Okay, so as you can see from the title of this post and screen shot below, I have managed to build my list from 50 to 2000 subscribers in around 15 weeks, which means that I managed to hit my target goal of 2000 by 1st APRIL. (See My Goals For 2010 for more information)

And as I said in my previous post, I’m going to share with you what I did to build my list to that figure in that space of time.

My very first subscribers came in September from me tweeting about my various free offers on Twitter, I had been building my Twitter following since April 2009, and had built up around 4000 followers, mostly targeted to the Internet marketing and make money online niches. So I was lucky that I’d done that.

Twitter proved to be a very slow way of getting subscribers though, and they would often unsubscribe after they got the download. Those that did stay were very unresponsive because I hardly emailed them. The ones that did open my emails, when I finally emailed them that is, they would unsubscribe because they probably didn’t remember how they got on my list.

At the beginning of October of finally got over my fear of entering JV Giveaway Events, yeah I know it sounds funny but i was actually worried about entering these things. It was the fact that it says that you MUST promote the giveaway event to your list, and I barely had one!.. For some strange reason I also had it in my head that I might get banned from entering other JV Giveaway Events if I was caught not promoting (which was not the case at all.)

I really wish I’d started doing the Giveaway Events right from the start like I was told to by, Alex Jeffreys my mentor, because once I found a decent gift and entered as many as I could, slowly but surely my list would grow each week, and this time as the new subscribers came in, I made sure to email them at least one a week with something free and of value with no opt-in required.

I simply used Twitter to promote the JV Giveaway Events as best I could, and this helped keep me from getting my gift removed from a lot of them. However it was nothing like I thought and was no big deal if I didn’t manage to get enough hits to my link, as I’d still get some subscribers from the first few days which is when all the traffic is being driven to them anyway.

I also started using some Safelists to help get more people on my list faster, the main one I used was ListJoe, it allowed me to mail out to about 3000 I think as soon as I joined, and it got me a few subscribers. You then have to earn more credits to be able to send again, by clicking links in emails, that got pretty tedious though and I soon stopped wasting time clicking links in emails, so I didn’t mail out with them again and just did the same thing with a few others instead.

Don’t get me wrong the Safelist sites are ok, but only if you take the discounted one time offers for upgrades when you join, otherwise it is a lot more expensive later, but I didn’t have the cash to do that. I will probably look at joining one of the better Safelists and upgrading soon, as I know people who have done this and it helps them level out the unsubscribes they get. I will blog about it when the time comes, and let my readers of this blog know my recommendation of the Safelist I end up upgrading to.

October and November I spent writing my Traffic ebook, a long process but well worth it. I also attended Lee McIntyre’s Live Workshop in Manchester at the end of October, and this gave me a lot of ideas for list building, and I found out that Jit Uppal who was a speaker at the event built his list and made thousands of dollars, using adswaps.

I finally released my ebook on 23rd November and started entering it in as many JV Giveaway Events as possible.

By December I had built my list to around 50 subscribers using the above methods, which could easily have been a much higher figure but I just hadn’t been giving list building enough focus, I was far too wrapped up in my blog and driving traffic to it, in the hope that they would signup to my list through the free offers I had in my blogs sidebar. However that didn’t really work out, and it only got me a handful.

I decided it was time to start taking this listbuilding more seriously, as I could see my peers boasting mailing lists of up to 2000, and there I was at 50, and I started at the same time as them too… Anyway I think it was about the  first week in December that I started to getting interested Adswaps, after I had spoken to some of my friends that I had made along my journey, namely Paul Wilson, and James Howard, who told me how well adswapping was going for them.

So knowing that I needed to get some more people on my list before starting adswaps, I decided to pay for an upgrade in one of the big JV Giveaway Events, and I managed to add 30 subscribers in just a few days.

So I was now up to 80 subscribers, I knew this still wasn’t anywhere near enough to start adswapping, but I went out looking to try and get my first one set up anyway, and I was lucky enough to find someone with a list much bigger than mine, who offered to send out for me even though he knew I only had 80 subscribers… Very nice of him huh, and you will generally find there are quite a few nice people out there who will help the little guys out if you look hard enough.

