Lessons Learned After Six Months in the Yakezie Challenge.
I mentioned an aweful long time ago that I joined the Yakezie challenge. That was back in January 2011 and I had six months to blog 2-4 times a week, selflessly promote others, and get my Alexa traffic ranking down under 200,000. It’s now July and I’m not quite there, but I do have a shot at meeting the requirements. But I really shouldn’t be in this predicament. Had I done everything I was supposed to do, I’d have been under 200k a few months ago.
I actually was on a roll and making good progress until April. My Alexa ranking had dropped from 600,000 or so all the way down to 330,000. That’s a big drop. I was really excited to see it drop almost every day. But then it stalled. And it sat there in the 340k range for two months.
Why my Alexa ranking stalled
What happened? Well, two main things got me in trouble. First, I got busy with school and stopped writing as frequently. That hurt me because I didn’t have as much content going out. The number one thing that brings traffic to your blog is good content. I simply didn’t produce good content for 6 weeks or so.
Second, I hadn’t really taken the time to figure out what I was supposed to do to be a full-fledged Yakezie challenger. Sounds silly but I just neglected to do the up front research on what it took to be successful in the Challenge. Sure, I had blogged 2-4 times per week, announced on the blog that I was joining the challenge, and done some work to promote others. But I didn’t get involved in the Yakezie community, which is really the whole point of the challenge. I had missed the point.
So even though my more consistent blogging helped my Alexa ranking drop to 340k-ish, I wasn’t quite doing everything I could to get the most out of the challenge. I didn’t promote too many other blogs from the network, and I didn’t get to know too many Yakezie members or challengers. I did develop some relationships but not at the level I should have. That was the missing link.
Why my Alexa ranking is dropping fast
I changed all that in June, and what a difference it made! I started interacting in the Yakezie forums, getting to know other bloggers, writing guest posts, commenting on their posts, and promoting their articles on Twitter and Linked In (I’ve been very careful to only promote the articles that are consistent with the things we teach here at Financial Excellence. I think I owe that to our community). I also started doing periodic Link Love articles where I share links to articles I like from around the community.
The results of my new focus have been great. I’ve developed some new relationships, blogged more consistently, learned a lot about blog design, and my Alexa ranking is down to 258,402 as of today. It’s been dropping fast and I think I’ve got a chance to get under 200k by the end of July.
The biggest lesson I learned from going through the Yakezie challenge is to focus a lot less on me, and a lot more on promoting others to share good content with my readers. You’ll be hearing a lot more about the Yakezie network in the future as I keep finding great articles from the network to share.