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Just wanted to wish all the readers and people that might stumble upon the blog these days,  Merry Christmas (or whatever good wish you might have if you’re of a different  religion). I hope everything you wish will come true (and it will, my new 22" LCD is proof of that).

If you’re working right now, then leave the computer alone and go meet a friend or your family and have some fun.

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As you can see if you’re reading this on the blog (if not, come see the new theme), the new ShylockBlogging theme is up and running. I’d appreciate any comments on it or if you see any problems with it.

The theme is done by a very good friend of mine, that is working on his own blog right now and will offer custom WordPress themes at affordable prices. I’ll make an announcement when his blog is up and running.

The people that ordered ads for December+January and sponsored this theme:

• Urban Read
• 5xMom
• BetShopBoy
• eXtra For Every Publisher

There is one ad left at $15 and you get December + January for this price, and a monthly mention of your blog in a special post.

Now, on to the November stats.

While November saw an increase in visits and page views, the increase in subscribers has been minor this month. I posted very little in the second part of this month, probably part of the reason for this minor increase. Managed to get into Top 20,000 Technorati, released a WordPress theme.

Hopefully, I’ll manage to get back on track in December, and maybe start a case study on a new blog that I’m launching.

First number is from November and the ones in brackets are from October

• 9,912 visits (6,624)
• 16,383 page views (11,349)
• 866 visitors from search engines (470)
• Technorati Rank: 19,292 - authority 268 (25,970 - 215)
• Alexa Rank: 68,345  (79,628)
• Subscribers: 212 (193)
• 84 posts and 385 comments  (68 - 306)
• 1867 downloads for the Shylock Adsense Plugin (1,396)
• 212 downloads for the Abstract Shylock Theme

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First of all, my bad for the lack of updates here. It’s a busy period for me, but I thought I’d give a few updates on things related to this blog.

First of all, the new WordPress theme for this blog is being coded right now, and I’m looking for people interested in advertising here. There will be 6 ads 125×125 above the fold, rotating, to give equal exposure to all of them, and I’m looking for sponsors for when the theme will be launched. It will probably be live before December 1st and I’m going to offer you a very sweet deal to advertise here.

If you order an ad on this blog for December, you pay for one month and you also get January free.

The 125×125 button above the fold is $15/month, so order an ad for December and you get January free.

The 468×60 ad, that appears after the first post on the front page and at the end of every article on this blog is also $15/month, and you get December at this price and January free.

Two months of advertising for $15, on a blog with 16,000-18,000 pageviews/month and 200 subscribers. You can’t find advertising that cheap easily. The price is a bit lower then my comfort level, but I need the money and I want all the spots sold.

All advertisers will also be mentioned in a monthly post, with 50 words about your blog or product. So if you order now, you’ll get the ad for two months for the price of one, and also two mentions of your blog/site/product.

The traffic is already bigger then it was in October, by 30%, and there are 7 more days until the month ends.

Order now!

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Two new tools got to my attention this last week, from comments made by their creators in my posts, both with great potential.

Auto Social is a WordPress plugin that automatically saves every post you write to del.icio.us. While del.icio.us does have nofollow on the tags, the creator says that he will add more sites in time, so I’ll definitely keep an eye on this plugin. It’s true that Yahoo shows nofollow links, but they don’t carry any weight with them, so the plugin doesn’t help much right now. Really excited about the possibilities though.

GTrends Made Easy is a tool that automates a bit the work you do with the GTrends tool, that I’ve talked about here. It seems quite a bit done to complement WordZe and the initial message asking for an WordZe API gets annoying after a while, but the tool is great anyway. It’s free (though you do have to give your email message) and it allows you to paste a list of keywords and find out what their search volume is on GTrends without clicking that small icon for each one. A bit slow right now and it has no export functions for the results, but you can still paste them in an excel file.

Again, it’s got great potential and there are plenty more features that can be added to make it truly valuable and easy to use. I’d have no problem paying $50 for it instead of getting it for free if it had more features.

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