So, I hope you are sitting down:

1. I am the artsy one in the Weiss family. One day my whole house will be covered in my own paintings! – If I ever have time to paint and draw again, that is, keeping you all entertained is taking up so much time!
2. Apparently I tend to often interrupt people when they are talking because I get so much into the conversation and want to get my word in before I forget what I wanted to say!
3. I was always really, really bad at writing essays – that’s probably why it takes me a long time to get blog posts together!
4. I am German, studied German administration and got a diploma, just to travel to Australia and end up “for good” there! The Australians don’t seem too interested in what I know about German administration…
5. I have climbed Ayers Rock in Central Australia and dived with sharks at the Great Barrier Reef (!?!? did I really do this?? How old was I??)
6. Since I had the kids (7 and 6 now) I have become the greatest CHICKEN on earth – I see danger in everything, hence me questioning No.5.
7. But I have still started to do waterskiing early this year and really enjoy it! When the season starts again soon I will have to learn how to drive the boat (shiver….) I don’t have a photo of me on skis, just of me and mini-me before her kneeboarding…
8. I absolutely love my two Jack Russells Boomer and Dash, but I am sometimes to lazy to take them for their walk (shame on me!)
9. I don’t like the telephone. Never have. It took me ages to get a mobile phone.
10. I am a “Yes”- Sayer. I can’t say no. I want to please everybody. I HATE my weak self!
11. I am obsessed about my weight. I eat too much. I love food. I LOVE FOOD. Constantly on a diet or other….
12. I am very good at making resolutions about what I am going to do; but I really SUCK at sticking with it!
13. I am extremely compassionate. Sometimes too much, because hearing about certain events can mess me up for quite a while…
14. My 2 dream holidays: Horseback riding in the Rocky Mountains, Painting course in Tuscany.
15. Swimming is one of my favorite sports. I am a water rat.
16. I’ve served ice-cream in our own store in the center of Australia for 7 years, and hated every minute of it. Loved the “all-you-can-eat-for-free” though.
17. Been together with my partner for nearly 15 years…
18. Never in my whole life has anybody asked me “will you marry me?” – …They must all have known that I would say no!!
19. I consider myself a single mum as my partner is constantly away on business.
20. I am currently doing Certificate IV in Bookkeeping – I want to be able to do someting for the unlikely case that my Internet Marketing doesn’t take off! (don’t put all your eggs in one basket, or so the saying goes?)
21. My favorite book right now is Enough: Breaking Free from the World of More fantastic read!
22. One of my favorite things to do is to go for a walk along the beach here with my kids and dogs and watch the sun set over the Indian Ocean…. (are you jealous??)
23. I love to do paperwork and office work. I know – I am a rare breed! And I have always been absolutely pedantic about being organized and neat. I should have married an accountant! – If I ever would have been asked, that is…
24. I cannot lie. I am too honest. That’s probably a good thing!
25. I am a happy person who enjoys life and I am on a quest to better myself by being more mindful, doing 10 minutes of meditation every day (so far I still suck at it, I have to learn), by giving more and being more content.
26. I am always up for a challenge (hint hint!). What I consider my biggest challenge right now is to show all my friends and family that you can actually make lots of money with Internet Marketing!!!

Here is what I have added after completing the list (I will keep adding here as I see fit, on an ongoing basis!)

• I yearn to see more of the world. I have been to lots of countries in Europe while I was still living in Germany, and have also been to Sri Lanka, Thailand and Bali, and of course now I am living in Australia, but I would love to see North and South America, and Africa! Russia, China, Japan….
• I have been snow skiing in Zermatt in Switzerland (at the Matterhorn)
• I have cycled around Bali by myself – now THAT was cool!

Puh, that’s done! I hope I haven’t scared you off now, and you will keep enjoying reading my blog! Thanks, Gene, for tagging me to take part in the challenge, as you can see I have risen to the task, now I will go off and tag my 5 people, too!!! I will be listing the other “contestants” who get the T A G from me right here as they complete their tasks. Watch this space!

Here are the Internet Marketers who were fortunate enough to get tagged by me :

1. Rob Willis – 25 things you may not know about me.
2. Vance Sova – What are Alex Jeffreys students up to?
3. Veronica Purdey – Tagged by Petra for 25 random things

Get Website Traffic

Today I want to talk about how to get website traffic.

You see, I am still going with Alex Jeffreys Coaching Program, even though I haven’t really had a lot of time, I keep slowly working away at it. And I have just discovered that Alex has put up a contest for all fellow students to see who can drive the most traffic to their website within the 2 week period from 1st August to 14th August 2009. Now, obviously I am starting more than half way through the competition because I have not been up to date with his teachings, and I certainly won’t win the contest, but I still think getting more traffic to your website is always a bonus!

So, as a little twist in Alex’s competition, we are supposed to talk about how we are driving traffic to our websites, too. Petra-Weiss.com is an established blog (up for about 11 months), so I have been getting constant traffic already. But how did I do it? And how am I going to get more traffic in the future?

