month which is really surprising. This came mostly from two sources. A contest with PVPonline and a mention in an article for Digital Photography School. The take away from this is pretty simple: getting mentions on large, popular websites dwarfs pretty much anything else you can do for marketing. Period. This is something everyone intuitively knows but people seldom talk about. I should also note that I got a fair amount of traffic and subscribers from a mention in an MSNBC.com article in April as well. All three of those sources are outside of the travel niche, which pretty much confirms what I think about where you need to generate traffic from.

I had a huge spike in traffic in May. In terms of raw traffic, I had 40,000 visits in May which much more than the previous high in April of 25,000. I wont be surprised if I fail in this goal. Subscribers are cumulative, traffic is not. I’ll need some big media mentions to hit that goal. Once I’m in the US that could happen, but I can’t plan on it. I’m not sure that Google is going to be the answer to achieving this goal either.

No news on the podcast front and I don’t think I’ll be doing anything with it until the fall.

The book outline is something together. I need to start contacting agents, which will help once I’m back in the US.

It has now been four months since I made the change to how I approach Twitter and I figure it is a good time to go back and look at how successful it has been.

Twitter Follower Growth

In addition to the changes noted above, I also invested $50 in a very nice looking Twitter background image. This has made a huge difference. The moment someone checks out my Twitter page, they know what I am about, even if they just scan the page. Here is how my follower list has expanded since December:

You can see I have gone from about 2,000 followers to 45,000 followers at the time of this writing. My marketing strategy is focused around serendipity. If people have a chance to accidentally discover me, I am pretty good at converting them. The trick is the initial introduction. Twitter is really good at this and I see the results of it every day. I think my success at growing my follower base is due to the compelling nature of what I’m doing, and the fact that I spend most of my time on Twitter answering questions and just engaging in chit chat with people about the places I visit. Most of twitter marketing is just BSing with people. It is really not hard.

Blog Traffic

I have gone from about 100 visits per week from the Twitter.com domain to about 900. This only reflects visits which come from the Twitter website, not people who use third party clients. This probably would at least double the amount of actual traffic I get.

I have also found that the number of clicks you get on a URL you put on Twitter is dependent on the number of times you display the URL. Most people seem to only look at traffic which appears when they are online. I’d very much like a WordPress plugin that will put a URL on Twitter X times every Y hours. I think once every 6 or 4 hours would be idea and most people wouldn’t get the sense that you are spamming the same URL. Most people wouldn’t even see the other mentions of the link.

Subscribers

My subscribers have increased dramatically over the past 4 months. I crossed the 1,000 mark on January 1 and as of today I am at 1813. That is an 80% increase. I can only indirectly point this to Twitter. It mostly has come from my site redesign and the launch of my email newsletter, but Twitter has played a big role.

Lessons
I don’t know if my experience applies to everyone. As I stated in my previous post on advice bloggers, everyone is going to have to apply lessons differently. Twitter has proven to be a great tool for people to discover you. If you have a more targeted blog, my approach probably wont be as successful.

Facebook Fan Pages
I’ve not put a ton of effort into my fan page in the past. Honestly, there are serious limitations with what you can do with a fan page. In fact, I have never even done the “suggest this page to a friend” thing, and I have over 500 Facebook friends. I did that a few days ago and increase my fan page followers from about 400 to 561 as of me writing this. Most of that has come from friends who didn’t know about the fan page.

The reason why I decided to pay some attention to the fan page is pretty simple: pages are now showing up along with profiles in the “people you may know” feature. That means the more people who join your page, the more people will have your page suggested to them. It is literally viral.

I don’t care about the fan page so much as a platform to actually communicate with people. I might set up an application to push out the RSS feed, but that’s it. It mostly serves the same purpose as an email list. The point being, given the mechanics of Facebook, it can be a great way to introduce yourself to people who may have no idea about you or what you are doing.

The next step would be to get a few key people to do the “suggest this page to a friend” to their friend list. If they are college kids with a huge friend list, that can grow the page in a hurry.

Googe Friend Connect
This is something which I think is really underrated. Google launched this a few months ago and only a handful of sites have added it. It is basically a widget where people can “join” your site. It then shows a bunch of small images for each person. It isn’t really a way to communicate with readers, doesn’t build links, nor does it directly drive traffic. Why do it?

There are three big reasons: 1) If you use Google Reader in addition, the site you joined will appear in Google Reader under “Blogs I’m Following”. This can add to your subscriber count. 2) The social validation of people with faces can give you a bit of cred. 3) I’m convinced that Google is, or soon will, use this data as part of its search algorithm. I’m guessing it will be factored into the domain trust or authority of a site. Google accounts are hard to fake. If you have people on Friend Connect, you have some real readers. This can be used as part of a profile to tell Google “I am a real site and have real readers”. I saw an increase of about 33% in search traffic after I installed the widget. I can’t prove it was casused by Friend connect, but I think it had something to do with it.

