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Progress Update : 2009 Week 2 January 12th-18th

Posted on 20. Jan, 2009 by Derrick.

Ok, So a couple of days late. . but I have legitate excuses (Difficultly uploading video to Youtube - for some reason, it wouldn’t accept my HD version, and attempted nearly 10 times - the file was huge - over 700MB :). .Anyways, here’s my progress report for 12th to 18th of January. (times are approximate, as there were a few times when I was in deep concentration on making the video, I forgot to start the timer

My Achievements:

1. Brainstormed Ideas for Video Contest & Produced and Uploaded first Video (~16 hours+)
2. Researched Wordpress themes and revamped my blog ~ 15 hours
3. Initiated my first Joint Venture Project - I’ll reveal more of this later ~ 4 hours
4. Writing 2 Key articles - one on article writing, the other on directory submission ~ 9 hours
5. Spending a very small amount of time on Traffic Generation ~ 2 hours  (I think this is a little inaccurate - probably more closer to 4-5 hours and this was mostly oil rig hopping - visiting and commenting on other peoples blogs)

Below is a nice coloured graph showing you the breakdown:

Now that I have showed you what I have done - Lets check what the RESULTS are

My Key Performance Indicators from the goals I set in January were based on the following : Income, Visitors, and my list building.  As I have been focusing on producing content and updating my site (and subsequently very little on traffic generation) my results this week, have not suprisingly been bad :)  Firstly here are my google Analytics stats:

As you can see I nearly dipped to ZERO on the 16th, but I was luckily able to resurrect my traffic after I finally uploaded my Video to YouTube.  I have to say its very discouraging when you aren’t getting traffic, but its an adrenalin ride when you do:)

Ok. big question : have I made any money?  And the answer is NO. . in fact I’ve spent some money (spent $70 buying the WooTheme to update the look and feel of my site).  But I know I will very soon. . How about my list?  No subscribers yet either, but again I do have a plan. . so this will change very soon

One other bit of good news is that I have climbed in the Alexa Rankings - I’m now proud to say I’m at 580,385 Check it out below:

Oh, and one other thing. . I just passed 1000 friends on twitter :). . so all in all despite not being good to my bank account, it has been a good week :). . .

Well that’s it for week 2.

My plan this week is to continue working on my blog usability and functionality, adding lots of quality content, and spend more time in traffic generation activities

Would love to hear any questions you may have or your thoughts on how I could be more productive, or where you feel I need to focus my energies for the coming weeks - post your comments in the box below

Derrick

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Directory Submission - Save Yourself Up To 179 Hours But Still Get Your Site Listed In All The Directories.

Posted on 11. Jan, 2009 by Derrick.

Just got off the phone from a friend of mine who is an SEO Expert, and he suggested using another tool to get your websites submitted to the directories. Before we go further, here is a quick summary from Wikipedia of what Directories do and why they are important in getting traffic:

‘Today submission of websites to web directories is considered as a common SEO (search engine optimization) technique to get vital back-links for the submitted web site. One distinctive feature of ‘directory submission’ is that it can not be fully automated like search engine submissions. Manual directory submission is a tedious and time consuming job and is often outsourced by the webmasters.’

If you don’t know already, back-links, or links from other sites coming to your site, is a very important variable to show search engines that you are an important site - as it is expected that the more links to your site and the better quality links - (including links that are relevant, from highly ranked sites) , the more favourable the search engines will rank you and therefore get you more traffic.

Notice also the quote said - it’s a time consuming job. I tried Directory Submitter as mentioned previously, and it took me about an hour to submit to 10 directories - very time consuming if you realise that there are 350 sites in the FREE Version of Directory Submitter, and over 1800 in the paid version. (ie it would take about 35 hours to submit to all the directories for the FREE version and 180 hours for the paid version!! (It is however worth taking a look and reading the copy of Directory Submitter to understand more about directories)

Why does it take so long? Well, to get your site listed in any Directory, you need to provide details of your website :

• URL
• Category
• Sub Category
• Title
• Description
• Keywords

So normally you would need to firstly have a list of all the directories, and then go to each directory and submit these details.  VERY TIME CONSUMING.

Directory submitter allows you to firstly input this data into its database, and saves time by having the  listing of all the directories within the program (with page rank, so you can start from the highest page rank(10) to the lowest(0)).  You just click on the directory you wish to submit to, and it loads the page up into its inbuilt browser, and automatically copy and pastes the details you have entered previously into the directory’s site submission page.

This definitely saves time, but you still often need to select the best fitting category, as every directory has a different category system - so just looking through their category structure to find the category that best fits your site takes time, and sometimes the program doesn’t always fill in all the blanks (if the directory has additional fields etc).  So that’s Why it takes time, even with the time saving features of Directory Submitter. (which probably at least cuts the time needed by half.)

So naturally I complained about the time it takes to submit to the directories to my SEO friend, and he suggested a much better option that I wasn’t aware of - Directory Maximizer - A service that will manually submit your website to the directories for you.  They only charge 14cents per directory - That means instead of investing 1 hour to submit to 10 directories, I can get it done for $1.40. (And my time is definitely worth more than that! - I’m sure yours is too!

Other advantages of using this system is:

• Increased  chances of link approval as they ensure your site meets all the directory guildelines
• Live up to date reports on the progress of your submissions
• Choose how many directories to submit to - and can select by page rank
• Target multiple search terms by submitting up to 20 different tiles and descriptions
• Control the pace of the submissions - as it is better to step the submissions over a period of time (2-5 weeks), as a sudden influx of back links in a short period of time, does not look good to google.

Anyway, This definitely seems to be worth the cost, and is going to be my first job at outsourcing work that is going to make me more effective - you can take a look at Directory Maximzer here.

Have you done directory submissions? - What do you think?

Stay tuned later today, as I’ll be writing about how to write articles

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