With any luck, I’m now heading towards back on track for my weekly goals. I finally managed to launch the site I’d been working on, which is a big step. It’s still at a point where it needs a lot of building, but not in ways that would be excessively obvious to users. Just needs more original content. It’s a gourmet chocolate site, so this has been a fun one to work on!

It’s hard to create sites quickly while maintaining quality. Any good website requires a lot of work at first, even if the bulk of it comes from a datafeed. You still have to do something to get the search engines’ attention, after all, and differentiate yourself from the crowd using the same feed.

Now comes the fun part – trying to build some sort of traffic to it. I need to get links to it, which can be done as I build links to my other sites. One of my goals is to build links, with a goal of 20 submissions per week. That’s not a lot, and my first week I went over that amount. Of course, not all links will happen. Directory submissions won’t always be accepted, especially for affiliate sites. Link exchanges can fall through.

Really, the part I look forward to is writing the first articles to see if anyone cares to publish them, and get links that way. That doesn’t go toward my link building goal, of course – it goes to my article writing and submission goals. It’s not a topic that exactly has a lot of newsletters, so I have to come up with ways to get the word out on other relevant sites. I don’t expect that to be too hard to doo – there are too many topics for which chocolate can be relevant. Think gifts. Think weddings. There are relevant websites out there.