I really couldn’t believe my luck, and it really was a case of being in the right place at the right time, as it just happened this person had decided to break his list down, and had some adswaps with a few smaller lists this particular weekend to help the little guys like me out.

I ended up adding 50 people with that adswap in the space of 48hrs, and I had about 120 clicks to my squeeze page. This left me with a total of 130 subscribers, still not really enough (recommended is 250-500 to start adswaps) but I had been bitten by the bug and did everything I could to seek out people with small lists like mine, and offer to send twice for lists twice my size, all the time being honest about my list size, which is very important.

So apart from carrying on joining all the latest JV Giveaway Events, Adswapping is all I have been doing between now and December, and that is what has seen my list grow from 50 – 2000 in 15 weeks. counting all the unsubscribes that I’ve had, and people not clicking on the confirmation link in the emails, I think I must of had about 4000 submissions to my opt-in forms all together… but i make a habit of deleting unsubscribers each week, or you end up paying more for subscribers that are no longer receiving your emails.

I’ve also seen my first sales as a result of the adswaps that I’ve been doing, and I’ve been seeing some consistent small sales each week over the last month, so all the effort I’ve put in to this is really starting to pay off.

If you’ve made it this far down the page, well done. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading my little story, I know it’s a long piece of writing that I could of explained in fewer words, but once I started typing the words just started to flow, and before I knew it I’d wrote over 1000 words! (Pitty I wasn’t doing it for an exam, eh!)

I’ve really enjoyed writing this, and it brought back the memories of how frustrated I felt when I had such a small list, that was growing at such a slow rate, and which was all fault of my own. I really hope anyone who may be just starting to build a list will learn from my mistakes by reading this post.

And just to make sure you start off on completely the right track, I’m going to write a short and to the point, step-by-step report for you all, on the exact steps you need to take, to get get your first subscribers and build your list to 2000 and beyond in as little time as possible.

I have only just started writing the report today, and I really want to make sure I include everything you need to get going. I’m going to try my best to include all the resource links and tools, and exact steps needed so that you can get your list off to a flying start.

You can expect that to be released sometime in the next 2-3 weeks…

In the meantime I would love to hear what you think of this post, did you like my little story and the way I told it?… Or did it send you to sleep it was that long?… Either way I want to know.

Until next time…

Sionara,

Paul

Over the next few posts I’m going to be briefly covering some of the many different traffic generation techniques that exist.

So I will start off with the first 5:

Traffic Generation Ideas (Part 1)

1. Yahoo Answers

Yahoo Answers is a website that allows people to post questions, and all you have to do is answer peoples questions with good advice to help and answer their question. After you’ve answered the question you will be able to link back to resource pages on your website.

As you will be linking back to pages on your site/blog, the questions you answer will need to be related to pages that you have wrote about.

2. Free Blogs

You can create free blogs on sites such as Blogger.com , WordPress.com , LiveJournal.com and create posts with your targeted keywords in them, and also use your main keywords in the blog and post titles, which will then usually become part of the url.

You would then link back to which ever of your main sites the keywords related to in each post, using the keywords as anchor text (making them into a link), which would generate lots of backlinks at the same time helping your site in the search engines.

Rinse and repeat this for all your sites and squeeze pages.

3. Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is a great way to build 1 way backlinks to your sites, and also to get a lot of traffic too, as long as your posts are deemed as valuable by the regulars of these sites.

The best way to go about this is to add some friends once you join and start bookmarking other people sites first. Then every time you bookmark your latest blog post (this works best with blog posts) it won’t look like you are just bookmarking for traffic to your site, as it will be mixed in with a lot of other stuff you’ve bookmarked in between.

If you end up getting bookmarked by someone who has a big a following on one of these sites, you can end up receiving thousands of visitors within hours.

Here is a directory of the top social bookmarking sites – Top 20 most popular social bookmarking websites

4. RSS Feed Directories

RSS Feeds will ping certain services every time you make a new blog post, but first you have to submit your feed to the directories. So submit your RSS feed (if you have one) to as many feed directories as possible.

Here is a good list of directories to get you started – TopRank Best List of RSS Blog Directories to Submit Your Blog and Feed

5. Forum and Email Signatures

Signatures are set fields that are automatically filled in at the end of each forum post or email you write. So it makes sense to make use of them and add a link back to your blog or squeeze pages.

