The New Traffic Plan

Posted on January 28, 2008
Filed Under Traffic |

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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