Two weeks ago I shared my website stats for all to see and demonstrated how different things I’m doing online impacted my traffic.  Here is an updated look at my blog stats:

Weekly traffic on this blog

I’ve looked at a lot of website stats over the last 10-plus years, and although this is still a new blog at the low end of the traffic spectrum, I have to say “wow” to the quick progress it is making.

If you recall my post from two weeks ago, I discussed how my traffic has been influenced by different factors.  Early gains in traffic came from committing to a regular posting schedule and syndicating the blog via feedburner.com and technorati.com.  Then I created a linkedin.com account to further promote myself and started sharing my blog URL with clients and new leads which continued the positive climb in the stats.  Then big fall-out/bail-out in the stock market dropped my traffic for a week as more attention was taken up by this, but then I increased efforts in promotion by adding regular twitter.com posts promoting my blog and joining and utilizing biznik.com, in particular getting an article posted on biznik.com that generated a lot of interest.

Finally, just this last week, I posted an interview that was well recieved and I had my blog “stumbled” on stumbledupon.com which really spiked my traffic.

I’m not sharing these stats to brag, but to show as proof that social networking and online self promotion works.  Everything I’m doing can be emulated and none of it has cost me anything, except a commitment in time.

Just when I thought I was going to leave LinkedIn.com alone as a blog topic for awhile since I have a few recent posts on it, LinkedIn has to go and introduce a cool new feature.  Now you can plug mini applications (widgets) into your LinkedIn profile.  These applications range from auto-embedding your most recent blog posts, displaying Power Point presentations, embedding Twitter activity or sharing documents among other apps.

The power in this is that you further engage visitors to your profile and give them a bigger picture of who you are and what you are all about.  Since LinkedIn is a networking website, the more you can impress visitors on the frontend, the less selling you have to do to get them to join your network.

It looks like there is still some bugs with the release of this new feature (at the time of this blog writing, my LinkedIn WordPress application is not displaying anything).  However, these bugs are bound to get ironed out soon, and I have no doubt many more applications will get introduced over time.  If you don’t have a LinkedIn account setup yet, you are soooo yesterday!