Just remember not to add any affiliate links to your signature if you are using forums.

Okay… That’s it for today, I should have some more ready
for you in a few days or so.

In the mean time if you would like to download  my FREE eBook that I recently released on the subject of traffic generation, click the download link below:

Traffic Guide For Newbies >> FREE Download >>

If you have any questions or if you just want to say introduce yourself, please leave a comment, and I’ll get right back to you… I love meeting new people.

Paul

I’m pleased to announce my very first ebook…. Traffic Guide For Newbies is now LIVE!… Go and grab your FREE copy now!!

Revealed: 11 Traffic Generation Techniques To Drive Targeted Traffic To Any Page Online !!

Finally you can…

• Use Social Networks To Pull In Massive Traffic !

• Get Access To The Best FREE Tools To Run Your Twitter Account On Auto Pilot + Get 1000′s of Followers!

• Use B…. ………….. To Maximum Effect And Make Good Friends & Contacts In The Process!

• Get More Comments On Every Blog Post You Make !

• Use S……… To Increase Your Traffic By 100′s or Even 1000′s Every Week

• Learn How To Spy On Your Competitors And Legally Tap Into Their Traffic Sources !

• And Much More….

Just enter your name and email below, and I’ll send you a copy right away!

You can grab your copy of the ebook right away, you will receive a zip file as soon as you confirm your email address. And I will send you the link to the download page as soon as it is ready. EDIT: >>> Download page is now live and ready !!

Yes you read that correctly… Unfortunately The download page isn’t quite ready yet, you see I had some trouble with making the squeeze page today. After hours of trying to get the opt-in box where I wanted it, I found a really good tool that completely solved the problem for me!

I’ll be sharing that tool very soon on the download page of Traffic Guide For Newbies, I’m currently in the middle of adding more bonuses to the download page too.

I would love to hear your thoughts on my ebook,  as it is my very first creation.

So if you’d be so kind as to leave your comments, testimonials and reviews below, and the best ones will earn a place on the squeeze page.

I’m going to be driving a lot of traffic to that page over the coming months, so not only will this help me, but it will also help you gain some free exposure for you and your business.

Enjoy the book!

Paul.

Hello there!!

After many weeks slaving away at my keyboard I have finally finished writing my first ebook… Yay!!

Well I say finished, there is still some grammar and spelling mistakes to correct, but I feel confident enough now to announce the release date, which is….

*drum roll*

Traffic Guide For Newbies goes live on Monday 23rd November 2009

If you would like to receive a FREE copy, then please fill out the form below. I will then send you a copy before I officially release it here on my blog.

I decided to purchase the domain name for it as well, and luckily for me the .com version was available. It was very lucky really as I’d already had the cover graphics made.

http://TrafficGuideForNewbies.com

You’ll also notice that Aweber have done something different to their system lately, the old opt-in webforms have gone! That was the only sort of webform I could get. Maybe there’s an option that allows you to change it to the old standard format, but I couldn’t see any option for it?… Maybe it was because I’m tired though?

Anyway… That’s it from me for now, I’ve got a lot of work to do over the next few days. There’s the corrections to make as I said, but I also have the squeeze page and thank you page to make yet. I also have other things I need to get done in-between that too.

So look out for the release of this in my next post on Monday, or sign-up above and have your copy sent directly to your inbox before I release it.

Take care everyone!

Paul.

Hey everyone

I have something *VERY* exciting to share with you today that I know is going to help you in a massive way!

As some of you will remember I was lucky enough to attend Lee McIntyre’s recent workshop, and the stuff Lee talked about has made me think very differently about Internet Marketing. So much so that I’m currently re-planning my whole business, and in the coming weeks and months ahead I will be making a lot of changes.

Now the good news for you is I just found out that fellow Internet Marketer Dean Holland, recently interviewed Lee McIntyre and they recorded the whole thing .

And what is even more exciting?…  Dean has made this available to download for FREE!!

(The above is affiliate link, if you go on to purchase any offer by going through this link I will receive a commission)

This MP3 download contains some absolute GOLD information that covers a whole range of topics, and I can also confirm that what Lee talks about in the interview has some cross-over from his recent workshop! So if you weren’t able to have attended one of Lee’s workshop’s yet then you’d have to be mad to miss out on this interview, seriously!!

