I’m back. I finally managed to pry the snow blower and shovel out of my hand long enough to sit down and write this post. The last time I talked to you was last Friday and I told you how Alex Jeffreys was holding a competition for his students. He’s going to give away $1,000 to the one who has the most traffic to their blog in a two week period.

I also said I was going to tell you what I’m going to do to drive traffic to my blog before I do it, then I will post the results on my blog.

First off, let me show you where my traffic was at starting Dec. 12 before this competition started. The starting date for the competition was supposed to be Dec 19, 2008 but because of some problems getting information to some of the students the starting date will be pushed back a couple days. I’ll let you know as soon a I know.

Here’s a screen shot of my traffic from Dec. 12 to Dec. 22, 2008.


google analytics

As you can see it’s nothing to brag about. But as sad as it was it did start climbing on the 19th. That’s a direct result of a few posts, commenting on my fellow students blogs, and them commenting on mine. All that really got started the week before but didn’t show up right away. In fact, from the 12th to the 18th my traffic was between 7 and 17 visitors a day. That’s the period when we had a terrible ice storm and we were without electricity for 4 days.

Then when we did get power back I was working on my computer trying to catch up and bang, we lost power again. This kept happening for a couple days with the power cycling on and off as I was working. Well, one time we had a big power surge and it took out my computer and I had to bring it to the repair shop. So there’s two more days without doing anything. All is well now so I have no more excuses.

But I wanted to put this in here to show you what happens when you take a break and don’t do anything, especially early on in the life of your blog when you haven’t established a following yet.

So here’s my preliminary plan of attack.

  • Keep visiting my fellow students blogs and keep leaving comments on them.

  • Start visiting other blogs outside of our little network and become interactive with them.

  • Outsource some articles and put links in the resource box pointing back to my blog. Submit these articles to article directories, mainly EzineArticles and GoArticles. I have also signed up with Article Marketer which will distribute my articles to hundreds of directories. I don’t have time to write these articles as I have way to many other things to keep up with.

  • Start entering some giveaways so I can start concentrating on building my list. As that list grows I will be sending autoresponder emails to that list every time I enter a new post and ask them if they would please read each post and it would be nice if they could leave a comment telling me what they thought.

  • I was already a member of Twitter but I plan on being more active and this should bring me more traffic.

  • I want to join Squidoo, which I know nothing about as I’ve heard this is another great way to get free traffic.

I think this is enough to keep me busy for now.

As I think of new ways to drive traffic I will let you know before I actually start doing it so you can see if I fall on my face or not. :-)

let the traffic begin…

Jeff Sargent

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Tagged with: alex jeffreys • article directories • articles • blog • squidoo • Traffic • twitter

Filed under: Internet Marketing • Traffic

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