I have been doing a lot of reading and research on how to promote your blog and website and I have found what appears to be some great suggestions.  So I had the idea that I would dive in, begin implementing these suggestions and diary my results on my blog.  This way everyone can learn from my experience.  And hopefully I can help others to maybe avoid some mistakes or find shortcuts.

Here are my thoughts; I began my blog to support solopreneurs in the start up phase and first couple of years in business.  That support is intended to help them grow their businesses as well as remember to live balanced lives and not let their businesses take over.  Not that everyone wants to avoid letting their business take over their life.  But, the support will be available.  Okay, I got off track a little here.  I am going to take this relatively baby blog and use the strategies I have found to determine how long it takes to generate a fair amount of traffic.  And we will find out together what works and what doesn’t work.

Let’s begin…About a week ago I added the plugin from www.feedburner.com (netted me three new subscribers).  Suggestion number two is to post to your blog frequently and my goal will be three times a week.  This will be my third post this week and I have two more in my pipeline.  To accomplish this I will set aside time each week to just write, research, and build up a backlog of options.  Suggestion number three post comments to other blogs on a regular basis.  I began this practice today, Saturday June 28th and plan to continue at least once a week to post comments to two or three blogs.  We will find out what the magic number is.  Third suggestion that I am implementing this week is to write and submit articles to ezine directories.  From my research it appears that www.ezinearticles.com is the most widely used.  Today, I am posting my first article.  Finally, about mid week I added the Stumble It logo and rated my blog on the site.  As you can see their code has been added but the logo doesn’t display properly.  I have decided to leave it as is for now.

Here is my blog history with virtually no promotion going on except a small amount of pay per click.  I have suspended the pay per click with the exception of the local newspaper site which I have a balance of $50.00 in my account.  This will be the only money I spend during the next 30 days.

Month    Unique visitors    Number of visits       Pages Hits          Bandwidth

Jan 2008      260                  331                     1122             6985 24.84 MB

Feb 2008      303                  401                     1172             8241 28.93 MB

Mar 2008      273                  349                     1003             5577 22.69 MB

Apr 2008      160                  244                       827             3237 16.26 MB

May 2008     432                  573                     1041            10530 38.46 MB

Jun 2008      224                  364                     1122             5244 27.72 MB

Total         1652                 2262                    6287             39814 158.90 MB

Would you agree if I can’t do better than this I should take up crochet or something?  Okay, let’s have some fun.  And please give me your thoughts and check back frequently to learn about my results.