The main theme of the interview is around traffic and traffic generation, quite simply because Dean has identified this is a HOT topic that many people struggle with. In fact I’ve even got an ebook coming out very soon on the same subject, so look out for that too.

However, there is a LOT more covered in this interview ranging from Lee’s business all the way through to outsourcing and making money, and the running time of the interview is just over 1 hour long of pure content.

http://paul-lear.com/go/gts-lee-mcintyre-traffic-tactics-interview.htm

(The above is affiliate link, if you go on to purchase any offer by going through this link I will receive a commission)

Now something you should also know, Lee McIntyre is not one of those big gurus that is in the spotlight all the time, however he makes over SIX figures per MONTH online!! And I’ve seen behind the scenes of how he does this live at his recent worshop, and that is why you simply MUST grab this audio download right now and hear what he has to say.

I’m pretty certain this will not be available to download for free for very long, so I recommend you grab it right now while you can as I’ve heard Dean will be selling this in the near future for $47, although he could easily charge much more than that as the content is so good.

http://paul-lear.com/go/gts-lee-mcintyre-traffic-tactics-interview.htm

(The above is affiliate link, if you go on to purchase any offer by going through this link I will receive a commission)

Also, once you have listened to it I would love to read your comments below, if you like it half as much as I did then I know you will be thrilled with what you learn!

Speak soon

Paul

I’ve recently been using MyBlogLog to drive some targeted traffic.

And in this post I’m going to go over what I have been doing to get this extra traffic. And I will also go over some settings to keep your MyBlogLog profile information secure.

First I’ll go over what I have been doing to get this extra traffic I’ve been getting recently.

MyBlogLog Traffic Generation

Step 1

Add your site to MyBlogLog and add the recent visitors widget

Add your blog to your account, you can do this under the ‘My Sites and Services’ section. It is located on the left on your profile page.

Once you’ve done that, you will be able to add the MyBlogLog widget to your site. If you are adding to a WordPress blog just add a new Text widget to your sidebar, and then paste the MyBlogLog widget code in there.

+

Always make sure you are permanently logged into MyBlogLog, so that you appear on the recent visitors widget when you visit blogs with it installed.

Step 2

Join other communities in your niche

I have recently found out that you are limited to the amount of communities you can join per day. I’m not sure of the exact time frame, but I’ve worked out it’s somewhere between 12 and 24 hours until you can join more.

So try and join 15 communities per day in your niche. You can do this using the search function on MyBlogLog.

You can also do this by finding someone with a blog in your niche, and look through which communities they have joined.

Step 3

Add people who have a blog in your niche to your contacts

As far as I know you can add as many contacts as you want each day, there’s probably a limit somewhere but I haven’t found it as I only add about 15-20 every couple of days.

I also add the creator of each community I join, to my my contacts.

Step 4

Introduce yourself to people in your niche

When you add someone as a contact, and join communities. Visit one of their blogs and then write them a short message introducing yourself. You can do this using the ‘messages’ tab on a members profile, and when you send the message choose private.  If you liked their blog let them know, if they have an interesting blog post you could also leave them a quick comment on their blog too.

Doing this won’t always lead to traffic, but it certainly helps. And at the same time you are also building relationships with like minded people.

Step 5

Occasionally message members of your community

This is a feature I’ve only recently found out about, and it allows you to message all your community members at once.

I haven’t actually used this feature myself yet, as this is not a feature that I want abuse. But I will be using it when I have something to tell my community members, that I think will be of value to them.

For instance I will most likely use message them when I release my first free ebook. Which coincidently I will be releasing in the next week or so.

If you want to use this feature you can find it on the community page for your blog. You will see a link ‘Message Members’

And that’s all I’ve been doing really, and I’ve noticed quite a lot of extra traffic since I started doing the above steps.

Try it out for yourself and keep an eye of your google analytics to see how well it’s working.

And don’t forget to come back and tell me how it went, I’d love to hear your results.

MyBlogLog Privacy Settings

I checked my privacy settings recently, and found out I’d been giving my contacts access to my email. I’ve changed the setting now, and I don’t really use that email address for anything other than MyBlogLog anyway. But I think it’s better to keep your email private, so I’m going to show you where to locate the setting so you can check it is set to private, unless you prefer to share it?

