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.

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.