Breaking Free
How to Quit Your Job and Start Your Own Business
Day 5: First Page of Google, Bugs, Article Marketing Lifehack.org
22 Jun 2007
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.
Table of Contents:
- Building Website Traffic – Three Items Per Day For A Month
- Day 1: FeedBlitz, SEO, and Post Series
- Day 2: New Article, Amazon Cover Upload, and Digg Comments
- Day 3: LinkMachine, Google Website Optimizer, and ProBlogger
- Day 4: Interviews, SEOMoz, and Technorati
- Day 5: First Page of Google, Bugs, Article Marketing Lifehack.org
- Day 6: Email Signature, Blog Carnival, StumbleUpon
- Day 7: Link Structure, Pings, MyBlogLog
- Day 8: FeedFlares, Reciprocal Links, Broken Links
- Day 9: Page Cache, 301 Redirects, and Submitting to Blog Search Engines
- Day 10: Removed Bad Links, Earning $5639 Per Year, Tracking RSS Subscribers
- Day 11: Article for ProBlogger.net, StumbleUpon campaign, and Longer Domain Registration (attempt)
- Day 12: Extended Domain Registration, More Incoming Links, Article Submission
- Day 13: Successful and Outstanding Bloggers list, Backlinks Advice from Yaro Starak, and DMOZ
- Day 14: MindPetals Article, Slow Server, Google vs. Yahoo indexing
- Day 15: Submitted MindPetals Article, Conversation with Liz Strauss, and LifeHack.org Article
- Day 16: Engaging readers in conversation, Interview on Calling All Authors, and a Research Tip from John Reese
- Day 17: Posted Interview Audio, Faster Server, and New Business Cards
- Day 18: Article for LifeHack.org, Contacted About.com Contributer, Updated my LinkIn profile
- Day 19: Barnes & Noble, Froogle, and Shopping.com
- Day 20: Meta Keywords and Descriptions, New Article, 37Signals Blog
- Day 21: New Video On YouTube, Creating a Personal Balance Sheet, and Article Marketer
- Day 22: Purchased a Water Buffalo, Apple’s Marketing, and RSS Confusion
- Day 23: A New About Page, ProBlogger Article Finished, and More Comments
- Day 24: Keyword Research, more Links Exchanged, Article Distribution
- Day 25: Translated into 8 Languages, A Version For Mobile Devices, and Submitted To Dozens of Blog Directories
- Day 26: More RSS Directories, Alumni Networking, Alexa Screenshot Update
- Day 27: New Article on Audio Books, Removed Translation, and Networking Tips
- Day 28: Amazon, Amazon, Amazon!
- Day 29: Zero Million, Yahoo Answers, Wikipedia
- Day 30: Wrapping Up With A Few Final Links
- Conclusion
6 Responses
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Breaking Free is a blog for people who'd like to quit their 9-to-5, start their own business, and achieve financial freedom. It's written by web-entrepreneur Brian Armstrong. You can read more here »
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Chris
June 23rd, 2007 at 10:10 am
Brian,
That reference to lifehacker.org doesn’t go to a blog? What’s the actual link?
Brian Armstrong
June 23rd, 2007 at 10:48 am
Whoops, it should be lifehacker.com
Fixed it. Thanks Chris!
Chris
June 23rd, 2007 at 10:51 am
Thanks, Brian!
Great blog, by the way!
Ankesh Kothari
June 29th, 2007 at 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?
Brian Armstrong
June 29th, 2007 at 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.