This weekend I put out a call on Twitter for people to join and I got 45 more in a few days.

I don’t plan on putting a ton of effort into either one of these, but I do think they deserve some attention for any blogger. If nothing else, get a fan page and put up the Friend Connect widget. (although I’m not going to bother for this site)

7,500 Twitter Followers: I have demolished my 2009 goal of 7,500 followers on Twitter. I am almost at 20,000. I pick up 100-200 a day without doing anything at this point. If I try, I can get even more. Twitter is far and away the #1 marketing tool I have. It is so good, I have not spent much time in other places. Having 100,000 by the end of 2009 is not out of the question given my rate of growth.

5,000 Subscribers: With the newsletter finally launched, I have a chance at reaching my subscriber goal of 5,000 by the end of the year. I have increased my subscribers by 50% since the beginning of the quarter. 50% quarterly growth will put me at 5,100 at the end of 2009. Momentum is picking up, so I’m not worrying too much about it anymore.

Get my book published: I have begun talking to some publishers about my book and the feedback is good so far. I think that is going well.

100,000 visits per month: My goal of 100,000 visits per month is still going to need some work. I’m at about 22,000 right now, but I have not had a ton of social media traffic. I have done nothing with Stumble Upon or Redditt in months. Nonetheless, March will be my biggest month yet through nothing but search engines, Twitter and organic traffic. I suppose that is pretty healthy considering I’m not using traffic spikes to achieve it. If I could get some marketing help with the Stumble/Reddit/Digg department, I could do much better. I’m guessing with a concerted effort in the SU/Reddit department, I could easily double my current traffic in a month. The trick would be keeping the numbers up that high.

Podcasting: I have done nothing with this so far.

Check out my new iPhone travel wallpapers.

I have never been quite satisfied with my website. This time I got hired help and I think I’ll be quite happy for a while. It will make my photography much more prominent, be easier to navigate, the total width will be about 100px wider allowing more room for content, and its designed to drive more subscribers.

The big content addition I’ll be adding is my Aweber newsletter. It took me a while to come around to it, but the evidence in support of developing an email list is pretty overwhelming. The fact that Aweber syncs with Feedburner doesn’t hurt either. My current plan is to release the email newsletter every two weeks and include updates on where I’ve been, photography, and articles. Myself and other tech savvy people I know tend to use RSS and dismiss email, but it is much more accessible to the majority of internet users. I think most of my subscriber growth will come via newsletter subscriptions.

I’ll also be displaying videos prominently on the front page, which I hope should give me more incentive to shoot more of them.

I may have some other projects in the works soon too. All and all, I’m pretty happy where things sit.

Once all the website stuff is done, I’m going to turn my attention to my photos. I am officially declaring my attempt to self host my photos to be a failure. The storage costs alone will be more than using a service, and my goal of getting more photos indexed in Google Image hasn’t worked out. I’ve moved all my Flickr photos to Smugmug and have linking all my new photos to my Smugmug account.

Smugmug is great. The level of customization they allow is what makes it a great service. I’m going to map photography.Everything-Everywhere.com to my Smugmug account and customize it so it is pretty seamless with my blog. This should provide a much better experience for the user than my current site. Over time I’ll gradually change all the old links over to Smugmug and remove the images off my webserver. I’m giving up on getting indexed in Google Image.

Here is the background:

Feb 28, she writes an article titled Dubai: destination re-branding urgently required – from ‘playground of the rich’ to the complex compelling place we know it can be . I make one comment in the article about how I didn’t think Dubai was that great of a tourist attraction (something which I stand by). She replies to my comment and then ….

On March 2, she writes a full post in response to my comment on how I really need to use guidebooks titled: There’s more to beaches and malls in Dubai: the case for using a guidebook . The title of which came directly from a line in my comment in the previous article.

So this article is about ME. You will notice there are no comments listed in this article. I wrote a lengthy reply, as I was the impetus for the article. I mean, that seems fair right? You write an entire blog post about ME, take the title from ME, and quote ME you should let ME respond, right?? She never approved my comment. (You should also note that I previously wrote a controversial article on why you don’t need a guidebook) So much for “spirited debate”.

Now if you read the March 3 article where there is all the angst about commenting, I’m accused of “imposing (my) opinions on others, taking the topic to a place that we really weren’t interested in going.” At this point in the “spirited discussion”, I have made a single comment which got an even longer reply and a full blog post that was directed at me personally. All my comments were blocked after this.

Also, I do not even know how it is possible to impose my opinion on someone else, let alone in the comments of another person’s blog. Having an opinion isn’t imposing an opinion.

There was another March 1 post on some Australians who were arrested in Dubai. I made a shorter comment pointing out how she never addressed the facts surrounding the case. People were/are held in Dubai without being accused of a crime. I’m a big lover of freedom and I don’t like that. She approved a pro-Dubai comment but blocks mine which questions the actions of the Dubai government. (this is all really ironic considering that the Dubai government censors the internet and suppresses political dissent) If you are going to defend a government which suppresses speech and can imprison people without due process, then you should expect to defend it. My comment was directly on point to the subject of the article.