1. Click the My Account link at the top of the page.

2. Chose whether or not you want to hide your birthday?

3. Scroll down the page to Additional Info, and review the settings and set to ‘nobody’ for things you want to keep private.

Hope that helps? I know Jacinta Dean was wondering about this.

==========

Alexa Rank Challenge Update

On a side note, as I predicted I have easily made my Alexa rank goal. I wanted to get it down from 900,000 to 500,000 in 3 weeks! But it looks like I gave myself too much time to do that in, It’s been just over 2 weeks and I’m already at 405,971 !!

I’m very pleased with the result and will continue doing what I’ve been doing, and start to implement a few more of the Alexa rank tips from my Top Ten Tips To Increase Alexa Rank Post soon.

But for the moment I will be concentrating on getting my first ebook ready for releasing. And creating some gift packages for GiveAway events, as I’ve not really been working the GiveAway’s like I should have been. So I will be making sure to take advantage of them in the next few weeks, and see how well they perform for me.

So James Howard will have some time to catch me up now! 

For those who don’t know, me and James Howard are helping each other push ourselves, by making our own Alexa rank challenge between us. In a recent comment on this blog I gave myself the challenge of staying in front of him, and challenged James to catch and overtake me.

James has taken me up on the challenge and has recently made a post about it on his blog titled Alexa Rank Challenge. If you have a moment go and check James Howard’s blog out, he’s doing some good stuff over there.

This is a perfect example of how blog commenting has been used to build a relationship. So if you’ve not been doing much blog commenting recently, then you’re missing out on traffic and relationship opportunities.

I have some more case studies of this which I will include in another post soon… Watch this space

Until next time…

Paul.

As you may recall in my last post I said I would be posting some tips to help you improve your Alexa rank. I found quite a few tips, here are the beter sounding tips I found that may help you improve your Alexa rank. If you would like to know more about what Alexa rank is and how it works, please see my Improve Your Alexa Rank Challenge (Part 1) post.

Top 10 Tips (In no particular order)

1. Install the Alexa Toolbar – Seeing as Alexa rank is based on how many people visit your site per day, who have the toolbar installed. Install “Sparky” The Alexa Toolbar for Firefox today! Alternatively you could install another firefox plugin, which also exchanges data with Alexa – Search Status.

2. Install the Alexa Site Widget on your blog/site – The reason you want to do this is simple,  you want as many people to download the Alexa Toolbar as possible. So by installing the Alexa Site Widget on your blog, you are more likely to get people interested in Alexa rank, and if they have a website they’ll most likely download the toolbar. Even if they don’t have a website, they might find it interesting and install it anyway?

Here’s an example of what the Alexa Site Widget looks like:

3. Encourage others to install the Alexa Toolbar – This is a pretty obvious one, and you will probably have already noticed me doing this. So encourage everyone you know to install it, friends, family, work collegues, your nexdoor neighbours, the milkman … Everyone!!

4. Bookmark every post you make, and encourage others to bookmark your posts too – We all know bookmarking your posts is a great way to get lots of backlinks to your site, but it can also help you get lots of traffic too if done properly. For this to work you will need to do some research to find out what the hottest topics are in your niche, and then write very informative content answering the most popular questions. Use tip 5 to help get some exposure to these posts.

5. Visit Webmaster and Internet Marketing forums – On these type of forums the majority of people will have the Alexa toolbar installed, all you have to do is get them to your site. The best way to do this is to use your forum signature to link to popular posts on your blog, preferably offering free tips to improve Alexa rank. Or link to a post that answers a much asked question.  You can also try and offer them something of value for free, and experiment with different subject lines in your text link.

6. Make an ‘Alexa rank’ category – Register with Alexa.com and opt-in to receive occasional news emails from them, and blog about the latest Alexa news as soon as you get it. It would also be a good idea to create regular posts with more Alexa rank tips as you find them. Also be sure to do keyword research, and submit your posts to Article directories and link back to your Alexa rank category.

