As mentioned, my Site Promotion Plan is part of my overall blog Content Strategy. Naturally, the idea is to create a popular blog site that people can find – and refer to. There are plenty of websites out there that talk about the theory of site promotion, but I’m trying something different.
Instead of just talking about the theory, I’m going to show you exactly what I’m doing, how I’m doing it, and what the results are.
Of course, that’s going to open me up to a whole bucketful of criticism if things don’t go well – but the way I see it, if things don’t go well there ought to be very few people who notice. So that should all work out fine. 
To start with, that means I need to establish a baseline. So here it is.
I started this blog on October 9, 2009. At that time, my site statistics were:
- Visits: 34
- Pageviews: 503
I’m using the statistics package that comes with cpanel, because obviously Google Analytics hasn’t had time to kick in yet. So I expect every one of those 34 visits – and all pageviews – were from me.
Not surprisingly (given that there was virtually no content at the time), the number of referrals that came from searches on that day was precisely zero.
There is one other thing of note. I didn’t get this domain name specifically for this blog. I’ve had it for a number of years, and it’s generally been in use on one project or another. What that means is that I’ve given myself a kick-start. Instead of starting completely from scratch, my homepage has a starting PageRank of 3.
How much of a bonus this might prove, I don’t know. Guess we’ll have to wait and see.
Hopefully, as time passes, I’ll be able to show real, concrete gains in terms of absolute visitor numbers. I’ll also be able to let you see where people have come from, and what I did to encourage it all.
From this, I ought to be able to show you what worked and what did not – and it’ll be interesting to hear any comments.
Can’t wait to try some of the things I’m planning out. Kind of exciting, isn’t it?
