April Goals Results

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Unfortunately I wasn’t able to reach 100% of my April goals.  I under-did a few task and over-did others.

Here’s a re-cap on what my April goals were:

1. Reach 2000 Twitter followers
2. Guest post on 10 blogs
3. Bring down my Alexa to at least 150’000
4. Build an extra 100 backlinks
5. Gain 25 genuine opt-ins
6. Publish 100 posts
7. Complete My 2 eBooks
8. Join 5 relevant forums and post 15 posts on each
9. Send out 1 newsletter
10. Get 10 genuine open source software reviews

This was my starting point:

1. Twitter Followers: 200
2. Guest Posts: 0
3. Alexa Rank: #309’623
4. Alexa Backlinks: 199
5. Opt-Ins: 0
6. Published Posts: 0
7. eBooks: Unpublished
8. Forums: 0
9. Newsletter: Unpublished
10. Open Source Software Reviews: 0

Here are my end of the month results and method:

Twitter Followers:
Currently at 1’885.  I’ve only worked on this for a few hours really, at some point I forgot about it and then left it for about 2 weeks or so.

Guest Posts:
I’ve submitted more than 10 posts specifically to low-traffic blogs (almost immediate approval and in some cases immediate).  The purpose of that was to gain more backlinks.  Although in some moderate and relatively high traffic blogs they tend to use “scheduled posts” so I suppose my posts are supposed to be published some time on May (fingers crossed).  I do receive a trackback notification when they are published.  Hopefully when they are published on these “quality” blogs I’ll notice a considerable difference in traffic and/or opt-ins.

Alexa Rank:
My Alexa rank is currently at #164’587.  My target was #150’000 so unfortunately I didn’t meet the target rank for the end of April.  This bugs me but on one hand I am glad that my slow-but-sure methods of driving down my Alexa ranking actually works, having brought it down from #300’000+, on the other hand I’m a little bummed out because it definitely is becoming increasingly difficult to drive it down (the lower it is, the more difficult it is to reach because you are competing with global top sites).

Alexa Backlinks:
My Alexa backlinks is at 369, so I’m glad I managed to reach this target.

Opt-Ins:
I have a little over 50 opt-ins.  It was slow-moving though so I decided to invite a couple of people in my contact list.  In terms of percentage though, not even 50% of my supposed “friends” actually opted in when I sent them the email invite (thank you very much).  One of them had the audacity to reply to my invite asking me if my invite was a personal one or if it was automatically sent.  I am one of the only regular bloggers I know out there that don’t have enough friends who actually support me, or are bloggers themselves.  I have a handful of friends who visit my blog regularly enough but choose not to opt-in or comment.  What’s up with that? Meh.

Published Posts:
I might have spent too much time outside of my blog than inside it this time.  I only have 84 published posts.  My target was 100.  Although if it’s something I realized, I think I already have quite a bit of posts on the whole blog.  Traffic increases a great deal with quality posts.  I’ve posted a few rather long posts for April and they brought it a good number of traffic.  I also noticed lots of social media sharing for some posts which is absolutely awesome…a feat even.  Thank you very much for that!

eBooks:
I haven’t published my ebooks! After the Google Penguin update I decided to steer clear from posting SEO-related eBooks (yes, that’s what I had written about).  In fact I want to make a few changes on my eBooks and integrate advice and opinions of the algorithm change.  That should be useful, eh?

Forums:
I might have over done this.  On a previous April update post I had already reached half or a little more than half of the target.  I definitely over did this. Although for now there is no noticeable traffic coming in from forums because it’s important to achieve a certain level of credibility in a community before you start advertising anything or getting members to believe your recommendations.  I speak from experience.

Newsletter:
Published! To those of you who have subscribed and actually read the newsletter – thanks! I ought to mention that the layout was inspired by the weekly Ask Alice! newsletter which I subscribed to in 2005 (I think) and I’ve had the pleasure of receiving their newsletter ever since: simple, straightforward and interesting!

Open Source Software Reviews:
This target was met by the previous April update post.

Stay tuned for my May goals and blog updates later this evening (I need to go cook something)!

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