January 15th, 2009 | 
Author: Today I have been posting more articles to the blog and I now have a grand total of 15 published articles on the blog. I have just checked in google and they are all indexed in google already.
For each article, my main target phrase when searched in google does not show up yet apart from 2 of the articles which show up on page 3. This is pretty good, especially when they each get on average over a thousand searches a month. Time to push on and get to page 1 by trying to get some backlinks from good sites.
Promotion Activities
- Published a squidoo lens on Cruises with links back to my main blog.
- Did some commenting on other relevant squidoo lenses and included backlinks to my blog.
- Made a shortlist of potential link partners and have collected contact details.
- Have started to contact potential link partners with requests.
- Sent 5 articles to Ezine articles, Go and Isnare with various links back to various posts on my blog.
- Social bookmarked each post.
- Submitted the RSS feed to many different Directories.
- Submitted sitemap to google and setup webmaster tools.
- Created a robots.txt file on my server and allow all robots.
- Searched for some blogs using comment Kahuna for doing some valid blog commenting with links back.
Results
Today, I am up to 10 unique visitors all coming from google. The keywords they are arriving on are mainly long tail variations of my main target phrases. I will probably wait until I have all my posts done and hopefully getting over 100 unique visitors a day before I start adding adsense blocks.
Things To Do
More of the same promotional activities plus I am getting together a press release to get a buzz going. I am also considering adding a forum and a photo gallery to add some stickiness to the blog.
Hi Stephen,
As useful as the stats that you have displayed are, I would additionally like to see the info displayed under the “Connect to site from” section of the AWStats of your blog. I don’t think it would give too much away and you could blur out anything that was particularly sensitive. Just a thought.
Also, are you doing all this work yourself or are you outsourcing some/most of it?
Keep up the good work.
Nick
Hi Stephen,
I just wanted to thank you for sharing all of this information. I’ve just started my blog and I’m following your path (much slower than you as this is all rather time consuming!) But I just have a quick question, and sorry if the answer if obvious, but why haven’t you got adsense up there already? You say you’re going to wait until you have 100 unique visitors and all posts done, is there a reason for that?
Thanks again,
Zoe
Hi Nick, I will look at your suggestion for future posts I make.
Hi Zoe, I will start a thread about this in the forum..
This is fantastic info and I want to thank you for being so transparent. This is a process that anyone with a little time and persistence can do and it’s more important than ever given how many people are losing employment.
I was wondering the same thing Zoe was. What could hurt you by posting up the adsense blocks before you get the 100 unique?
Nothing could hurt but I just don’t need the distraction from geting the content up and traffic in at the moment. It won’t be long now though…
Hi Stephen,
I wanted to know if you use isnare to submit your article only or also pay to spread it through directories.
If you use the paying service for distribution how effective is it,and how does google consider it?
Thanks and hope for a fast answer