Not much done towards my traffic challenge this week. Had a weekend away and then I was playing catch up with everything. However the Alexa ranking of this blog has risen to 1,074,105 and is on target for getting below 1,000,000 during the next week.

The article that I submitted to Ezine Articles and Isnare was finally been accepted a couple of days back and is currently on 15 other websites and blogs and has been sent out in a couple of ezines. That will give backlinks and hopefully click throughs to this blog and as it’s early days the article will probably end up on a lot more sites and blogs in time.

I’ve almost finished the next article for article marketing so once I’ve got a few more out on the directories and on my Squidoo page there should be a noticeable difference in traffic results.

Statistics

Now we’ll have a look at Google Analytics. The overall bounce rate is now 60.96% with the average time spent on the blog being 3.31 minutes. Last week the bounce rate was 67.32% so less visitors are clicking away. According to GA yhere have been 152 visitors altogether in 5 weeks, yet last week it said 186. Something weird going on there so I’ll check out my cpanel statistics instead.

Awstats tell me that there were 651 unique visitors during February and there have been 185 unique visitors in the first 4 days of March with 91 the highest on the 2nd. Because of the Alexa ranking I suspect that the cpanel stats are more likely to be right. Maybe I’m not looking at the right figures in GA, maybe neither are right. I’ve decided to set up another of my sites with GA to see what’s what.

A few decent comments have been added which helps to make a site or blog stickier when it comes to the search engines. Unfortunately there are far more spam comments than decent ones. Over 600 in a month and the usual porn, loan and medical links. A pathetic waste of time because the spam comments never get published, only the comments that might add value to the blog.

Plug Ins

I added Broken Link Checker this week. It lets you know in your dashboard if there are any broken links and you can repair them from there rather than searching through articles. That’s an excellent thing to have and probably one of my favourite plug ins.

I also added a plug in called Instant Tweets to my Firefox browser. Apart from a few other functions I can click on a little blue bird in my browser to instantly add any web page that I wish to Twitter.

Social Networking

Still not sure of the value of Twitter for myself. There are some internet marketers who swear by it. The following people and they follow you back aspect seems like a game to me and I’d rather spend my time writing or improving my websites but maybe that’s me being blinkered. I can see the value of having a big following if you launch a product and you announce it to your followers. Or if you want reviews or testimonials it would be a quick way to get them if you’ve got thousands of people to ask.

You could drive yourself dizzy with all of the different social networking sites and end up spending more time networking than actually working. Maybe that’s good maybe not. I will always social bookmark my sites and pages but I want to spend quality time creating first and foremost. The blinkers are not there though, I will watch and learn more about this so called internet marketing phenomina.

Pings

I added a lot more sites for this blog to automatically ping to every time a post is added. Pinging is basically letting the internet know about your new content and attracting more visitors. Obviously that is a good reason to add content every day.

Goals

My goals for next week are to get the Alexa ranking below 1 million, get 100 visitors for at least one of the days, send 2 articles out to directories with this link in the author bio. I also want to finish the sales page for a package that I’ve put together, redesign this blogs header and design a logo. I doubt I’ll get all that done because I’ve got a heavy week ahead of me, but even if I spend 15 minutes a day on the blog it will keep things moving towards my 6 month traffic target.

I had to cut things short yesterday because I was traveling to Pontefract to stay with my daughter. I’m feeling great today because I don’t see Fran and my grandchildren often enough and when I do I always feel refreshed.

It was a special occasion yesterday, my 3 year old granddaughter Isabella was dancing on the stage at a concert organised by her dance school. My what a lot of cute there was and I especially enjoyed watching Izzy dance. She did really well remembering the 3 dances that she performed with a group of other children around her age. Talk about proud gran!

Anyway now that I’ve returned relaxed and happy I feel raring to go and can spend more time on this blog. I’m mentioning this because I feel that it’s important to take quality time away from a business internet or otherwise else it can take over your life.

As today is Sunday it was easy enough to check the articles submitted to my directories. There are never as many submitted at the weekends which gives me more quality time with my websites and blogs, but I don’t have as much free time during the week so it’s best to make the most of it.

I’ve mentioned article directories before and they are actually an excellent free way to get traffic called Article Marketing. There will be more about Article Marketing on another day, when I start to go through that process.

Traffic

I said yesterday that I would give you a quick peak at statistics for visitors, it’s very early days so I wouldn’t set too much store in the results but traffic has already increased. This domain had been averaging 17 unique visitors a month and my first target was to double that within the first week and get 17 unique visitors a day by the end of the first month. During the last 3 days of January there were 47 unique visitors so I have already beaten my first target with the steps that I have taken. Those are results from my site cpanel stats.

When I set this blog up I also set up an account for it with Google Analytics. You can get very detailed statistics there, but I’m going to wait until my first month is up before I check them properly.

Where Did The Traffic Come From?

