I started this blog back on May 9th, 2010. Since starting it I’ve had 3045 unique visitors. I’ve made thousands of dollars off the blog. . My blog is officially 3 months old today, so I thought it would be a good chance to take a look at my blog and see what things I should keep doing and what things I should change.

I’ve been focusing on sending SOME traffic to this site, but I should say that I have a TON more traffic tricks up my sleeve but I haven’t been using them. This blog has been a sort of test into using only free traffic tactics to see what I can do without spending a dime or a lot of time. Here’s what I’ve done so far in marketing this site.

1) EzineArticles.com

I installed a plugin from Ezinearticles that let’s me submit each blog as an article directly to ezinearticles right from my blog interface. It makes it super easy and you don’t have to deal with going to EzineArticles and doing all that.

On a scale from 1-10, I would give this a rating of 7.

In total, I’ve submitted 13 Articles to EzineArticles.com. This has resulted in 822 page views thus far. My best performing article is one I knew would perform well. It’s called how to make money fast. That article alone accounted for 446 of the 822 views. This is because in the “make money online” internet marketing niche the target market is really out for 3 things:

1) How can I make money online?

2) How can I do it super fast?

3) How can I do it without that much work?

By knowing my target market, I wrote an article I knew would appeal to them. If this blog were my main income source (it’s not), I would write more about this topic because it’s now proven itself.

When it comes to actual results from these ezinearticles page views becoming visits to my site, here’s how it looks:

882 page views – 62 clicks. That’s an overall clickthrough rate of 7%. Not great. I would love for that to be more. This means I need to look back through my article bylines and see which ones are performing the best and use those.

As a result of my article being on EzineArticles my articles have been used in ezine publications 18 times. That’s more traffic, more backlinks, and more exposure. Overall, this has probably been my best traffic source.

2) Forum Marketing

I have been posting regularly in the Warrior Forum. It’s a place where a lot of internet marketers hang out. I’ve had decent results from it. I don’t have exact stats on it, but from what I’ve been watching I’ve probably had about 150 unique visitors from there. It’s not that bad, because I post on there anyway so it’s truly easy.

Also, these people are way more likely to buy my products because they are always in search of new marketing ideas, traffic strategies, or tools to help them in their business. I rank this a 6/10 stars because of the low amount of traffic. But if I posted more on there, I’d get more traffic.

One strategy I do there is to make sure I’m talking in the threads that get a lot of play. I still post in threads that are small, but it doesn’t hurt to stop in a thread that is getting thousands of views.

3) Videos on Youtube.com

Here’s one that I pretty much quit on. I was taking my articles, reading them, and adding the audio to a quick presentation slide. I didn’t track all the clicks from this effort, but I made a total of 221 views off 4 videos.

Looking at it again, this is probably something I should have kept up with. It just didn’t “feel” like it was worth it at the time. I may go back now and add some more videos and keep a close eye on my tracking to see how many visits I get to my blog off it.

My rating here is 5/10 because of the time to make the videos.

4) Facebook Fan Page

Social networking is of course all the rage and I like it. But I’m still not 100% sold on the results of it. I’ve been skeptical of sites like twitter and facebook for direct response style marketing for a while now. I actually taught Twitter at a marketing conference way back in 2007. I may have been one of the first to do that.

But, what I do see the value in, is having a decent amount of fans or followers. Since creating my facebook fan page, I’ve got a total of 121 fans. I haven’t run any ads or anything like that. It’s just been word of mouth and me inviting my facebook friends. When I hit 200 fans, I may turn on some ads and see what happens from there.

Whenever I update my fan page, I can count on 2-3 visitors to show up here to read my latest blog post. Again, these numbers will grow when I expand the number of fans. Apart from traffic, I don’t see a lot more benefit to this besides branding myself. That’s what I use it for. It looks good when people check in on me and see that I have 121 fans.

It’s sort of social proof these days. It’s worth having, even IF there aren’t a ton of sales backing it up. It’s good to have friends either way.

My rating on this is 5/10.

5) Twitter Marketing

I don’t go on Twitter. I set it up to automatically update whenever I update my facebook page. Not my fan page, but my personal facebook. Everytime I update my personal facebook page, I get a follower of two on Twitter.

My experience from Twitter so far has been more of a marketer meet marketer experience. So many marketers are on there trying to “get rich with twitter” that they are sort of feeding on themselves. Most everyone who adds me on twitter has tens of thousands of people they are following and they are just trying to grow their twitter follower list.

I’m sure I could do a lot more with Twitter, but it just hasn’t been my thing.

Rating: 4/10

Funny, as I wrote this, an email just came in with someone who just followed me. Here’s their stats:

4715 followers
1400 tweets
following 4455 people

You can see that no “real” person should be following 4,445 people.

6) Social Bookmarking

This is one that I’ve been a little disappointed in. I expected a lot more traffic from this avenue. I actually bought a program called Bookmarking Demon which costs a decent amount. I think around $97 or so.

It works great, but the issue I’ve seen is not getting much traffic from it. The good news is that it’s giving me a lot of backlinks. After 3 months, I have 243 backlinks pointing to my domain. That’s a decent amount. However, it’s not been enough for me to rank yet for much in the search engines.

I usually stumble my best posts and that results in an immediate surge of about 3-5 visitors. Again, not much, but it can all add up. Right now, my social bookmarking efforts have seemed very manual and very slow. I thought that some of my content would have produced a little better response from people.

The reality is that content is king, but when you have a new blog, sometimes it’s hard to get that content in front of the right people. I’m going to step up my bookmarking efforts though and really make sure I go after some keywords for SEO purposes. I think longterm, my efforts will pay off. At the 6 month point, I expect google to finally trust my site and show me some love.

rating: 3/10 for traffic, 10/10 for backlinks

7) Blog Commenting

Almost forgot this one. This one has actually done well for me. It creates traffic and backlinks at the same time. Whenever I leave a comment on someone else’s blog I can almost always count on 5 visitors from that site. It’s like clockwork. If there was one method I would tell people to focus on, that would be it.

I really think you could see great results over time.

One trick I do is instead of putting my name in the name field, I put my keyword. Some bloggers hate this, so look around and see what’s been approved previously before you do this.

rating: 8/10

Conclusion so far:

So far I’ve been averaging 1,000 unique visitors per month. I’ve added 91 people to my email list directly from this blog. That’s about 1 person a day on average. It’s right on par with the 10% optin rate I’ve seen most blogs get.

I have seen a rise lately though because I added a hover ad that displays an offer to opt-in. With Aweber.com, this is something you can do really easily.

With the stats I have now, I am planning on rolling out some paid ads in the coming weeks. Including some banners that point to certain areas of my blog. I’m also (finally) creating a new squeeze page and a new system.

That has been the ultimate point of this experiment. What kind of results can I get without spending a lot of time (and no money) on a blog where I write down ideas and thoughts about internet marketing. Well, now I know.

I also put my blog right up there with the whole “branding” idea. Having a blog helps my brand. It shows that I’m an expert. When I do consulting with other businesses, it helps them to see some of what I’m doing and thinking. And you can’t put a price tag on that. And, as I already said, soon enough I’ll fall into the good graces of google and the traffic floodgates will open wide.

If you’re up to it, share some of your traffic experiments and results.

UPDATE:  You can see part 2 to this post where I answer questions from this blog post. Click here – Blog Stats and Results