WOW! I haven’t done a public challenge in over 8 months, and it’s definitely time for one. I want to accomplish a lot of things, so this challenge will be a mixture of working towards getting traffic and increasing revenues for 2 sites: this one, and a niche site whose best traffic months are the spring and summer months.
In February 2010 I challenged myself to increase traffic for this site by 75% and fell short by just a little bit. But, for the second part of last year I was majorly distracted, and was very inconsistent with adding content, stopped guest posting, and even got sloppy with one of the main attractions to my blog: the free niche research.
So, in April I am planning to increase traffic by 25%. Here is a screen-shot of the the traffic as of today, March 31, 2011:
So, in April I need to come up with 948 more unique visitors, for a total of 4740. Now, in order to achieve this, I’ll do the following:
– go back to weekly free niche research
– guest post at least twice, and find at least 2 people to guest post for me
-create 2 how-to articles (these seem to attract traffic). Do you have suggestions? I’m all ears: please post below in the comments and I’ll either write it myself, or find someone qualified to we rite it for me.
Now the other site in this challenge is a niche site I challenged myself on last year as well (it was actually my April challenge for last year).
Here is a screen shot of my stats from that post last year:
And here is a screen shot from the first 3 months this year:
Big difference, right? My plan is to double traffic to this site in April, as well as double income (which is pitiful right now, at $122.60 for this month). It’s an ambitious plan, but I think I can do it. Here is what I am planning to do for this site:
– add content every day for the month of April (luckily, I already have all the content needed, so I just need to take a few hours to add images, links, etc., and upload them to the site
– guest post at least once (last year I wasn’t able to find a place to guest post, but this year I’ll try harder)
– build some links. Not exactly sure which route I’ll take for this. I may submit a couple of articles to article directories, send a press release, tweet, bookmark, etc.
– I’ll create and distribute at least 2 videos. I’ve tried creating videos myself in the past, but I am not cut out for it, so this will be outsourced.
– I’ll create a FaceBook page for this site (probably I’ll outsource this as well)
– create a list for the site, so I don’t have to always rely on just the search engines to bring in traffic. I already have my give-away for it (had it for more than a year and never took the time to create a list: shame on me!)
– pick 2 products, create detailed reviews, and work on ranking those 2 pages: shooting for top 5, but will be content if I reach page 1 🙂
– monetize the site better: I am using AdSense and Amazon for now, but I need to tweak it for better performance.
What are YOUR plans for the month of April? Wouldn’t you love some more traffic? Please join me in this challenge to increase traffic: just comment below.