HAPPY ONE MONTH ANNIVERSARY GRANDMASTERB.COM!

WOW! How fast a month goes in the early stages of running a blog. I cannot believe that I started this blog a month ago today. I have seen a lot of great moments in this first month, and met a few really cool bloggers along the way. By following the tips at other blogs, I have managed to get this blog off the ground and had relatively great success generating traffic (and most of it quality traffic). When I started out I didn’t have a clear path to follow, but I’m working on some guidelines and goals for the future that should help me along the way. Once I have them all put down on paper and streamlined I will create a post for those of you that want to follow along.

What’s this? 201 Unique visitors on April 16th! Fan-freakin-tastic!

After seeing the graphic above you can probably guess that I’ve met my third traffic goal for the site, and did it in the first month of being online. Also, you may note that there are two days without any traffic. Tip to those of you editing a template file; make sure when you upload it that the Analytics script is where it needs to be and not completely absent. Below are the goals and dates they were achieved.

• 50 Unique Visitors: March 30 (57 visitors)
• 100 Unique Visitors: April 12 (102 visitors)
• 200 Unique Visitors: April 16 (201 visitors)
• 300 Unique Visitors: TO BE DETERMINED

I know that to some it may seem odd to keep track of when you broke a certain number of visits, but if it helps to push me forward…I’m all for it. The first month saw some other great happenings here at Grandmasterb.com. The site was featured on WP-Premiums and CMSNerd for excellence in design. Those two features were influential in generating new traffic to the site. I have been working hard to find other ways to generate quality traffic.

Along with continuing my efforts with EntreCard, I have started to use StumbleUpon a little more frequently; which coincidentally generated 81 uniques yesterday alone. Yesterday was the first time I focused any effort on the phenomenon that is stumbling. I still don’t fully understand how it works or why it works; all I know is that it does. I decided it was also time to figure out what Twitter is all about…needless to say it’s just about as addicting as dropping EntreCards. If you want to follow my goings on I’m at twitter.com/GrandmasterB.

What does the future hold?

Advertising
Right now, I am working on setting up the site to add affiliate marketing and private advertising to generate a little cash to offset my operating costs. Don’t worry folks I won’t turn this site into a blinking carnival of ads just to make a quick dollar. I will continue to make GrandmasterB.com a site that is appealing to the eye and focus on the content.

Design Services
I am also working on being able to provide design services (ie. Wordpress Themes, logo design, etc). Of course the kicker as always is finding a happy medium when setting up pricing. Too high and I’ll scare away potential customers; too low and I’ll be wasting my time and effort. This will probably get rolling in mid-May once I get my portfolio page online. I’m also contemplating doing a couple freebie theme designs later this summer.

Onto Month Number Two
Time to stop basking in the glory of making it through my first month online. Now is no time to rest on my laurels. Time to start working on the next phase of the GrandmasterB plan…what is it again?

Thank you to everyone that has visited, commented and spread the word about the site. I appreciate all of your help and guidance along the way. As always if there’s something you’d like to see or want me to talk about I’m all ears. Drop me a line…

~ GrandmasterB