Tastybuds

It has been 20 days since I started this blog, and although I am trying to build it up as quick as possible, it is a long process.

My initial goals were to get an average of 10 visitors per day, and 4 comments on my blog. The idea is that in addition to pure traffic, I am trying to build up a community of people interested in optimizing AdSense, and other analytics. In order to accomplish these goals, I set out to average a posts day, comment twice on 5 different blogs, and accumulate 20 posts.

I now have 35 posts, which is almost 2 posts per day. Commenting has been difficult for me; I commented 3 or 4 times on the YieldBuild blog, but I have not found any other blogs to heavily comment on. I think I have scattered a single comment on 6 other blogs, which brings my total to 10, but I still need to find blogs which I am deeply interested in.

How has this payed off? I am now averaging 3 visits per day, and have gotten my 4 comments. I still have a bit to go before I am at 10 visits per day, but feel I am beginning to get traction. What I am happiest about so far in terms of my progress is that I’ve managed to get a free lunch from one of my readers for blogging and commenting.

I also have begun to monitor my SEO process. Almost all my traffic so far has come from comments, but in the last day or two, more is coming from Google. My ranking for “optimizing adsense” has jumped from 89 to now 26. My next goal will be to get that into the top 10.

So what do need to do to finish off my first goals? Continuing to post at least once a day shouldn’t be a problem, but I need to really find more blogs that interest me and comment heavily. I will try to average at least one comment a day. I also have submitted a few articles to EzineArticles, and if those get approved, will submit more. My hope is to achieve my goals within th next 20 days.

Just after posting about being excited about getting a minuscule amount of traffic, I have two more milestone I just passed.  I just got my first comment and my first signup into an RSS reader.  The person in question works and posts for YieldBuild, the blog I just got interested in.  I had commented on one of their articles, posted here that I liked their blog, and then added them on in my links section.

Not sure exactly how they landed here, but it just goes to show that involving yourself in the community is the best way to get more traffic and dedicated traffic.  It is definitely necessary to build up a strong library of good posts (both for content and SEO purposes), but I am more and more beginning to think that some of the most important aspects of blogging happen outside of your blog.  I am going to continue to try to find good blogs, comment on those blogs, and write about those blogs.  I only have so much time, so I will have to balance this with my other objective of building up enough quality posts, but I don’t see that as much of a problem.

My first day of traffic I got 2 visitors who both left the site immediately. Now on my second day of traffic I got 7 more visitors, and one of those people visited 7 pages over the course of 6 minutes. That is exactly the type of highly engaged visitor I want.

But I didn’t get this traffic through Google or my attempts at SEO, I got it through participating in the blog community. Two of the three comments I have left so far elsewhere have resulted in traffic coming my way. And even more unexpected, when I mentioned a TechCrunch article I was interested in, I automatically got put on that page as a trackback. That trackback has already resulted in 4 visitors in under a day.

Granted, these numbers are extremely small, but it is giving me an idea of where to focus my attention. Linking to other articles seems like a huge potential source of traffic, and it is all part of an overall community and discussion I am trying to get myself into anyway.

At first I thought getting traffic was all posting a ton and SEO, but now I see it is really about actively participating in a community you are interested in.

After 4 days of getting everything set up, and writting as much as possible, Google Analytics I’d finally reporting that I an getting traffic. Granted, it is only 2 visitors (from Australia and Arizona), and they both bounced, nut I’ve got to start somewhere.

So far I have been writing only about what I am interested in, and about topics which I think might be interesting to others. I haven’t really been playing the SEO game much, although I might start to a bit. However, I will have to be careful, as I am writing this blog to get people involved, not search engines.

However, to get those people, I have to start somewhere, and that usually means getting Google to like my site. I have installed the “All In One SEO” plugin, a Google Sitemap Plugin, and a plugin to help with tagging my posts. Next I will focus on the actual writing aspects of SEO. In doing so, I will probably start writing quite a bit about SEO, which is now one of my new categories.