Traffic Generation Challenge 1: Learning & Planning
Posted by Sant Qiu in : Traffic Generation on October 11, 2007 , trackbackIntro: This is the first posts in the series of “Traffic Generation Challenge”. In the next 20 days, till the end of this month (Oct ‘07) I will be applying traffic strategies to drive massive traffic to this brand new blog, starting with no traffic at all. My initial traffic statistics.
As I apply those strategies, I will also share with you the results I’m getting. Whether those strategies actually increase my web traffic or not. Mind you, I’m a technical idiot (the designer did all this pretty stuff). So I’ll be keeping technical stuff to a minimum and rely more on my marketing skills.
But first, let me put things into some contexts. For the purposes of this challenge I was looking for a few things namely:
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Targeted (quality) traffic
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FREE ‘organic’ (non-paid) traffic
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Minimum effort, maximum result
My ambitious goal is to be ranked 150,000 by Alexa by the end of the month. I know it’s ambitious, but I’m pretty excited about how this will turn out.
If you’re interested to drive traffic to your site/blog, especially if you’re just starting with a brand new site/blog like me, this might be something you’ll be interested in. Bookmark or subscribe to this blog.
Alright then, let’s start!
I strongly believe in leveraging from other people’s experience and expertise. Learning from others who have the expertise and have ‘done it’ will always save me time and a lot of pain from trial and error. So the smart thing to do is to get some guidance.
Guidebooks:
Since I’m currently using the wordpress platform, there are two e-books that I’ll be referring to. The first one is Alvin Phang’s Atomic Blogging. And the second one is Gobala’s Wordpress+Adsense System. Both were highly recommended to me by others.
Alvin’s Atomic Blogging is an easy read and more importantly it’s very easy to follow. It uses a lot of screen-capture pictures to show you step-by-step how to set up your wordpress blog and how to start blogging. For a non-techie like me, this is fantastic because I can just follow the pictures and the accompanying instructions.
There are useful and interesting strategies to start driving traffic to your blog. However, I feel that near the end when he starts to cover the slightly more advance stuffs about traffic generation, he losts his earlier attention to details. But he promised his clients Lifetime Updates and any improvements on it. And so far he has updated and improved upon his original release couple of times. Still, this is a good guidebook that I’ll be referring to for tips.
Gobala’s Wordpress+Adsense System contained more pages and is more comprehensive. It contained more explanations on overall wordpress blogging. It also covers in more details on what you need to do to drive traffic to your site. It even teaches you how to use the additional plugins that he provides as part of the package. It is a very useful guidebook for someone who is really starting from zero on wordpress blogging.
However, it is not as easily followed as Alvin’s Atomic Blogging. He also doesn’t use as many screen-capture pictures like Alvin. Instead he chooses to use words to explain what needs to be done. Personally I prefer following pictures. It’s easier.
Both systems are geared towards monetizing your blog using Adsense. While that’s not really the purpose of my blog, both still contained great information, useful tips and tools that I can use in my “Traffic Generation Challenge”.
Successful Blogs:
Other than following the guidebooks, I’ll also be learning from other successful blogs. This is a simple and wonderful strategy. Modeling what they do is going to give me tremendous insights on how they make their blog successful. As my goal is to have my blog ranked 150,000 by Alexa, I’ll be modeling those blogs that are ranked lesser than 100,000.
However, the guidebooks will still be very useful as visiting successful blogs will only show me the exterior of the blog. There are probably many background technical things that I won’t be able to observe. The guidebooks will help me get a deeper understanding of what’s actually going on.
Progress Report:
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Just started to read through the guidebooks and follow the tips given inside.
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Begin searching for successful blog to model after.
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Announced my revamped, new blog to people who knows me.
- Installed the ’sociable’ plugin and the ‘get recent comments’ plugin.
- Signed up for mybloglog. But don’t know how to use yet.
- A little traffic just started to trickle in. My Alexa ranking went up from 2,641,133 to 2,287,033. Not great, but I’ve not really implemented any strategies yet.
Next: I’ll be applying more strategies and I’m expecting traffic to start spiking up!
If you would like to share your best strategy to drive targeted traffic to your site/blog, post them in the comments section. If I use them I’ll credit you and your site.
Cheers!
Hi Sant,
You’d probably know that Alexa is not a meaningful statistic. If anything, it should only be used as a very rough benchmark.
You might like to use awstats (as you’ve shown from the screenshot above), google analytics or mybloglog stats for greater reliability and credibility.
Hi Andrew,
Thanks for the tip. I didn’t know that. I’ll be using awstats then. I’m still learning how to use mybloglog. I don’t know how to install it yet. Can you let me know?
Lots of technical things to learn. Appreciate your help.
Sant
Google for “google analytics”, it’ll give you a good snapshot.
You might also want to submit to at least 50-100 blog and RSS directories.
PS: Your blog formatting is pretty messed up on my firefox browser, the text is way too large….
Thanks Andrew, I’ve sumbitted to blog and RSS directories. I also realise that in Firefox the blog is screwed up. I’m not sure why I’ll have to ask my designer friend to check it out.