As a reward for completing Day 3 of Dr. Mani’s CHD Awareness Squidoo Challenge (yes, I’m way behind), I’ve allowed myself to spend a half hour catching up on reading twitter posts and I’m finding some really cool stuff here.

First up, Merlene made my life so much easier today by blogging about a Firefox add-on called Vertigo. By putting the tabs down the side I can see everything I’ve got open without having to do the horizontal scroll. (Kinda sounds like a really bad line dance, doesn’t it?) I don’t think I could cope with anywhere near 74 tabs at one time, but I’ve got 12 open now and this morning that was driving me nuts.

From there I wandered over to check thefluffanutta’s twitter page (it’s a goldmine for Squidoo users) and found myself checking out a post on the SquidU forums which led me to this article by Darren Rowse on The Benefits of Twitter for Bloggers.

Reading that gave me some ideas for how I could use Twitter a little more productively, and it also led me to the Treader by Bob Lee. With that installed now I can tweet directly from my Google Reader. And considering how many times I’ve thought about tweeting about a blog post and procrastinating because I didn’t have Twitter open at the time, I’m really excited about the possibilities of this.

Not bad for a half-hour of semi-random trail wandering. As things go it’s a pretty good reward for having a productive and wakeful day. Sure, I could’ve opted for a nap as my reward, but if I make it until midnight it will be the first time in over a year that I’ve been able to stay awake all day.

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!

Then reality set it, along with its attendant overwhelm. Who am I kidding? I have a hard enough time doing one site in one hundred days, let alone one a day!

And so I found a compromise where I can work on my list of 100 sites, but not move on to a new one until the first one has made at least its first dollar. I also decided that in doing so, I will find ways to make use of the mountains of private label rights and master resale rights material that I have hoarded on various hard drives around here.

Then I decided I would blog about the whole process, so that anyone who’s interested can follow along. But, in typical Ruthie style, I procrastinated a bit on starting the blogging process, so the project is actually in its seventh day today.

Part of me thinks, why would anyone care what I have to say. It’s not like I’m some super successful guru or anything. And being as introverted as I am, it’s really hard for me to intentionally put myself into a position to be criticized and not totally in control. So as much as this is an exercise in creating profitable websites, it’s also an exercise in stretching my own comfort zone. I’m taking bigger, bolder actions in order to achieve my bigger, bolder dreams.

So here we are, sixteen days into the new year. It’s finally time to say Happy New Year, and let’s get to work!