It’s day 14 of my 30 day challenge to build traffic to my blog. As you recall, I’m proving that blogging can be a profitable business anyone can start via live demonstration!

Today I…

1. Wrote the draft of an article for David Askaripour’s MindPetals.com. Its about Toastmaster’s, a public speaking club, and why I think everyone who is interested in starting a business should join. I’ll provide a link once it goes live on the site.

2. I’ve been battling my hosting company 1and1 to fix the performance problems with the server. I notice it being frequently slow (although never down) to the point where I imagine many users get frustrated and leave. I’ve asked them to be moved to a different shared server (sometimes one bad apple on a particular shared server can wreck the experience for everyone), but they don’t seem to do this without big cause, so I’m staying on them. What has been your experience with the speed of browsing StartBreakingFree.com?

3. I spent some time today checking progress in terms of back links and indexing in both Google and Yahoo. As of today Google shows only 7 people linking to this site (most of which are no-name sites), which I find rather bizarre because Yahoo is showing 4264 incoming links at the time of this writing (many from important high PR sites). I’d heard that Google had a higher standard for what they considered an incoming link, but they seem to be counting poor links and missing some of the best ones. Finally, it looks like only two pages of this website are indexed in Google while Yahoo has indexed 53 pages. I have the Google sitemaps plugin installed for Wordpress and an Archive/Sitemap page at the top (both of which should help Google index the entire site). I’m hoping this is just a temporary side effect of my changing the link structure that will be resolved soon!