Over the last few months I’ve been talking about the Yakezie Challenge and keeping you updated on our progress. I’m happy to say we’ve completed the challenge and are now members of the Yakezie bloggers network.

What that means is we blogged consistently 2-4 times a week for the last six (eight) months and spent a lot of time selflessly promoting others (specifically other Yakezie bloggers and challengers). The six-month challenge period is all about building relationships and helping other blogs grow.

The key metric for success in the Yakezie is the Alexa traffic ranking. Our goal when we started was to get our Alexa ranking under 200,000. Today we’re at a nice 142,589 and dropping. Keep in mind that we started the Yakezie Challenge with a ranking in the 600,000 range.

It’s been a lot of fun to watch that metric continuously improve. One drawback of this scoring system is it only measures traffic from visitors who have the Alexa toolbar installed. (Hint: if you like our blog, please install the Alexa toolbar to help us out a little bit. Thanks!) Having said that, the challenge was about a lot more than just the Alexa ranking.

So we made it. Now what? I wrote my member post and it went live a few days ago. In the member post, I told my story and how I became a financial coach, blogger and podcaster. Now I will contribute posts to the main Yakezie site on a somewhat regular basis, and continue to promote other members and challengers.

Was it worth it? With my schedule, it was very hard to keep up with the demands of the Yakezie. Not that it was the written requirements. Those were easy. I had trouble keeping up with promoting everyone that was promoting me! Since it’s such a great group of awesome bloggers, I felt a lot of pressure to keep producing the highest quality content and promoting those other great blogs. It wasn’t easy but it was definitely worth it.

I’ve built some relationships and made some friends. I’ve found some new blogs I like reading and I’ve found some inspiration in others’ writings. Not to mention all the tech support I’ve received in the last few months. Yes, our blog grew tremendously, but that was the side effect.

If you’ve got a personal finance or lifestyle blog and you want it to grow, I definitely recommend you take the Yakezie challenge. Today.

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