Three months ago today I relaunched my IdeasForWomen blog with some new goals in mind.

One of my long term goals is to add more blogs to the site. On the shorter term I need to first get more visitors to the current blog - and I set some specific goals based on some data I collected for that too.

Last month I gave an update on my progress here too.

So? Where am I now? Originally I wanted to get an average of 10-15 comments per post and 1000 Feedburner subscribers in 6 months. I have 3 months left.

I now think that 5 comments on ave. per post would be pretty good and I would be satisfied with that. I’d still like to have 1000 subscribers if possible - or at least close to it.

How close am I? Not very. But not from lack of trying.

Comments - I haven’t actually counted the number of comments but a rough estimate is that I’m getting close, and that number is still certainly achievable. On some posts I do get as many as 5 comments left.

Subscribers - This number is still really low. I have less than 100 people subscribed. The big feed button and a subscribe by email option hasn’t seemed to have helped any. I still think it should at least theoretically be achievable however. I just posted recently about Tina Su from ThinkSimpleNow.com who got 2000 subscribers in 90 days, so it certainly is possible.

I looked at her blog closely and some others and read advice from some other bloggers and wrote up a list of guidelines for myself to follow when writing.

I started writing at HerProBlog.COM too. Maybe that will help me out some too.

At any rate, I’ve got 3 more months to go to reach the goals I set. I don’t know if I’ll make it or not. But I’ll sure try the best I can.

I just finished reading a post at Problogger by Tina Su from ThinkSimpleNow.com . Its from January, either I missed it then or something. Anyway its From 0 to 2000+ Subscribers in 90 Days.

Tina makes some good points in it that might help me. She thinks her blog has been successful for these reasons:

1) Concrete Goals & Focus

I think I’ve needed to be more focussed and maybe that has been one of my problems. I’ve got my blog a bit more narrowed down though. Sort of anyway. I think so.

2) Content Creation

This is always still a challenge for me - I’m better with coming up with ideas now but still find it hard to find the time to write.

She gave some good tips though that I really need to keep in mind:

“I like to write as if I’m talking to my best friend, giving them the best I have.”

“Use Personal Examples - People love stories. This allows them to relate with you on a personal level and connect with you as friends.”

I don’t use picture though. Personally I could never see the point of getting an image somewhere that really isn’t exactly of the thing you are writing about. Maybe I could try to come up with some other type of graphics to use.

3) Getting the Word Out

A long time ago this was really a problem for me - I do better with it now, but I need to do better. One problem I have is I really don’t know what’s acceptable. For example, I just redesigned by blog but I don’t know to what extent it is acceptable to tell everyone. I have people and bloggers I know, but I don’t feel that I know them well enough to tell them to come look at my new design. Seems too pushy or rude. But I don’t know, I’m not good at gaging that type of stuff.

I need to be better with replying back to people who leave comments too. I was doing this for a while, but am pretty behind with it now.

And I need to get more familiar with Stumble and Digg.

Tina also says not to be shy and to email people and introduce yourself and even suggests emailing her for practice - so I will do that as soon as I’m finished writing this!

I’ve been playing with Entrecard the past 3 days. Didn’t really know what it was until recently, but at some point I started hearing people talking about it. I wish I would have paid more attention to what they said now!

There are blogs using it that would probably have readers that would be interested in mine too - so it could be a way to get ’sort of’ free advertising.

I’ve bought a few ads already but I’m thinking I might hold off before buying any more and save up my credits. Then after I have a lot built up buy a bunch of ads to run all around the same time.

Anyone know if they have a limit to how many credits you can build up? Has anyone got many visitors (real visitors, not just ones dropping cards) with it? Any tips?

- something to add here:

entrecard is doing weird things to me, even after just 3 days. Now, any time I look at a blog the first things my eyes and brain start to do is look for that ‘Drop’ link! Sometimes I forget what I really came to the blog for even!

The word ‘blogosphere’ is not recognized by the WordPress spell check. But, then, neither is ‘WordPress’.

I’ve been busy this week working on a new design for my site. This weekend, being a holiday, I will get it up live on the site - probably on Sunday.

I’ll be writing at HerProBlog.COM soon too! The site was going to be launched this week but was postponed until the 15th.

It went fairly well with the fitness interviews I did for the blog. Next, with my new design and tag line I’m going to start looking for guest bloggers and also interview other women bloggers.

I’ve got a list of some good ideas for regular blog posts too - but I feel like I’d rather have more visitors before I write them. Still can’t seem to get many more subscribers or visitors. I need to come up with some more ideas to get more people to the blog.