The first month of the year has come to an end and it’s time to take a quick look at how I progressed toward the goals I set for this year.

Increase unique visitors to the main site to 5,000 a day

We had a large drop in the number of uniques to the site in December, but it has picked up again in January. We’re well over the half way mark here and we’ll continue plugging away at it.

Double membership to 11,500

This one is going to be a tough one to accomplish. At the beginning of the month we decided to clear out all the emails that were bouncing and that took out about 1000 members, so we’re actually at a lower membership rate than what we began with at this time. I think it was a good move, however, to give us a better picture of where the site is at. We’ll have to hope for some good media plugs if we’re going to meet this goal.

Increase sat sites to 50

I didn’t add a single sat site this month due to working on the new journals this month. While it took a good deal of time away from me building sat sites, it was a good move for us overall. It has the potential to bring a lot more people to the main site. We still have a lot of work to do on them. Nate will be building in a lot of extras which we hope will encourage more people to write journals. At the moment we have about 30 active ones and hope to build that to 100 by the end of the year. We are both excited about them and believe they have a lot of potential.

For this little journal, I would like:

Get it into the top 15,000 of all blogs as ranked by technorati

At the beginning of January I had just squeezed into the top 50,000 so I thought the top 15,000 would be a good goal. I’ll have to up that to the top 10,000 as I already accomplished the yearly goal this month.

Technorati Rank: 14,798 (294 links from 106 sites)

While I’m extremely happy with those results, Technorati is pissing me off to no end in another area. They are not updating my site and haven’t done so for over three months. I’ve emailed, I’ve pinged and I’ve begged to no avail. If anyone has a clue to why this might be happening, I would love any suggestion to get that worked out.

Have at least 200 feed readers

I’ve been stuck between 80 and 90 for the last week or so. I’m not really sure what gets people to sign up with your rss feed, but I think I’m at a respectable position for the goal. We’ll see how February turns out and how many readers I have at that point.

Overall a fairly good month toward the goals. If I can keep up the current pace I think I’ll be quite happy where we are at the end of the year.