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

Some visitors to my blog have been asking me how I set my blog up to display the items in my sidebar. So I recorded this video to show you how it’s done.

I forgot to mention in the video that this only works if your blog theme is widget enabled.

Click on the image below to see the video.

You can get a copy of the web development software mentioned in the video at…

http://net2.com/nvu/

If there’s anything else you’d like me to show you how to do just post a comment here and ask.

Be successful.

Technorati Tags: blog, blogging, design, editing, how to, sidebar, wordpress

Well I’ve been persevering with the same methods I started out with; blog commenting, submitting articles, and frequenting twitter. This approach has definitely seen an increase in visitors to my blog. But not as great an increase as I had hoped for; or has it?

You see, I can track visitors to the site in any of 3 ways and this has thrown up some anomalies.

My 3 tracking methods are…

• Server logs
• Google Analytics, and
• Feedburner

My web host provides Webalizer server stats in my cpanel which show me discrete visitors to this domain. I have the latest version of the ‘Ultimate Google Analytics’ plugin that is supposed to track visits and distinct visitors through the Google Analytics interface. And finally, as I have a feedburner RSS feed subscription box at the top of my sidebar I have activated tracking in my Feedburner admin panel.

You would think that these would leave no room for error in determining how I’m doing with my challenge. Well you would wouldn’t you?

The trouble is none of them seem to agree with each other. Just taking the last 4 days for example. Google reports twice as many visitors as feedburner, whilst my server logs report over 4 times as many visitors as Google.

So here is my dilema – can Feedburner or Google Analytics be trusted to provide accurate stats? I fear not!

If you’re tracking visits using Google Analytics then please compare them to the visits reported by your server logs and let me know what you find. And if you’re an Analytics wiz then perhaps you can comment here and let me know what you think is going on.

My server logs tell me it’s going to be a close run thing to achieve my challenge. But I’ll do my best to get a last spurt of new visitors to the site before we see the new year.

Watch this space!

Be successful.

Technorati Tags: blog challenge, 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

Day 4 already and less than 10 days left to reach my target. I took a day off yesterday – “all work and no play…” as they say. Instead of working I went to a Christmas party at my sister’s house who lives near Norwich in Norfolk. It was a chance to see my parents, sister and two brothers and all their kids. As we all live in different parts of England we don’t often get a chance to get together so it was really nice to see them all.

Anyway, back to business – what have I been doing to promote my blog.

Today I’ve been commenting on other people’s blogs to build some backlinks and hopefully encourage some visitors. This was the main approach recommended by Alex in the last webinar.

I was also notified today that one of my posts has been accepted on a blog carnival and the trackback is already live. That was a great feeling as I hadn’t expected results from that so quickly. I’m hoping that I get a lot of visitors from that trackback.

The other thing I’ve done today is add a link back from a few web pages I have online that receive regular traffic. I’m hoping that some visitors will follow those links and find my blog.

I have 2 particular strategies that I plan to implement over the next couple of days. One is a free giveaway and the other is to increase my twitter followers. I’ll Let you know how I get on.

Keep an eye on this blog over the next couple of days so you can take advantage of my free Christmas giveaway. Until next time…

Be successful.

Technorati Tags: blog traffic, blog visitors, 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