It’s Day One of my project to get traffic to the PLR blog. As I mentioned in my last post, one of the things I did wrong with the giveaway was that I didn’t put enough focus on driving traffic to the site. My goal now is to take the blog from the 30 visitors a day it gets now to 100 visitors a day using social media as the main source of traffic.

In order to have a starting point to measure from, I took a screen shot showing the daily visitors for this month so far. I also went through the individual URLs to determine the most popular posts by actual views and how many times they were used as the entry page. I’m not going to list the actual URLs here so as not to skew my results, but the top three we’ll be starting with have stats as follows:

• URL #1 – Page views = 80, Used as entry = 31
• URL #2 – Page views = 66, Used as entry = 22
• URL #3 – Page views = 54, Used as entry = 24

The goal by time we reach the 100 visitor a day mark is to have all of the individual posts bookmarked. I’m not using automation for this, nor am I outsourcing at this point because there’s no room in the budget for it. I also want to get a feel for how each site works and that’s not something you can really do using mass-posting software. (Not that I’m against the software, because I can assure you when the budget allows it’s on the list to buy!)

I’m also not going to overly concern myself with finding the absolute perfect keywords. I have, in the past, driven myself to distraction and inaction by over-analyzing keywords so this time I’m just not gonna worry about them and get things done. I do have a list of about 10-12 relevant keywords that I’ll be using just to keep the tagging consistent and that’s as far as I’m going with keywords for now since I’m not focusing on SEO at this point.

That’s it for me today. I’m off to get started on my social bookmarking tasks for the day. I’m actually really excited about doing this. It’s something I’ve always managed to find ways to procrastinate over, so I’m counting on the fact that I’m forcing myself to get it done publicly to keep the ball rolling. If you want to make sure you get the latest posts and results, be sure to either subscribe to the email version of The Ritchie Report, or subscribe to the RSS feed.

Have a great day!

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It’s been one of those weekends where nothing went according to plan. I’ve been trying to get this post up since Saturday afternoon!

I’m starting on the traffic-getting portion of my new project on Monday. In the last two weeks I have set up a store using the BANS software, and added a new wordpress blog to go along with it. On Friday night I added a sitemap and fixed up all the pages so that they have proper titles, keywords and descriptions — all that good SEO stuff. It still needs some tweaking on the store side, and the blog needs more content yet, but it’s good enough to start getting visitors and making sales. I can tweak as I go so that any new content is tailored to what people are searching for. (At least that’s the plan.)

In the interests of doing this semi-scientifically, and so that I have a proper starting point for reference, here are a few relevant stats:

1. Site started January 10, 2008

2. Unique visitors since January 10: 112

3. The site has been visited by five different robots so far: Google, Yahoo, MSN, Alexa, and 1 unknown.

4. Alexa rank on January 26 was 2,205,535. That’s up considerably from the 5million plus it was a week prior.

5. So far I’ve been able to find 8 pages indexed on Google, and none in either Yahoo or MSN.

A couple of notes:

1. The best traffic day so far was the day I posted content on the front page of the site. That brought 104 unique visitors, mostly from Stumble Upon.

2. The best ranking I have out of the 8 pages so far is #286 of 34,100 competing pages. So there’s definitely some work to be done if I want to have any success with organic search engine traffic.

3. I’m not going to show you the site at this point because I don’t want to skew the site statistics. Normally I’m totally against not showing actual results, but I can see how that would render some of the testing less than useful if people were going just to have a peek.

Now that I have a starting point, it’s time to work at bringing in the visitors. Since I don’t have a budget for doing paid advertising at the moment, I’ll be focusing on no-cost methods such as bum marketing tactics, and social media marketing. I have a ton of courses and ebooks and videos that I’ve bought over the last few months, and this project will be an educational experience if nothing else as I put what I’m learning into practise.

Starting February 1st I’ll also be taking advantage of the social marketing training that Dr. Mani is offering. But since I don’t want to wait another week — I’d actually like to have at least my first sale by the end of this month — I’ll plunge into the deep end by myself for the first part of this week.

I’ll be posting updates here, so make sure you’re subscribed to the feed or the mailing list so that you don’t miss the good stuff!

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