Completing the Yakezie Challenge

I am excited to report that I completed the Yakezie Challenge with my blog, Cash Flow Mantra this week.  What that means is that I was able to get my Alexa ranking under 200,000 within six months of starting the challenge.  I actually started on July 1st, 2011 so I had until the end of the year to complete the task.  As of this moment, my actual Alexa ranking is 198,607.

That being said, I certainly don't plan on quitting.  I will discuss a little bit more about that in a moment, but first I would like to explain how I was able to decrease my ranking so quickly.

No Secret, Just Writing and Interaction

There really isn't any big secret that I used to decrease my Alexa ranking so quickly.  I simply posted some content about 2-3 times per week and began interacting with the Yakezie community of personal financial bloggers.  Actually, that was probably the most important aspect of getting traffic and growing the site.

Through commenting on other individual blogs, I was able to find some readers who took an interest in what I had to write.  Occasionally, these bloggers would enjoy a post and link back to my content.  This was probably the biggest factor in any success that I have enjoyed thus far.

Now, I am starting to generate a little bit of search engine traffic as well.  Hopefully, both social traffic and search engine traffic will slowly increase over time such that I am able to grow the blog little by little.  Up til now, the traffic growth has been fairly quick.  Of course that is because I am growing off a small base.  But I suspect that it will become more and more difficult over time.

Future Plans

I certainly don't plan to stop working hard at this point.  I would like to see my blog grow as much as possible by the end of the year maybe to the point of getting 100 visitors per day.  That seems like a stretch at this point, but I do believe that it is possible.  I will probably continue doing what I have been doing and reassess my progress and plans at the beginning of 2012.

I want to thank each and every one of you readers here who have been reading my other blogs and following my progress.  It is really exciting to see something develop from scratch.  The other part that really excites me is that I was able to develop this using Wordpress and get something done that one year ago was really frightening to me in concept.  The bottom line is that you just have to step out and get it done.