So far, I’ve taken itty bitty steps forwards utilizing my plan of action that I talked about previously.

I built my niche minisite targeting some keywords within the pregnancy niche. I chose those keywords because of my own personal experience. I figured it would be a lot easier to get my feet wet if I was actually knowledgeable and interested in the topic.

Because the targeted keywords are in the pregnancy niche, I designed a simple pink WordPress theme that would be clean and easy on the eye. There are no heavy graphics. I wanted the theme to load quickly. A grungy theme would not work well ;)

Since the domain I purchased from Godaddy was live within minutes of purchase, I was able to upload and install the WordPress script as well as upload and start up the minimal plugins needed.

For me, designing the theme, install the script (I upload the script to my hosting and add the database username and password myself. I don’t Use Fantastico), and getting the plugins started are the easy part. It’s thinking of keywords and writing several different articles about the keywords that I find hard, if not boring and tedious work.

I spent the 2nd day of this project writing up 3 different articles, each targeting one specific keyword. The title of each article included the keyword and I made sure to sprinkle the keyword throughout the article.

When I’m not focusing on specifically writing to grab traffic through articles, I can write seemingly forever. 600-1000 words would be a cinch. But when I have to focus on grabbing traffic, I get writer’s block. It’s a struggle to write an article worth 400 words.

I put my main article on the first page of the site. I did not use the posting feature. Instead I used the page feature and posted each article to its own page. This made my site look more like a regular site than a blog.

Once all articles were up, I added 3 different ways for monetizing the site: Adsense integrated into the articles, as well as Ebay ads and affiliate links in the sidebar.

I haven’t been heavily promoting the site as I’m very new to traffic generation. I’ve read up on the many different types of traffic generation and took notes. So far I’ve submitted articles to Ezine and a few other article directories (I now have a basic plus account with Ezine. Aiming for platinum status), I pinged the site at pingoat.net, I used Onlywire.com for social bookmarking the site, and I’ve used USFreeAds.com to post an ad regarding the site. I purchased a monthly subscription with the classifieds ad site so that I can post unlimited ads.

Traffic generation options that I haven’t utilized but am considering are forum posting (I’m iffy about this because I’m not big on setting up accounts at many different forums to discuss a topic I don’t know much if anything about), submitting to RSS feed directories, blog commenting, and submitting to press release sites.

Those methods above are all free methods. I don’t have money to pay for ppc or offline ads so that’s out of the question.

So far, the traffic to the site has been minimal. But what can I expect when I’ve only got 3 articles written and only 2 of them have been submitted?

• Traffic, traffic, and more traffic!
• Article Marketing