It’s been fun to get back into the swing of things, although making money while I was on a cruise pretty much rocked. Internet marketing is a beautiful, beautiful thing. By the end of my vacation I have to admit that I was a little anxious to get back to work. Here are some miscellaneous things that have been happening around here lately:

Feed Count Has Grown To 400+

Today my RSS feed count widget is showing over 400 readers for the first time. The number currently sits at 412. (For those of you that read this tomorrow or another day it will probably show a different number.) I find myself wishing that I would have put the feed count button in my sidebar earlier because it’s grown a lot more quickly since I did.

The first 150 readers are definitely the hardest to get. Once I got over that number it started to grow a lot more quickly. If you’re stuck below that number and it’s going pretty slow, keep on truckin’.

Improved Technorati Ranking

Sometime while I was on vacation, my Technorati ranking passed the 2,000 mark. As of this morning it’s sitting at 1,684. Hopefully within the next month or so I’ll be able to break into the top 1,000 blogs in the world. It’s kind of fun to be ranked as one of the top 2,000 when there are now an estimated 100,000,000+ blogs out there.

My Technorati ranking has been pretty interesting. For the first three months I had this blog I did absolutely everything I could to better that ranking. It got me into the top 50,000 but then I pretty much stalled out. Since I wasn’t getting anywhere, I started to focus on SEO, link building, and traffic. Since then my Technorati ranking has shot up really quickly. I really haven’t done anything to force the issue.

Alexa Is On Crack Lately

If any of you are seeing some weird fluctuations with your Alexa rankings, don’t worry because Alexa is having some issues lately. Their site is unavailable a lot, and the stats aren’t being recorded properly. I figured this out when my biggest traffic day of all time returned my worst Alexa score in the last 4 months. Since then I’ve been watching their site, and they are definitely having some problems.

Search Engine Optimized WordPress Themes

For the next week, I’m going to be creating a new search engine optimized WordPress theme each day. I’ve been pretty anxious lately to get more themes in there. My biggest fear is that people are using themes that either 1) don’t provide them with the maximum benefit for their work or 2) have shady links and stuff that will get them banned.

I’m going to work on getting over 100 themes in there over the next few months. The current number sits at 14 themes. Now would be a good time to make a request if there’s a theme you would like to see in there.

Improved Layout For CourtneyTuttle.com

I’m currently working on a slight layout change for this site. Everything will look pretty similar, but it will add some functionality that is needed. The new layout will free up some advertising space without compromising the usability that I’ve tried to create on this site.

Answering Comments Again

While I was on vacation, I obviously couldn’t answer everyone’s comments like I usually do. Now that I’m back, I’ll be answering again so go ahead and ask me whatever you want to ask. This blog doesn’t feel right to me if I don’t take the time to answer when people have questions.

If you haven’t left a comment before, please feel free!