7. Blog about, or write and submit articles about Alexa – If you write about Alexa often enough, and do a little keyword research you are more likely to get found by people searching for information on Alexa. These people will more than likely have the Alexa Toolbar installed, which means when they pay you a visit, your Alexa rank will improve. If you are submitting articles about Alexa, make sure you give a good enough reason for them to visit your site in the resource box.

Example: “Find out how Paul improved his Alexa Site Rank by 1 million in 30 days.”

8. Talk about Alexa rank on social networks – Use sites like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and Youtube to get people interested in the Alexa  and how it works. When doing this post a snippet of the post, and give it an interesting subject line. And always include a link back to your site, to a relevant post. Of course you can do this with any subject matter, but for this we want people to get interested in Alexa and installing the toolbar, so a post about Alexa is needed.

9. Create a Webmaster Tools Section/page – The trick here is to attract Webmasters to a page on your site, where they can gain access and information to the latest and greatest Webmaster tools. If your page is good enough it will get bookmarked, linked to, social bookmarked, etc…

10. Join communities like MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog - Sign up for these blog community sites and add your site link to your profile, next install the site widget. You can see an example of one of these site widgets on my sidebar to the right. Doing this and various other things to do with these sites has almost doubled my traffic. I haven’t got a BlogCatalog account yet, but I will be signing up this week and putting the widget under the MyBlogLog widget.

For more Alexa rank tips check this post out from DoshDosh.com – 20 Quick Ways to Increase Your Alexa Rank, it is the post where I got most of my Alexa Traffic tips ideas from.

I will be making another post probably later this week, where I will be sharing what I’ve been doing with these blog community sites to increase my traffic… Stay tuned.

In the mean time amougst other things, I will be trying out some of these tips to improve my Alexa rank. I’ll be posting another update of my Alexa rank on Friday, hopefully I will have hit my 500,000 target by then after only 2 weeks!

I’ll try and get the blog community traffic tips post up by this Wednesday.

I hope you have enjoyed reading this post, please leave a comment and tell me what you think?

Paul.

P.S.

I messed my blog settings up last night and spent about an hour  reseting everything, so I decided to change the header as you’ve probably noticed… What do you think of it? I’ve done it for a bit of fun, and it makes me smile when I see it.

I will most likely be getting a professional header graphic made in the next couple of months. I’ll most likely have a play around in Photoshop in my spare time first though, even though my mentor, Alex Jeffreys doesn’t recommend it. As long as you do things like that in your spare time, and not when you should be working on something, I think it’s fine.

Well it’s just over a week ago now since I set my goal of getting  my Alexa rank down to 500,000 or below, and I’ve seen a big improvement in that time. Much more than I expected for the little work I’ve put into it.

If you check my last post I posted a screen shot which was taken on 17th September 2009, which was just over 1 week ago. And my Alexa rank was 908,199.

Here is my latest screen shot taken just moments ago:

It’s now 656,630 !!!.. I’m quite amazed at this, I really didn’t expect it to come down that fast. At this rate I should smash the 500,000 goal easy, unless it starts to slow now for some reason?

Funny thing is, I can honestly say that I haven’t really been doing anything much in the last week to try and get it down either! I have actually been feeling down all week, I suffer with recurrent mouth ulcers and I’ve had them pretty much the whole of September. It all started when I bit my lip, and it’s gone on from there and now I’m just getting rid of one on my tongue.

And don’t know if you’ve ever had a mouth ulcer, most people will have had one of these awful things at some point in their life, but they’ve got to be one of the most depressing and painful things I’ve ever had to endure. And I get these things several times a year!

Anyway enough about that!

The point is, all I have done this week is comment on a few peoples blogs, done a little networking on Facebook,  and added a few people on MyBlogLog. That is all I have done in the last 7 days to try and generate traffic. So just goes to show how well these methods must work.

I’ve also managed to find some good looking tips that I plan to use, and you can too, to help us with our Alexa rankings. I will go over these tips/methods in another post on Monday. I would include it in this post but it will be better for SEO if I make a separate post with a targeted keyword phrase in the title.

So try and pop back over sometime next week, and the post should be there where I’ll share these tips with you.

Thanks for reading.

Paul.

P.S.

Remember, if you want to improve your own Alexa rank, the best thing you can do is install the Alexa Toolbar. Just visiting your own site daily with it installed, will help with your Alexa ranking.

