Well the results are in. You may remember that following a competition set by my coach and mentor Alex Jeffreys I set myself the challenge of getting 2009 visitors to my blog by the start of the new year.

This challenge began on the morning of 19th December 2008 when I posted a screenshot of the current state of visitors at that time. You may want to refresh your memory by checking out that post?

Anyway, here’s the same screenshot taken this morning…

You can see that I’ve added an arrow to show the challenge start date. The big peak is when I launched my Christmas gift giveaway, which worked well and created a surge of traffic. You can also see that after the peak my daily traffic has risen consistently. I’m hoping this will continue into the future.

So the final tally according to Google Analytics is 883 visits, which if I take away the 170 visits I began with, leaves a total of 713 visits. Now if you read one of my previous posts you’ll know that I’m deeply suspicious of the accuracy of these results. Simply because of the feedback and comments I’ve been receiving I know that there has been more traffic than this.

So lets take a look at my server logs for the period…

And here are the actual numbers…

OK, so using the results from the server log table above I received a total of 2,841 visits during the challenge period.

WooHoo! I think you know which results I’m going to believe. I actually did it – I beat the challenge. I am really stoked.

If you visited this blog during my challenge then I want to thank you so much for helping me achieve this target and more. You’re great!

Make sure you come back here soon, because I’m gonna to tell you exactly what I did to achieve this.

Until then – be successful

Technorati Tags: blog challenge, blog promotion, blog traffic, blog visitors, blogging

Well you asked for it and here it is.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I was using blog carnivals to drive traffic here and I got many requests asking me how to do that. So here is a video showing you step by step how to go about it…

If you have any more questions, or if there’s any other stuff you’d like me to show you how to do then just leave a comment below and I’ll oblige.

If you haven’t picked up my Christmas gift to you then please do so at the previous blog posts.

Be successful.

Technorati Tags: blog carnivals, blog promotion, blog traffic, blogging

Today has been a very positive and enjoyable day despite me fighting off a headache for most of it.

For me today has been as much about learning as it has about doing. Yesterday evening I came across a new course that provides a series of videos ahowing the top methods for driving traffic to a blog. I’ll reveal more about these as I try each one and report about it here.

So method number one is blog carnivals. Now submitting to blog carnivals was one of the suggestions that came from my forum responses yesterday. Only trouble was I didn’t have a clue what they were or how to use them. So the video in the course was most welcome and told me exactly what I needed to know.

Basically a blog carnival is when another blog owner places a number of links to posts on other blogs that are relevant to their own blog’s topic. So if you get a post accepted in a carnival, everyone who visits the blog holding the carnival could potentially be directed to your blog.

I spent a good hour this afternoon finding appropriate blog carnivals and submitting articles off my blog to them. I must have submitted to about 15 carnivals and hopefully my articles will be accepted on at least a few of them. Here’s hoping!

That’s all for today. Speek to you again tomorrow. Until then…

Be successful.

Technorati Tags: blog promotion, blog traffic, blog visitors, blogging

Here’s what I’ve done to start the ball rolling during day 1 of my challenge.

Well I visited a few high profile marketing forums to seek the advice of some experienced bloggers on how I might quickly generate lots of visitors. I must say there were some blinding ideas, some which I’m going to start putting into action tomorrow.

I also hoped that my forum posts might start a little bit of a buzz about my challenge and generate some visitors through curiosity about what I was doing.

I also posted another article to ezinearticles.com. I’m steadily building a growing list of articles that include a link to my blog in the author’s biog that you’re allowed to add at the bottom of each article. Though this method takes time for the article to be reviewed and indexed my server logs show that they’re already generating 1 or 2 visitors.

That’s it for today. Check back tomorrow to find out what else I’ve been doing.

Don’t forget you can subscribe to my RSS feed up there top right in the sidebar to be notified about every new post to this blog.

Be successful.

Technorati Tags: blog promotion, blog traffic, blog visitors, blogging