Savvy Affiliate

Day 15 of The 100 Days To Webpage Excellence Guide

There is quite a lot that a successful blogger has to do.  He has to write content, network with other bloggers, build up backlinks, monetize his site, moderate his comments etc.  And if you are just starting a site, chances are that you have a full time job as well.  How can you possibly to all that in the time you have available?

The trick is to focus on constantly improving your productivity.  You need to always be looking for ways to get more done in the time that you have available.  To do this, you need to track what you spend your time on, and how effective it is.

It is especially important to track what kind of link building is effective.  It can be very difficult to track how effective content you write it.  Likewise, how can you tell if you are monetizing your site with the best use of your time?  That is extremely hard.   But building up backlinks and getting traffic lends itself well to increased efficiency.  What might a new blogger do in order to attract attention to his site?  He might have a link signature in forums and comments, he might e-mail some bigger name bloggers with some of his top content hoping for a link, he might guest blog at a popular site, he might use Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon, and other social networking sites to drive traffic.  But what works best?

 What will work best at driving traffic to a new site is different for every page and every blogger.  Jane May recommended using Myspace as a marketing tool, and every day adding 50 friends that you choose out of groups related to your site.   That may work for her, but I don’t think it would be a good use of time for my page.  I know that because it will take upwards of 30 minutes every day to manage myspace.  She thinks it will yield a several hundred hits a day in the long term.  I know from my tracking that there are other things I can do that are a better use of my time!

In order to track, you need to do 2 things. 

• You need to keep a list of how you market your blog, and how much time you spend doing it.   - Without this list, everything else is going to be a guess
• You need to use a tool such as analytics to keep track of how people are finding your page.

When you have those two pieces of information, experiment.  Try posting on different blogs or different forums, which drives traffic to your site?  Try spending less time Digging your posts, and more time stumbling them.  What it effective?   This is all information that you need to know.

As you get more experienced you will learn what works well and what doesn’t just from repetition.  But if you want to improve your site as fast as possible, you need numbers.  Taking the time to track how you use your time can be very beneficial.  Give it a try and I think that you’ll find yourself becoming much more productive.