5 Visitors came in through an advert that I posted to a free advertising blog. 2 from keyphrase searches that found articles,  1 a keyword search for a product sales page that was the main page of the site previously – still there but not the home page, 8 click throughs from some of my other websites and the rest came via Twitter and the Tweet Me plug in that I added.

What On Earth Is Twitter?

My thought when I first encountered Twitter last year. Twitter is a social bookmarking site where you can pick up followers who are interested in what you are doing. According to Tweeters who rave about it on forums Twitter is currently one of the best ways to get traffic to your sites and blogs. Although I joined Twitter over a year ago I haven’t really used it until I started this blog. So I am also learning as I progress.

When I added the Tweet Me plug in it automatically posted excerpts of the new blog posts to my profile on Twitter. Obviously several people were interested enough to come and take a look and one of them was interested enough to become a follower yesterday.

Apparently how Twitter works for Internet marketers is that you build up a following and then every now and then post details of something that you are trying to sell, a special offer or something new to your followers, but it works better if you have at least 10 fresh blog posts in between ads.

Obviously you would have to build up quite a following to make sales, but you can do that by searching for members in your niche and following them. They are notified and some reciprocate. I haven’t got time for that so for now I’ll settle for new content attracting followers, or indeed those who are adding me because they want to sell me something. It will be interesting to see how many followers I can attract this way.

Opzioni Sociable

No I don’t speak Italian, well not words that you’d want to know! Optzioni Sociable is a new plug in which I added today. If you look at the bottom of the posts you will see a bunch of pretty icons underneath the heading Share and Enjoy. These are links to social bookmarking sites.

This is a powerful tool that can help to get traffic to your sites and blogs, help your posts along in Google rankings and provide quality backlinks. Optzioni Sociable gives you a choice of over 100 social bookmarking sites to link to, but I chose the 30 I believe to be the most popular and effective. I could be wrong and I may add more or remove some later, but at least I have some control over them.

What Is Social Bookmarking?

Basically when you socially bookmark a site or article you are creating linkbacks on websites that are popular and can help your sites and blogs gain popularity. You can socially bookmark your own sites, blogs and articles and you can use the bookmarking icons when you see something that you like on other websites and blogs.

It all works in a similar way to Twitter and the more times your content is socially bookmarked the better it is for you. I have icons to some of my favourite social bookmarking sites set up in my browser, so I generally use those whenever I want to give my content a boost for traffic, or indeed see something that I like on somebody elses website or blog.

My favourites are Dig, StumbleUpon, Facebook and Myspace, but with Facebook I’m not always comfortable with submitting Internet Marketing material to my profile apart from when I launch a new website. That is because half of my friends on Facebook are personal friends and relatives who are not interested in Internet marketing and I don’t want to annoy them by having my updates automatically posted to their profiles. I guess the best way around that is to start a group of those interested in Internet marketing and submit to that.

And The Rest

I added some more content and will continue to do so daily. The articles are all being selected to especially fit in with the theme of this blog. In time I should be able to build up a lot of information about free tools and resources for Internet Marketers and where to find them. Hopefully you will help me in this quest by recommending good ones in comments.

I also set up pinging to ping-o-matic which is  is a service to update different search engines and let them know that your blog has updated. I probably should have done that on day 1 but better late than never.

Last night I added some more plug ins to this blog which are:

All in one SEO pack

This should help with the search engines and this is what the plug in is supposed to do:

* Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines
* Generates META tags automatically
* Avoids the typical duplicate content found on Wordpress blogs
* For Wordpress 2.7 you don’t even have to look at the options, it works out-of-the-box. Just install.
* You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want.
* You can fine-tune everything
* Backward-Compatibility with many other plugins, like Auto Meta, Ultimate Tag Warrior and others.

Followsite

Thats a ‘keep me updated’ button at the bottom of every post. Hopefully visitors will like the content enough to want to know when something else is posted and return to read it.

Tweet Me

Every time something is posted on this blog news of it will land on Twitter. I’ll explain more about using Twitter and social bookmarking sites to get traffic another day, but it’s all good.

Automagic Twitter Profile URI

I haven’t quite figured that one out yet. I think it’s something to do with Twitter members being able to add posts to their profiles.

The plug ins are really easy to add with this new version of Wordpress – I’m impressed!

Feeds

I also added the RSS feed to Bloglines and added an RSS feed from the Internet Marketing category of my article directory to this blog. That’s good because the feed updates every time an Internet Marketing article is accepted on my directory and automatically adds new content to this blog.

I might add more feeds from different relevant categories, it’s all good information and fresh content to keep the search engines happy.

I took a quick peek at traffic statistics and already there is an increase, but I’ll wait until tomorrow to let you know the full January figures.

I won’t be doing much else until Sunday evening because I’m going to stay at my daughters overnight. Catch up with you tomorrow.