Day 5: First Page of Google, Bugs, Article Marketing Lifehack.org

22 Jun, 2007 Marketing, Education Brian Armstrong

This is day 5 of my 30 day challenge to build build traffic to this blog.

As a side note, I achieved two top ten rankings on Google! I am #8 (first page) for both keywords “start home business” and “start home based business”. This is huge, and is the result of some SEO work that I paid a guy to do about a month ago. I found him on eLance.com, and from what I understand he accomplished this mostly through paid links.

I’ve been getting about 800-1000 visits per day the last few days, and subscribers are up to 792 after taking a major dip due to my switch to FeedBlitz and some technical problems.

Here are the three tasks I accomplished today:

1. Spent a number of hours fixing bugs on the website. There was a bug in the email newsletter that went out. My apologies for that, I’m working to fix it. There was also a bug with the contact form on this page now showing up which I was finally able to resolve. These are not the sort of traffic building activities I want to be spending my time on, but it’s important to have a working website before sending more people to look at it.

2. Since most of my traffic so far has come from being a contributing editor on lifehack.org, I decided to see what other contributing editor positions I could get at other blogs. The more traffic the better, so I went to Technorati’s top 100 blogs page and looked for related blogs. I sent in requests to lifehacker.com (different than lifehack.org, but much more traffic), http://searchengineland.com, and http://www.problogger.net/.

3. I wrote another article for LifeHack.org which will be posted soon. You can see the last article I wrote for them here. It generated more comments than any other article I’ve seen recently.

This post is part of a series on Website Marketing

6 Comments so far »

Chris said,

Wrote on June 23, 2007 @ 10:10 am

Brian,

That reference to lifehacker.org doesn’t go to a blog? What’s the actual link?

[Reply]
Brian Armstrong said,

Wrote on June 23, 2007 @ 10:48 am

Whoops, it should be lifehacker.com
Fixed it. Thanks Chris!

[Reply]
Chris said,

Wrote on June 23, 2007 @ 10:51 am

Thanks, Brian!

Great blog, by the way!

[Reply]
Ankesh Kothari said,

Wrote on June 29, 2007 @ 7:23 am

Thanks Brian for some excellent tips.

I was wondering: how do you approach others and ask them to allow you to be a contributing editor? Do you follow a format?

[Reply]
Brian Armstrong said,

Wrote on June 29, 2007 @ 9:31 am

Hi Ankesh,

In general I:
1. keep the note as short as possible (2-3 sentences), most of these people get so much email they are skimming anyway

2. Focus on whats in it for them

3. I don’t ask to be a contributing editor up front, i just talk to them about one article, and then ease into that role later by continuing to send them stuff

4. personalize the note

If you spend the time (it does take time) to actually write a good article, that is rare, and you’re giving it to them for free.

So my note might look something like this:

Hey XYZ,

Great article on BLANK and since you love BLANK so much, i thought your readers might enjoy this article I wrote: LINK

Thanks!
Brian

or

Hey XYZ,

What you wrote about BLANK was awesome, I ended up sending that to a friend and he BLANK. I’ve been experimenting a lot with BLANK lately and was going to put together a research article. Maybe you can use it on your site, want to take a look when its done?

Thanks!
Brian

Who would say no to that? You can slowly ease into a contributing editor position this way.

[Reply]
May Andersen said,

Wrote on September 27, 2007 @ 7:46 am

May Andersen…

I Googled for something completely different, but found your page…and have to say thanks. nice read….