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.

Progress this week is not so easy to show because the beginning of my article marketing is mostly in limbo, but there has been some progress. The Alexa rankings started out at 7,094,643 and this time last week it was 1,437,223. Today the ranking is 1,219,519 which is a decent increase. I shall aim to get it below 1,000,000 within the next 2 weeks.

Last week I wrote an article for this Blog called Rag and Bone Internet Marketing With Free Tools And Resources and condensed it for article marketing. Then placed the altered article with slight variations on the title on my own article directory and a couple of others. Next I submitted the article to Ezine Articles and Isnare for their directory and low cost submission to ezines, directories and blogs, but I’m still waiting for approval of the article and a few others that I submitted to promote my other websites.

Once the article is approved the effects will start to kick in. The blog will have more quality backlinks and hopefully clickthroughs from the link in my author bio. There is always a wait with Ezine Articles and Isnare, but it’s worth the wait. At least I have my own directory where I can have almost instant article marketing.

One article submitted is not going to have an earth shattering effect, it’s just part of the process. Some article marketers write and submit dozens of articles a day on the same topic. I don’t have the time to do that, nor the inclination. Writing so many articles about the same thing tends to produce repetetive articles with the same information shifted around. It might get more backlinks, but I would rather write articles as I’m inspired with different ideas and go for quality above quantity and aim for the viral effect as I described in last weeks progress report.

I didn’t rest on my laurels. I wrote another article which is actually a review of Tradebit and Payloadz. Both sites offer a free service of being able to upload and sell digital products, well worth doing to make some extra profits. I’ve been using Tradebit for a while with some success, check out my Tradebit subdomain it’s a bit basic but profit is profit. Payloadz I just started to use with my business partner a few days ago so I don’t know what the results will be like yet.

Moving on. I shall be rewriting the Tradebit and Payloadz review and submitting it to the directories tomorrow. I may possibly make it two reviews and submit one of Tradebit first and Payloadz later when I have more idea of results. I shall also write several new articles over the next week and at least one to promote this blog.

I’ve added some more to my Squiddoo lens for this blog. I was a dope and forgot to publish the alterations until just now, but at least it was saved. It’s said to be better with Squidoo if you don’t do everything at once because Google likes to see regular updates and in exchange gives you more traffic and higher rankings, we shall see. I will try to find time to build an Hubpage too next week, it’s all good juice for link backs to this blog.

I messed up with Twitter too. Last week I forgot my password and changed it, but I forgot to change it in my dashboard so my updates didn’t appear on Twitter and no new followers until I realised last night.

I got a new plug in for Google Reader, to add updates from rss feeds from my other sites but I’m darned if I can get it to work. It just isn’t accepting my Google reader details and I got fed up with wasting time trying. If I can get it to work it’s another way of adding regularly updated content.

Statistics

This week I’m going into Google Analytics for the statistics as well as my cpanel stats. They don’t agree with each other at all. According to my cpanel there have been 619 unique visitors during February. GA says 186. My cpanel says that the bounce rate is 77.1% GA says 67.32%. GA also says that 27.24% are returning visitors and that 9.73% have visited between 25 and 50 times. That’s brilliant as far as I’m concerned.

Both sets of stats agree upon the traffic sources which are mainly from a small amount of social bookmarking and organic searches. The best result is from the Squidoo lens according to GA. 33 visits, an average of 3.57 pages per visit, average time on site 7.36 minutes and a bounce rate of 24.24%. Those are the stats that I will be watching because I can use what I learn to help with my traffic building quest. I shall also be watching the keyword searches to see if some stand out more than others in bringing organic traffic to the blog.

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.

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.