A couple of weeks ago I read a post on Rob Canyon’s blog about the Alexa Toolbar plugin for firefox, and how he had installed it and watched his rank increase. So I installed “Sparky” the Alexa Toolbar and I found my Alexa rank to be around 1,300,000. I didn’t take a screen shot of it at the time, but I wish I did now just to show as a bit of proof for this post.

So today I thought I better take a screenshot of my current  Alexa rank, which is 908,199. So in around 2-3 weeks I’ve managed to improve my Alexa rank by nearly 400,000!!

Now I’ve noticed for some reason the Alexa Toolbar doesn’t seem to give the same rank as at Alexa.com, it seems to be a day behind. I think Alexa updates you rank every 24 hours, and then the toolbar is updated with the previous days ranks? So I’m not really sure why it can’t show the same result as at Alexa.com, but there you go. If you want to know the exact rank of a site you need to visit Alexa.com to find out.

The good thing about the Alexa Toolbar is, if you click on the traffic rank shown it will take you straight to that sites page on Alexa.com. So it’s not too bad.

So how have a managed to get my Alexa rank down?

Well I’m not entirely sure, but I think it’s probably something to with the amount of other students who also have the Alexa Toolbar installed. You see your Alexa rank is determined by the amount of people who visit your site, who also have the Alexa Toolbar installed. There are some other sources they use to rank you which they don’t mention, but the data received by Alexa from the people who have their toolbar installed, is the main thing that is used to give us our Alexa ranking.

It will also most likely be something to do with the fact that I have the Alexa Toolbar installed now, and I visit my blog daily.

Another reason that may have helped, is I have the Yahoo My BlogLog widget installed. I think people like to get exposure by having their face on as many blogs with this widget as possible at all times. Or at least that’s one of the things I like to do.

I have also been doing a lot more blog commenting than usual, although I still don’t think I’m doing enough, I think this has helped my rank increase because many of the people who’s blogs I’ve commented on, have visited my blog in return and some, quite a few actually, have even left me a comment in return for commenting on their blog, which is always nice.

If you would like to find out more, click on the following text to see exactly how the Alexa traffic rank is determined

So for the next 2 weeks or so, I’m going to work on getting my Alexa rank down even more. In fact I’m going to set myself a little challenge, I want to see if I can get my rank down to 500,000 within the next 3 weeks. So lets see how I go and I’ll make another post in 3 weeks from now with my results. And I will also be making a few posts in-between as updates on my progress and what I’ve been doing, and with some tips on what I’ve learnt.

I would also recommend you also install the Alexa Toolbar to help improve your sites Alexa rank, and also so you can follow my progress and see if I’m on track to hit the 500,000 mark. Not to mention it’s also fun to find out the Alexa rank of each site you visit, and see if you are higher than them. Of course it would also help me with my challenge if you were to then revisit my site with the toolbar installed.

I also like to seek out blogs with higher traffic ranks than myself in an effort to try and improve my ranking. I’m not sure if it works, but the higher the Alexa rank for a site, the more traffic they are getting. Which also equals more exposure for your comment and more chance someone will click your link to find out more about you.

So in this period of time I’m going to be experimenting with lots of different methods, as well as the methods I’ve already been using and trying to figure out what works. I will update you with my findings on this when I post my results of this challenge. I will also be blogging a lot more in this time too, as more content should equal more visitors.

Challenge yourself to improve your own Alexa rank

Why not set yourself  a challenge to improve your own Alexa rank. I think it would be much more fun if a few people do it at the same time, and we all blog about it, and visit each others blogs daily to help improve our ranks. What do you think?

If you are going to be doing this too, then please leave a comment on this post letting me know, I will then help you by paying your blog a daily visit for the next 3 weeks. And I would hope you would do the same for me, but no worries if you can’t, I will still help you out.

Until next time…

Paul.

I’ve just finished watching the latest coaching call, Module #5 – Traffic Tornados. As the title suggests this module was all about the best ways of generating traffic. Most of the ways were totally free too. So I will give you a quick summary of what was covered, and then some time in the future I will make individual posts and possibly videos, going over these methods in depth.

