I took the month of July, Thirty One days to test some of the suggestions I read online for driving traffic to my blog. After the first few days I realized how quickly I could get sucked in and loose many hours while playing with this stuff. Although this is important I chose to limit the time I devoted to implementing these strategies. As a solopreneur I am responsible for all of my business activities and to limit my time I would set a simple kitchen timer for 30-45 minutes each day.
Now on to the fun stuff. I used methods like: social networking sites (I have read that this is becoming more and more important) article submissions, and posting to other blogs. These methods increased my external links to my site. One of the most important measures for a website is how many other sites link to it. The more links the better. I had 74 external links in July – which was a significant increase. This is fun, I was Stumbled Upon 309 times. My articles were posted on other sites a total of six times. And search engine traffic of 104 visits came from the keyword “coaching”.
I told you I would introduce you to a new resource today.  I used this resource to grade my webiste on July 10th and I scored 51 out of 100.  Today I measured again and I scored a 77 out of 100.  Not too bad.
“A website grade of 77/100 for www.donnaamos.com means that of the hundreds of thousands of websites that have previously been evaluated, our algorithm has calculated that this site scores higher than 77% of them in terms of its marketing effectiveness. The algorithm uses a proprietary blend of over 50 different variables, including search engine data, website structure, approximate traffic, site performance, and others.”
Some of the information the report captured:
Google PageRank: 3     Google Indexed Pages: 67    Technorati Blog Ranking: Top 2.71 %
My 22 year old son who is a techie database creator told me that those sites don’t really work.  I choose to believe he doesn’t know everything he thinks he does.  The website is www.websitegrader.com.  Run the report on your site and the program will give you your measurements as well as suggestions to improve your rankings.  It was kind of fun to see what I could accomplish in a short period of time.
Month             Unique visitors      Number of visit        Pages
Jul 2008                642                       1202                    3919
I will keep you informed over the next few months as to how quickly my traffic continues to grow. I found these strategies to be simple to implement and any solopreneur could easily spend a little time each week growing their traffic.
Here are the challenges I will continue to work on and give you feedback as I make progress: Average time on my site is still less than 3 minutes (not good); and sales are still not where I would like them and I just added within the last few days a free report that folks could subscribe to which should allow me to increase my list.
I would love to hear what you are doing to drive your traffic as well.