Just a really quick update today. The good news is that this blog’s Alexa ranking is now 974,361, easily reaching the target set last week of getting below 1,000,000.

That has been achieved by the work put in on previous weeks which you can read about in my Challenge posts.

End of week 2 progress:

At the beginning of the first week this blog’s Alexa ranking was 7,094,643, at the end of the second week it is now 1777,235

Quite a significant increase which is quite normal when a website or blog is regularly updated and the traffic starts to come in.

No page rank yet but Google usually only updates PRs every 3 months and the last time there were any updates was about 3 months ago. As Google PRs are connected to Alexa rankings in some mysterious way and as I’ve noticed before that Alexa rankings remain static for a while and then update just before Google updates PRs then the signs are that updates are iminent. I don’t know if I’ve done enough work on this blog to gain a PR in such a short time, but you never know.

I resisted looking at my cpanel stats all week and today they tell me that this blog has averaged 93 visits a day throughout February and that there have been 395 unique visitors. The amount of unique visitors has only increased by 55 in a week, but I’m still pleased because if those figures are right then I’ve done something to capture interest and the unique visitors are returning.

The bounce rate isn’t that good. 73.2% have only stayed on the blog for up to 30 seconds, but quite a healthy amount have stayed on longer, for instance 4.3% have stayed on for between 30 minutes and an hour. Part of my challenge will be to see if I can improve those bounce rates over time. I promise that I will go into Google Analytics properly during the next week where there will be more information to be found.

There are pingbacks from 2 blogs. That means that the blog owners have connected to this one through posting a link to articles on their blogs.

I haven’t done as much as I hoped this week because I’ve been incredibly busy with my other sites and blogs and life of course. However I have made some progress which is detailed as follows:

Forum Posting

I started off my second week of traffic building by doing a bit of forum posting. Some forums don’t allow signatures, some do. I added this blog link to my signature and replied to several posts. In every case my posts were informative and not just spam to gain backlinks. You spam forums you get slapped down and possibly banned.

I have 2 favourite forums: The Warrior Forum and Conquer Your Niche. I joined those forums to learn. There is massive amount of useful information and tips available from members, discussions about Internet Marketing and anything new. I have contributed fairly regularly to both forums and as time went on I was able to offer advice besides taking it.

It’s an added bonus that you can get quality backlinks from your signature posts and quality backlinks help out your page rankings in Google and that helps out with traffic. Also with Conquer Your Niche you get some free advertising. Online forums are great free resources for Internet Marketers and well worth joining.

I did a little social bookmarking and noticeably Stumbleupon has provided quite a lot of the traffic. I have icons for some of the social bookmarking sites in my Firefox browser so it doesn’t take long to bookmark sites or pages and get some quality backlinks and more visitors.

I figured out a bit more about how Twitter can be useful. I’m really mean and am only following 2 people. The second one I added at the weekend. He came back and added me and sent me a thankyou through the Twitter system. The thank you was a free ebook and his copy of the Instant Bonus Page.  I wasn’t sure how far you could go in promoting yourself to your followers without being thrown off, but it seems that it is ok to send a thank you offer when you are added.

Of course the thank you offer is a way of making money out of you. The offers are all free for restricted elements, but you get more if you pay a fee and of course there will be affiliate links involved.

New Plug Ins

I got a tip about ‘SEO Fast Start 3rd Level Page Rank Push‘ from the Warrior Forum. Apparently it takes more of the PageRank from your Category pages and pushes it down to your individual posts. That means the individual posts accumulate more PageRank than what they would have accumulated otherwise. Although Page Rank is only one of the factors which determines your position in search engine it’s an important factor which ensures that you get more page ranking attributed to each post.

Duplicate Content Cure As the search engines don’t like duplicate content on the same domain and because of the nature of blogs you get duplicate content in archives and category pages domain this plug in helps out. It’s said to be is a very simple, yet effective SEO plugin that prevents search engines from indexing wordpress pages that contain duplicate content.

GD Star Rating allows visitors to rate articles and comments and brings a bit of interactivity to the blog.

When I was adding the new plug ins I saw in my dashboard that 3 of the previously added plug ins already had updates. All I had to do was click on update for each one and they were updated within seconds.

Next week my targets are to:

• Improve the bounce rate
• Write at least one good article for article marketing
• Figure out Google Analytics properly
• Put together a package of really useful free products for newbies
• Update the home page with that package and perhaps a different colour scheme
• Continue adding useful plug ins
• Continue adding content, bookmarking and forum posting

Hopefully I will get all of that done, but I have another busy week ahead of me with my other commitments.