Four Months Blogging and The Yakezie Challenge Homestretch

Whew, I can’t believe that I’ve been blogging for four months already. I published my first article on August 16, 2010 and have posted around 70 articles including this one. I can say that it’s been fun but pretty hectic and very discouraging at times especially when I rarely have visitors let alone readers in my first three months. I can see how many people can give this up so easily since there is very little monetary investment involved with a lot of time requirement on trying to update and promote the blog.  But thanks to the Yakezie Network, I am starting to have traffic and comments on my articles.

Over the past three months, I’ve been following the Yakezie requirement of  posting 2-4 times a week, visiting and commenting on other blogs and promoting other blogs selflessly. I have not done so much at the beginning since I was caught up on trying to write as  much articles as I can including my reserve ones. Eventually, I was able to balance my schedule with writing articles and visiting other blogs. I usually think of what I need to write during the weekday, and would later outline it and start a draft. And when Saturday comes, I would start to finalize them. I want to develop my own system on writing for the whole week so I’m pretty much covered. It is sometimes difficult to balance my schedule at the very beginning especially since I’m working during the day and have to attend some family matters at night and over the weekend. But I figure, majority of the bloggers are in the same boat as I am where we have to juggle everything else in a very limited time we have in a day. It’s just a matter of learning how to organize my schedule and cut down on a lot of wasteful time doing unproductive activities such as watching too much TV and just surfing the net.

Another thing that I’ve done for the first four months is submitting articles to various blog carnival. I don’t get as much traffic with the blog carnivals but the link building really helps.

I have joined and accepted the Yakezie Challenge on 9/5/2010 with an initial Alexa Rank  of 5,888,869. I have monitored the effect of the challenge and noticed my rank improved dramatically as the weeks go by:

• 09/05/2010 – 5,888,869 (Entry Date)
• 09/19/2010 – 1,271,097
• 10/31/2010 –     374,683
• 11/07/2010 –     342,082
• 12/05/2010 –     246,597

As of now my current Alexa Rank – is at 227,236 and I am averaging around 55 unique visitors within the past 30 days. By far, the highest unique visitor count in a day is 72. Not a lot but much better than four months ago. In the past, I’ve seen my Alexa rank improve drastically on a daily basis but right now it seems that it got stuck at 227,000. It has not moved for like a week already so I thought to myself, maybe the Alexa ranking is not working ...LOL. It appears that I may have found my true Alexa rank as it stabilize at 227,000. It’s like when someone is taking your blood pressure and it goes up or down dramatically on the initial reading and then stabilizes afterwards to give you the true BP reading. With the upcoming vacation, there’s a chance that I may not see any improvement at all since I will have less time on my computer and less time to write articles. I may need to dip in to some of my “emergency article reserve” for situation just like this one. But I would surely try to visit and comment on other blogs whenever time permits. I guess I can call it a year for now and would start with my new goals for next year. I still have three months to achieve the 200,000 Alexa rank in order to finally accomplish the challenge. As they say in horse racing, the next three months would be the “homestretch” to the finish line!!