At the start of the call Alex first reminded us about Module #1, and how we need to stay focused and have a plan of attack. Now a lot has changed since I made my plan back in Module #1, so soon I will be adding all that I’ve learnt since then into my master plan. I’ve only been doing weekly plans so far, this time I have enough knowledge to know what I want to be doing for the next 90 days. And I’ll still be learning more stuff on top of that, but that statement is always going to be true, even after the coaching has ended, because as humans we never stop learning new things.

But even when the coaching is over, it’s never really over, we have access to the private members forum for life, which the value of I think is priceless. The community we have over there is great, and creating a program or product of my own, and maybe having a forum is something I plan to do one day. Of course I won’t be able to do that just yet, but it’s one of my main goals for the future. Before I can do anything like that I need to put everything into practice, until I’m seeing all the right results. Until then I all I can do is share with you what I’m learning, so you too can put it into practice.

So on to…

Traffic Methods:

Forums

Forums = traffic + JV partners – Using this method you should not try & sell, and just be YOU and give value in your posts by helping people. If you do this people are more likely to want to find out more about you, and they will click your link that you will have in your forum signature file, which is underneath each post you make. This is also a great way to get a lot of one way backlinks to your site.

Search for forums in your niche on google, for example: internet marketing forums list, brings up some good lists/directories of forums in the Internet Marketing niche. You want to join the forums with the highest traffic, this would usually be the forum at the top of the search results. You can check the forums traffic ranking on Alexa.com against other forums if you want too.

Articles

Article marketing is a great way to drive traffic, and get backlinks to your site. If you have trouble writing articles, you can research the article directories for your subject, for ideas on what to write about. Once you find an article you like, you can totally rewrite it in your own words and add your own twist to it. But you need to make sure you add your keywords into the article. You can also use this method for ideas for your blog posts too, you’ll never have writters block again!

Search for Article Directories on google. Ezine articles is the best with the most traffic, but it’s also harder to get your acticles accepted because they are more strict. That’s the reason they’re the best though. I’ll make a post of all the best Article sites soon.

Blog Catalog

Use Blog Catalog and similar sites to search for the top listed sites in your niche, and add value comments on their blogs and build relationships with the site owners.

Google.com

Use the search term – link: (example- link: http://paul-lear.com ) to find out which sites are linking to any given site. Then go out and see if you can get your link on those sites somehow, if it’s a blog you can comment on a post and leave your link.

Yahoo.com

Use the search term – linkdomain: (example- linkdomain:http://paul-lear.com) to find out which sites are linking to any given site. Then go out and see if you can get your link on those sites somehow, if it’s a blog you can comment on a post and leave your link.

Alexa.com

Search for big name sites in your niche i.e:- the sites on the first page of the search results on google, yahoo, etc… Then go out and see if you can get your link on those sites somehow, if it’s a blog you can comment on a post and leave your link.

Press Releases

These can get you a lot of traffic, you can even end up getting picked up by Yahoo News. This is more advanced stuff though, press releases can cost around $200. But there are some free press release sites too, but obviously you won’t get anything near the results that you’d get by using a paid option. This is something I will go into at a later date when I know more about them. For now I’m sticking to the free options.

GiveAways

GiveAways are a great way to build your list and drive traffic, for more information on this you can download my free Listbuilding With Alex report. It gives step by step instructions on how you can use GiveAways to build your list.

Video Marketing

Use sites like YouTube to your advantage by submitting targetted videos, then do some keyword research and include these in your description, title, and tags. Also make sure to include your full website url in the description.

Social Media

Use sites like stumble upon, digg, delicious, to bookmark interesting posts including your own.

UStream

You can use ustream.tv to broadcast yourself live, it’s like having your own TV station. You can advertise to your list, on your blog, Twitter, when you will be broadcasting. I’ve not really looked into this, but it has huge potential.

I think that was about it, I’m sure you’ll agree there’s plently to keep you busy there, and great potential in all of the above methods discussed. Now all we have to do is take action and put them all to good use, and very soon I’m sure we’ll all be seeing floods of traffic.

Just remember though, you can’t do everything at once. Tackle one method at a time, and be consistant, consistancy is key when using free traffic methods. And make sure to always have a plan, and stick to it at all times!

Until next time….

Paul.