It’s been a while since I updated this blog with my progress in Alex Jeffreys marketing course. It’s a rainy Saturday afternoon and I have a bit of time to spare, so here’s what I’ve been up to during the course…

The core of Alex’s course is to build a list. I’m involved in a few online enterprises (writing software, building and maintaining websites, testing the waters with autoblogs, looking after customers, etc.), so I’ve had less time than I’d have liked to devote to Alex’s course. So my timetable has slipped over the last couple of weeks (a minor health scare and a short stint in hospital didn’t help either).

Putting The Course Into Action

The idea behind building any list is that you give away a product to a visitor providing they sign up to your list. As part of Alex’s course, he gave his students a product to give away in order to help in building their lists. It’s the Easy Cash Webinar (you may have heard of it by now). I’ve done a little bit of promotion on this but not as much as I should have and, consequently, I haven’t built much of a list here. The webinar is pretty much the first module from the Marketing With Alex 3.0 course and gives a good grounding in how you should approach running a business online. Everything stems from using that mindset.
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I was about to head over to the WarriorForum to check out the new posts when an email dropped into my inbox from EzineArticles about an article I’d submitted to them a few days back. So I opened the email, assuming it would contain an acceptance notice. It didn’t. Hmmm…

The article I had submitted was about the problems I’ve been having with the WordPress “Missed Schedule” posts on some furture-dated blogs and directing people where to find solutions (they’re listed on this blog). So it came as something of a surprise to see this the content of their email:
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This is the article marketing strategy I use for promoting something, whether that’s a specific page on a website, the website’s home page or some offer I might be promoting.

Related Post: Unique Article Wizard Review
Related Post: Using Article Marketing To Get Traffic

Write An Article

I write articles with a view to spinning them. Not in the sense that some thesaurus just replaces keywords it identifies in the text with various synonyms, making for semi-readable articles, but in terms of me doing the spinning. So first, I write an article. Pretty simple. Then I take that article and rewrite each sentence in it two more times. It’s important to note that it’s sentences that get rewritten and not paragraphs as a whole.

One of these articles I’ll submit to EzineArticles. This article directory takes a couple of days to review submissions and if they find a variation of your article somewhere else, they’ll reject the submission. So articles submitted to EzineArticles need to be absolutely unique.

Once EzineArticles has accepted the article, things really start to roll…
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If you’ve read my previous post, you’ll know that I’m now one of Alex Jeffreys‘ students. As part of the practical work he’s set in his coaching program, he’s set a competition for his students: whoever gets the most traffic to their blog by early next month will get as a prize, a complete professional blog created fro them (including content, plugins, graphics, etc. and the blog will be the front end to a whole marketing business. Quite a prize and one worth fighting for!

One of the terms of competing is for students to document how they are driving traffic to their blogs. So that’s what this progress report will be about.

I’ve spent time yesterday and today using various techniques to drive traffic. It’s a time-consuming business and there’s no way I could get everything done in a couple of days. Or even a week. Driving traffic is a long-term process, and there are quite a variety of ways to pull it. So here’s how I started:

1. I have a number of other websites so I added links pointing to this blog to them. A couple of my other websites are in the internet/affiliate marketing niche so it was ok to put a link to this blog on their front pages. With the other sites, I placed the links on “resources” or “links” pages on the site. Google seems to prefer links that are between relevant sites. Also, all links are one-way (i.e. this blog doesn’t link back to sites that link to it). One-way links carry more weight in Google and should help this blog rank better.

2. There’s a forum for students in Alex’s coaching program where the new students are asked to do two things: a) leave comments on other members’ blogs and b) post your blog link so others can leave comments on your blog. I’ve done both, but I’ll keep adding comments to other blogs over the coming days so I get more and more traffic. I’ve also added a link to my blog into my signatures/profiles on the various forums I’ve joined.

3. I’ve added my blog web address into my email signature. Anyone who reads my emails will see it there.

[Update: While writing this post, I got sidetracked into listing all the methods I use to drive traffic to my sites and ended up turning it into a report you can download (from the top right of this page). So, on the plus side I now have a report I can refer back to and that you may find useful too. On the downside, I've lost time actually promoting this blog!]

One of Alex Jeffreys challenges to his new students is to document how we drive traffic to our new blogs. I had intended doing just that in a post on this blog, but the post was getting longer and longer as I listed the various methods I use. So I decided to turn it into a report instead.

Related Post: Unique Article Wizard Review
Related Post: Article Marketing Strategy

In all, the report ended up being 14 pages long, so it would have made for a huge and unwieldy post. The Blog Linking Tactics Report, as I’ve called it, lists 27 solid, proven techniques for driving traffic to your blog. If you’re just looking to promote a standard (non-blog) website, then the majority of techniques will still be relevant to you. The report does list some blog-specific methods (by using certain WordPress plugins) to drive traffic which won’t apply to traditional websites.

You can get the report by entering your name and email address in the box at the right of this page.

I’d love to get some feedback, so leave a comment after you’ve looked over the report. it’s a bit raw at the moment but I wanted to get it out there rather than sit on it while it gets prettied up. Members of my list will continue to get free updates to the report as they’re released.