She accuses me of be insulting, obnoxious, imposing my opinion on others. If that is the case, prove it to the world. Let everyone see how obnoxious and insulting I am. I’m not the one hiding anything. I made my comments with the expectation of them being public and didn’t post them anonymously.

There never was a spirited debate. She doesn’t seem to like any disagreement, especially on the subject of the government of Dubai. The topic was probably going to “a place that we really weren’t interested in going”. It is hard to defend what the Dubai government is doing. All my comments were on point to the subject in the article which she wrote.

Its her website and if she wants to block comments she can. But I have a website too and I can use my platform to defend myself if she is going to malign me without a chance to reply. I’m not the one hiding anything.

Oh, as an aside, I don’t block comments on this site so anyone is free to comment or disagree with me, so long as the spam filter doesn’t catch it.

My Twitter experiment has been a huge success. My 2009 goal was 7500 followers. Two weeks into the year and I’m at 4,200 already. As you can see in the graph, since I’ve turn auto-follow on, my following rate has gone crazy. Once I got into the Twitterholic top 1000, it took on a life of its own. I can pretty much go on autopilot at this point and make my 2009 Twitter goal.

Everyone that follows me gets a link to my RSS feed, which I think has helped boost my subscribers. Moreover, a large Twitter following makes it much easier to meet people when I go to a new city.

Twitter has been working very well for me, but I’m not sure how well it would translate to another blog. I get a lot of people who discover what I’m doing and think its neat. I’m probably going to lay off the Twitter now for at least a few weeks. I’m going to be moving around a lot in the next few weeks, so I need to focus on content and not marketing.

There are two schools of thought when dealing with Twitter. 1) Follow as many people as possible in an effort to get as many followers as possible. 2) Only follow the people you actually know or want to talk to.

You will find many of the people in the top 100 most followed Twitter users take the first approach and have tens of thousands of friends. If you follow them, they will follow you. The problem with this approach is that you cannot listen to tens of thousands of people. I tried this once and got to about 500 people before I gave up. I was missing what people were saying and couldn’t focus on the people I wanted to listen to. Once you have over 500 “friends” you are using Twitter for marketing and broadcasting more than for communications. You can’t have individual conversations with that many people, no matter what you say. Not at a personal level at least. It is however, probably the superior way to use Twitter to increase your exposure.

The second option lets you talk to people and follow all the tweets of the people you want to listen to. You wont have hundreds or thousands of people drowning out the voices of those who are important to you. The downside is that you probably wont reach as wide an audience as if you took the shotgun approach.

I currently follow about 100 people and have almost 2,100 followers. Of those 100 people, about half are people who either don’t know me or are people I never talk to. That 100 could easily be 50 or less if I really wanted to pare things down. Most of the people I talk to on Twitter read this site on a regular basis

Ideally, I could get the best of both worlds if I could create a client side “super friend” where I could pay extra special attention to people I really want to watch.

I am leaning to turning auto-follow back on, then using Friendfeed as my method of following the people I actually want to follow. That would be the optimal solution. Most of the people who contact me I do not follow, so it is all done via reply. That would probably stay the same if I followed a ton of people, as following too many is functionally the same is not following at all.

Remember to follow me on Twitter

1) There is an extremely close vote.
2) There are a number of ballots which are ambiguous.

Both of these things are unavoidable. Close elections will happen from time to time and it should be assumed that they will happen again. Humans, being fallible creatures, will always find ways to screw up even something as simple as filling in a dot on a sheet of paper.

For 99.9% of all elections (if you include elections at every level) the number of screwed up ballots doesn’t matter because the margin of victory is much greater than the number of ambiguous ballots. How they are counted will have no effect on the outcome.

In that 0.1% of elections where it does matter, it can cause problems. You get into issues like hanging chads and “voter intent”. I think having any group of people trying to determine voter intent is a very dangerous thing. If the voter wasn’t clear, then they expressed no clear intent.

The way out of this is easy and should be adopted at all levels of government:

Accept that there will always be a small level of error in any voting system. In the MN senate election, approximately 2,400,000 votes were cast and 5,300 have been called into question. That is 0.22% of the votes. I’m sure a more thorough study could determine what a reasonable number is.

If any election is within that margin of error (lets say 0.5%), have a runoff between the candidates in an election which would happen 1 month later.

In the case of Florida, they would have had a special election one month later between Bush and Gore, with no Ralph Nader. In MN, they would have another election with no Dean Barkley.

Odds are, even if the election is close again, which you would expect it to be, it wouldn’t be as close as it was in the previous election. The ballot would be cleaner, there would be more attention paid to the race, and other candidates would be eliminated.

While it is possible to have yet another extremely close ballot count in the second election, it is unlikely. If it did happen, the recount would be much easier on a ballot with only two choices.