I’ve decided it’s about time I posted an update of my progress, and what I have been doing recently. This is actually an idea I came up with after visiting Jacinta Dean’s blog. Jacinta has been doing weekly posts of her daily tasks, and I’ve been meaning to do something similar for a few weeks now.

I’ve decided not to do a list of my daily tasks for the week, as I doubt I would keep up with it. So instead I will try and do one of these posts, once a month, as I think this will be less of a chore for me!

I wasn’t really writing things down much back in August, so I’ll start in September.

Now I can see how important it is to keep a journal of your daily tasks, this is something that Alex Jeffreys talks a lot about in the coaching. So if you haven’t started to keep a journal yet, then I recommend you to start one today!

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.

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I’ve just verified this blog so that it shows a green tick on my MyBlogLog community page. It’s just to prove this blog is owned by me, and if you have a MyBlogLog account it’s something you might as well do.

See screen shot below:

If you are a MyBlogLog member and would like to verify your blog, check out this link for more info – http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/comm_verify.php

I’ll try and make another post tomorrow.

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.

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.

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.

Hey everyone!

This is an exercise in creative blogging that, The GazzMan, AKA Gary Simpson, has introduced to us over in the Marketing With Alex private forum.  It all started with Gary writing 25 things about himself, then he picked 5 random people who he wanted to know more about. And each person who takes up the challenge is to then pick another 5 people out of our fellow students.

I’ve actually been tagged by 3 people, Roger Edwards, Mick Fallon, and Steve Wakefield. Anyway I’ve finally got around to listing my 25 things, so here goes.

1. Paul was born and still lives in Manchester, UK.

2. Paul loves animals, and especially cats.

3. Paul feels strongly about cruelty to animals, seeing and hearing about it upsets and angers him.

4. Paul was once pinned up against a fence by an Alsatian dog, while it overtowered him and repeatedly barked at him. This happened when he was about 4 or 5 years old. His mum managed to distract the dog eventually and he was able to get away unharmed.

Hey guys,

This is just me having a bit of fun and getting some more practice in front of the camera, I’m trying to be myself on this video without letting my nerves get in the way. I’m definitely getting more confident in front of the camera. I actually managed to smile on this video

What I took from watching this video back was, that I need to either stop myself moving around so much, or do my videos sitting down. I tend to feel better doing them standing up, but if I can’t stop moving about then I’ll have to do them sitting down and get used to it.

Another thing I’m learning to do, is not worry too much about what people are going to think of me, that was the biggest thing I had to get over before doing my first video. I’m definitely seeing improvements on each video I’ve done so far, athough I’ve still got a long way to go before I’m ready to appear in my first Hollywood movie.

Here is the video that I said I would produce in the last post. I finally go to grips with Camtasia Studio, and you know what? It’s really easy to use, after watching the great tutorial videos that camtasia provide for you that is.

So this video basically shows you how to easily search for, and install Wordpress plugins from within your Wordpress admin control panel. This saves you a lot of fuss and messing about with uploading it to your server with an FTP client (FTP software). I only recently discovered I could install them directly from within the control panel, I had been using FTP to upload each plugin. So as you can imagine that ws a huge waste of my time, so just in case any of you didn’t know about this, I thought I’d make this video to make you aware of this feature.

I hope you enjoyed the video, please let me know what you think as it was my first attempt at this sort of thing.

Which Plugins Do I Have Installed On My Blog?

This is a question I’ve often wondered when looking at other peoples blogs, so I thought why not make a page on my blog listing all the plugins I have installed on MY blog. That way anyone who would like to model their blog on mine can easily do so.

I also thought it’d be a good idea to include a short description of what each plugin does. So that is what I’ve done, you will now find the ‘Blog Plugins‘ tab at the top of the page, underneath the title.

But to save you needing to click away from this post, I might as well include the list here too, so here goes. But you still might want to visit the ‘Blog Plugins‘ tab, depending the date you are reading this. The blog plugins tab will be updated whenever I install a new plugin on my blog, but this post here will not be updated.