Alex Mansfield » Progress

Week Three

alexmansfield — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 06:56:23 +0000

I got a pleasant surprise today when I looked up my Google pagerank. It appears they’ve updated their ranks and this site went from a 0 to a 3. Not bad for 3 weeks. It looks like putting in the time and effort actually leads to some visible results. The results are not stunning by any stretch of the imagination, but at least I can see them. Eventually I would like to find clients through this site though, not just check my pagerank and look at pretty Google Analytics graphs.

Anyway, I’ve started submitting some of my posts to various social media outlets, but none of them bring in the traffic like Twitter, that’s for sure (at least not yet). The number of visitors grew from 12 last week to 82 this week, which was pretty substantial, at least if you look at it in percentage form (583%). I don’t think I’ll be able to keep that up :] My Feedburner subscriber count went up as well (to 9), and this time it looks like some of them are actually humans, not bots.

That’s it for now. I’ll try to give a little more in depth look at traffic sources etc. at the one month mark next week.

Two Weeks

alexmansfield — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 07:19:43 +0000

It looks like my traffic has more than doubled since the first week! From 5 visitors to 12 isn’t too much to get excited over though. I’ve gotten a little traffic from social media sites like Twitter and StumbleUpon, and the rest is from people typeing “Alex Mansfield” into Google (probably just other people named Alex Mansfield, there are a bunch of us). I also had my first iPhone visitor this week, which was sort of cool. Also, according to the Hubspot Website Grader, which grades website SEO/marketing effectiveness, I improved my score from 45/100 to 57/100. So to keep you up to date on what I’ve been doing with this blog, it looks like I’ll need to be writing a post on social media and link building in the near future. Good stuff.

One Week

alexmansfield — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 05:08:56 +0000

I started this blog one week ago and promised to write about everything I did in my attempt to build a successful blog. Well it’s a lot of work setting up a blog for success and so there was quite a bit going on. Consequently, I had a lot of writing to do in order to explain everything. That resulted in 9 posts this week, which is not a posting schedule I plan sticking with. According to Google Analytics (which I haven’t written about yet, sorry) I ended the week with 5 visitors and 1 spam comment. It’s only the first week though, so I’m not concerned. Google crawled my site on the second day, but hasn’t been back since, so not many of my posts are indexed yet. Looking on the bright side though, after only one week, my blog is in the 3rd position for the Google search “Alex Mansfield” (although that doesn’t say much, since I don’t share my name with anyone famous). Also, according to the Hubspot Website Grader, which grades website SEO/marketing effectiveness, I have a score of 45/100. Looks like I’ve got lot’s of room for improvement. Now that lots of the groundwork has been laid, I’ll start to focus a little more on search optimization and bringing traffic.