Yakezie Challenge Seems to Be Working

If you happen to read this blog, you will know that on New Year's Day I joined the Yakezie Challenge.  Yakezie,com is a site that as best I can tell is a confederation of personal finance and lifestyle bloggers seeking to help others through their blog as well as giving back.  They even have a scholarship fund that allows them to give out scholarships to prospective college students.  Be sure to check out the site.

The challenge calls for several steps with the ultimate goal of improving the Alexa ranking of your blog.  For example, this blog had an Alexa ranking of over 600,000 when I started.  The goal is to improve that ranking to less than 200,000 by July 1st.  Obviously to do this, I will need to increase traffic.  This is where fellow challengers can help.  It is asked that you help your fellow challengers by mentioning their blogs and so through combined efforts we all increase in our rankings together.

It sure makes sense.  There are so many blogs out there on the internet that it is hard to get noticed.  I am constantly finding new blogs and writers some of which I like and others which I don't like as well.  And that is OK.  It is nice just to be able to sample some new sites from time to time.

So, I would like to recognize those fellow Yakezie challengers who have sent some traffic to this blog according to Google Analytics.  I am sure this list will ultimately get bigger, and I will share more links with future updates but for now I would at least like to mention:

debtfreedivas.org -- I love the name by the way!  This is a pretty neat blog.  And the divas have even taken time to come here and comment.  I appreciate that immensely.

faithandfinance.org -- Another nice site with great content and great design.  I wish I had as good looking a blog.  Oh well, Thou shalt not covet!

frugalzeitgeist.com -- Being frugal is always important.  Gotta get back there to read the Dogs of the Dow post from yesterday.

investitwisely.com -- Another blog with great design and an awesome name.  Not to mention, it is one of my favorite topics.

So, how have I been doing with the challenge so far?  I had started to notice an increase in traffic toward the end of December and heading into the new year.  I have noticed an additional increase since starting the challenge also.  In fact over the past month, my traffic is up about 50%.  Even better is that my total search engine traffic is now 20% of the total.  I would like to see that increase to about 30% by the end of the challenge.

So far, my Alexa rank is now under 600,000 but under 400,000 for the one month report.  This is definitely a good trend and a positive sign that getting to under 200,000 by July is possible.  Of course, it will take additional work but I can certainly handle that.  I will be sure to keep you updated as time goes on.  I will be curious to see the overall impact in the months ahead.

That is all that I had for this post.  On a side note, I am getting ready to go on a golf trip to South Carolina.  Hopefully the snow will melt in time.  I plan on a post or two from down south.