So, just wrapping up a few things before the Xmas festivities kick off. A quick run down of what I have been up to to drive traffic.

To be frank, I’m not really going all out to win the 2 week traffic competition. I see traffic generation as a long term plan and we’ll all go at a different pace, what i will be spending this 2 weeks doing is setting the foundations for a good steady traffic stream in the coming months.

If anyone really wanted to just go out and win the competition they could probably spend $200 in traffic exchanges and get 10,000+ hits over the next 2 weeks. These hits would be largely useless and would in no way help the business or long term traffic plan.

Anyway, I came across this handy little cheat sheet that maps lots of different link building strategies. You can download it here. It’s now pinned to my wall. The sheet was provided by ProspectMX.

So anyway, this week I signed up to 10 of the top Internet Marketing forums out there and made one or two posts on them all. I intend to try and get involved in these communities as much as possible. Both helping others out and getting help myself.

I signed up for Twitter and Squidoo and had a bit of a play around. Started following a few people, and read some of the tweets. I noticed a lot of people already have hundreds of follows, is there a way to speed up this process, or do you have to follow everyone automatically? I must admit I’m a twitter newbie.

I submitted my site to some of the more reputable directories, but this is unlikely to have any immediate affect, just part of the long term plan. In any case a lot of people are saying link directories are dead now. But it can’t hurt anyway.

I’ve actually outsourced for someone to sign me up with accounts on the major social media sites, and post about my blog on them. 50 sites in all for $10 which seemed reasonable seeing as it would probably take me a day to do myself. That should be done by next week some time.

My next steps will be to get another, more personalised video done and get that out to as many video sites as possible. I was going to do it this week but I have a rotten cold and didn’t want to be blowing my nose all the way through it.

And finally I want to spend a day getting round as many fellow students blogs as possible, seeing what they are up to, commenting on their blogs and getting everyone on my blogroll.

So thats it! Hope you all have a wonderful holiday!

Carl.