Pretty Impressive Results ALREADY!

I was pleasantly surprised to wake up this morning and upon checking my email, finding two GDI visitor notifications in my in-box. It's only been a couple of days since launching my new blog and already it's producing results.

From my AWSTATS provided in my web hosting account, I see I've had 27 unique visitors to my site. From the free click tracking stats provided by Thirty Day Challenge, I see there have been 12 clicks on my GDI advertisment or blog post link (an impressive 44% click thru rate). And 2 people have watched the GDI video and entered their lead information (another impressive 16% conversion rate). Imagine what those numbers will be when I start getting my traffic up to the site.

And that leads us to the 30DC lesson today…

Creating backlinks to improve search engine placement and increase traffic
In today's lesson, Ed Dale takes us through the process of building some backlinks through participation or comments on other sites and forums. The process is very similar to what Derek teaches in the Follow Our Lead team for using Yahoo Groups for finding prospects… however, 30DC takes the process to a higher level by focusing on creating backlinks instead of just finding prospects. Combining what is taught in this lesson with what we're already doing in FOL should open the floodgates of opportunity for those smart individuals who choose to accept the challenge.

I'll be spending the rest of the weekend scouring Yahoo Groups, Google Groups, Squidoo Lenses, relevant forums, and other web 2.0 sites for opportunities to leave comments and of course a link in my signature back to my new blog.

Speaking of backlinks… I had made a couple of blog posts here and on another blog of mine regarding my newest blog, and was curious about how they are showing up in Google search results. Searching for my keyphrase in Google, I found one of my references in position #64, and a surprise reference from a mybloglog.com site in position #83.

This reference from the mybloglog.com site is actually picking up a del.icio.us bookmark I made yesterday. I don't know if 30DC will be teaching anything about mybloglog.com in the future, and if not, once the 30DC is over I will be adding this special sauce to the next phase of my blog development. I have used it pretty effectively in the past on some other blogs so I think it will be valuable here as well. As a matter of fact, you'll notice I have mybloglog.com here on this site in the sidebar.

I think the point I'm trying to make here is this… social bookmarking is a great leverage tool for not only creating backlinks to your site yourself… but others create them as well as your social bookmarks start propagating across the world wide web network. Is this cool? or what?

UPDATE: My newly created blog has moved to #141 in Google today. We're making some progress.

Okay, enough of today's Thirty Day Challenge update… it's time to go to work creating some backlinks.