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!

September

• Contributed in a Giveaway event for the first time, and unbeknown to me, I went and chose the only event with different rules from the average giveaway. The rules in this giveaway were that instead of all gifts being shown at the start, you had to earn points by referring people to get your gift shown! I don’t think my gift ever shown because I found it hard going to get referrals. So that put me off giveaways a little, as I thought they were all like that.

• Caught up on some coaching modules that I had fallen behind on.

• Ended up not being very well throughout September, and it made me lose focus a bit. I also let my birthday pass by without mentioning it here. It was on 17th September, and I turned 28! I had a few beers with my cousin, and despite being ill I still managed to have a decent time.

• Installed the Alexa Toolbar which sparked a string of posts about it – Improve Your Alexa Rank Challenge (Part 1), Alexa Rank Challenge (Week 1 Update), and Top 10 Tips To Increase Alexa Rank

• Started trying out different things with MyBlogLog to see if I could get some extra traffic from there.

• Started enjoying blog commenting more, and made some good friends in the process.

• Had an idea for my first ebook/report, and started to plan and write it.

• Purchased one of John Thornhill’s latest and greatest products – Profit From PLR . I’ve had a quick look at the videos and this is top quality information, and I’m pretty sure that once I put this into action (which will be as soon as I’ve finished working on my free ebook) I’m sure I will be able to make some good monthly income from this business model. I can also see this building me some big targeted lists in various niches too.

October …so far

• Made a blog post about what I had learnt from experimenting with MyBlogLog to drive traffic – How I Use MyBlogLog To Drive Targeted Traffic.

• Continued writing ebook, but started to struggle with it a bit. I’ve heard it called writers block, and I know exactly what they mean now. I have been writing pages, then having a break. When I come back and read what I wrote in the last session, I decide it’s a load of rubbish and delete it. But I’m getting on with it a bit better now and not reading it back so much. It’s also turning out to be a longer book than I planned.

• Found what I think it a decent package to use for the Giveaway events. I’ve submitted it to 2 events so far, which haven’t yet launched. I’m going to set a page up showing all the current giveway events soon, as this might help with referrals? I’ve seen a lot of others doing this so I think it must help a bit?

• I set up a second Twitter account based on one of my profit pulling platforms, and to help build my list. Currently I’ve grown it to 2,600 followers in 3 weeks. I’m not sure whether or not you are supposed to have more than 1 account? But I noticed one of my friends on the coaching has set up another account, and he doesn’t seem to have had any problems. And I’ve not had any issues either.

• Secured my place for Lee Mcintyre’s live workshop in Manchester, which is perfect for me because I live in Manchester! But this has also been a huge step for me, because as you may have read in my 25 Things You Should Know post, I have a bit of a problem with unwanted anxiety. Just a few short months ago I would have done anything possible to avoid going to an event like this. But ever since I started on Alex Jeffreys coaching program my self confidence has been rising at a fast rate, and instead of dreading the event I’m looking forward to it. I’ll be making a post or three about it afterwards, but it’s not for another week yet!

• Started keeping a journal of my daily tasks rather than just writing the odd thing down, which I was doing before.

• I seem to have been focusing too much on my blog recently, and not spending enough time on my list building. So I’ve changed my focus back to list building, which is where it should be.

• Installed some  more plugins on my blog, and updated my Blog Plugins page. One of the plugins I wouldn’t have found, if I hadn’t of paid Norene Broyton’s blog a visit. Norene made a post titled – Hear Ye, Hear Ye — A Unique Blogging Tool , which is about a plugin that you will see at the top of each of my posts. It gives you the choice to listen to the blog post, rather than read it. I find it quite fun to listen to. You can also download the audio as an MP3 or Podcast.

And finally that’s about it. Phew!!.. That was a lot of typing, and yet another long post from me. I do hope I’m not boring anyone with these long posts? And try to keep them as short as I can, while fitting everything in. But it can be hard as you can see.

Right now I’m going to have a well earned rest, and then I’ll get back to joining a few more giveaways. And continue writing my ebook of course, I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I will have at least finished writing it by the end of next week. Then I will need to look at getting some graphics.

So until next time…

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.

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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.

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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.