Savor the Success

So when I took on this personal project, my main goal was to garner 20,000 monthly blog visitors by January. When I first told Angela--the Savor the Success goddess--about that goal, she asked, "Are you sure that's realistic?" I wasn't sure of anything. Honestly, I'd picked that number randomly. It sounded good. I figured that if Dooce could get 850,000, then I could get 20,000.

Yeah, that's about as much thought as I'd put into it.

As my traffic increased throughout August and September, it seemed somewhat doable, too.

Then my site traffic kind of stagnated at 3500 monthly visitors. Around that time, everything started going wrong--with my personal life, with the world, and with my business. Things started going wrong in the lives of family and friends, too. Early fall has been rough for a lot of people. Just rough.

As I slid closer and closer to rock bottom, a friend gave me a lecture. He told me that I was a distance runner who was launching this business with a sprinter's pace. If I was going to have anything left for my kick, I needed to slow down and pace myself. I didn't need 20,000 by January 2009. It could be Jan 2010. It really didn't matter. I'd made the distance of this race an arbitrary and somewhat impossible one, and I risked not making it to the finish line as a result.

I took it to heart. More important, not long after his lecture, I read that most websites can't expect to see any measureable traffic for at least 6 months. This is the usual amount of time it takes not only to build a loyal following, but also for other bloggers to discover it and give you back links. This is the amount of time it takes to create enough content to impress the Google spider bots so you can get ranked high in keyword searches.

It's only been three months. As far as Google is concerned, my site is still an infant. I need to learn the art of being patient.

At this 3 month juncture, however, I also am reassessing my goals. I'm breaking that big goal of 20,000 visitors down into smaller goals--goals that will eventually help me to reach the big one. The smaller goals are:

* Reach out to other bloggers and offer them free material or guest blogs so I can generate more back links.

* Make a concerted effort to get ranked high for just a few keywords: marriage advice, relationship advice, and marriage expert.

* Expand my social network on twitter, facebook, and related sites.

* Focus on one targeted PR opportunity or goal at a time, with the focus on building relationships rather than on getting placements (not that placements aren't great, but one leads to the other). This is a big one for me, because it was the trying for everything and anything that was been burning me out.

* Get more feedburner and e-newsletter subscriptions.

* Constantly improve my content to attract more repeat visitors.

These smaller goals allow me to feel good several times a day--whenever I get a new follow on twitter, whenever I connect with an editor, whenever someone comments on my blog or emails that they like and have linked to my site. It's so much more fulfilling than my old approach of GET IT ALL AS FAST AS POSSIBLE.

Alisa Bowman

www.projecthappilyeverafter.com