Here is a screenshot of my current Google Analytics account; I have only installed it a couple of weeks ago, also as a “homework” we had to do in Alex’s Coaching program. (Google Analytics is an excellent way of analyzing where your traffic is coming from, how many pages visitors look at, how much time they spend on your site, and what sort of actions they perform. I didn’t know it was that good, but you can really improve your sites performance when working with these figures).

Google Analytics Shot Petra-Weiss.com

Now, over the past 2 weeks and a bit I had 574 visits and 1017 pageviews. I also had a 66.55% bounce rate, which represents the percentage of initial visitors to my site who “bounce” away to a different site, rather than continue on to other pages within my site. So you can guess that I am not too happy about that!

But how do I get website traffic to my site, and how am I going to improve it?

• I have been commenting on other blogs occasionally. This can definitely be improved! When I picked the blogs I commented on, I was mostly looking for top commentator blogs, as you can gain great backlinks to your blog when you make it to the top commentator list. Also important for me was that the blogs are “do-follow” so the link actually counts in search engine ranking terms. So part of my strategy with commenting was SEO. But one should not forget that in traffic terms, any comment on another blog (ideally related to your niche) has the potential to drive traffic, as other people see the link and might decide to click on it, whether it is do-follow or not! So I will be putting myself out there more and not worry too much about only commenting on do-follow blogs.

• I have been trying to optimize my posts for the search engines by picking keywords that have high search volume and low competition. It has actually worked – over half of the traffic to my site comes from the search engines! I am doing it again with this post; I looked for long-tail keywords in regard to driving traffic to a website, and I found “get website traffic” with Google’s keyword tool – it gets searched for 14,800 times a month, and when entered into Google Search within brackets it has only 70,700 competing sites! That is fantastic! So I am trying to optimize this post for the search term “get website traffic” to hopefully get some traffic to my site through the search engines! Have a look at my Google Analytics account regarding sources of traffic to my site:
  

  Google Analytics - Traffic Sources Petra-Weiss.com

I actually hit the Jackpot with my “Free Affiliate Insider” scam posts – I landed on page one quickly and everybody who wants to know something about the program “Free Affiliate Insider” lands on my blog! Search Engine Traffic is the best traffic you can get; if you make it to page one for certain search terms, you get free and often quite considerable traffic to your website.

• I have been building backlinks to my site, also to improve my search engine rankings and get more traffic. I signed up with Angelas BackLinkBuilder Program through the Warrior Forum, for only $5 a month she is supplying you with 30 high page rank backlinks per month which you can use to link back to your site(s). This offer was too good to pass up! Now, whilst this might not be giving me much traffic in the short term, it will pay off in the longer term as my site search engine ranking will improve and I will therefore gain more free traffic from the search engines. Voila!

• I have been active in different IM Forums and have my sites links in my signature. So for every post I make, there is another link to my site(s) for people to click on. But truth to be told, I have been to busy to do much in forums lately, also something I have to improve on immensly!

• Yedda and Yahoo Answers. Yedda and Yahoo answers have acutally given me a fair amount of traffic from the answers I left there alone. If you go and answer questions on either of those sites, and you leave a link to your site, people are quite likely to “check out what you have to say” when they like your answer.

• Twitter, Facebook – hmmm, this is absolutely to be improved on! Shame on me, for ages I haven’t even been following my followers on twitter, which is a shame! I need to get more active in Social Networks and get the word out.

• Writing Articles, Squidoo Lenses – as much as I know that this will get you more traffic, I simply didn’t have the time to get too much into that lately. Something to think about regarding outsourcing. It could well be worth spending the money for somebody to write me some articles. If you optimize your articles with good keywords, they can bring in a fair amount of traffic.

This is mainly what I have been doing to get website traffic to petra-weiss.com. What have I planned to do in the short term to really try to spike my traffic for the contest?

1. Twitter – I will tweet a lot more, maybe re-tweet some of my greater posts , not only tweet when I make an update to my blog which is about once every two weeks…
2. Comment, comment, comment. I will comment on many of the other students blogs (some of whom you will find here to the right in my sidebar; absolutely great people there!), on other IM blogs and just try to add more value to the community!
3. Keep going with answering questions at Yedda and Yahoo answers. Both invaluable traffic sources for me!
4. Forums – be more active in forums.

Puh, I am sure that’s not all, but that’s about it for me tonight, it’s nearly 11 pm and I have to be up for my accounting and bookkeeping studies tomorrow morning, so if I find more things I can add to this list I will do so – later. Might just do a few tweets before shut-eye, though….

Alex Jeffreys

What’s been happening in my life lately? Well, apart from being on 4 weeks holiday in Germany and lacking a little focus and time to work on my business (but what’s new?), I have also taken a giant leap of faith and joined Alex Jeffreys Coaching Program. I had heard many (and only) great things about Alex, but as I was off doing my own little things so far I hadn’t considered signing up with him. My Internet and Affiliate Marketing efforts had shown some good results, and I was hoping to be able to just continually improve with what I was doing and increase my earnings over time.

Well, until I realized that for the past few weeks I had literally gotten stuck in a viscious circle of doing lots of stuff on the computer feeling really busy, but – when looking back – not having done a lot at all. I had started going off the rails, and when I realized that I knew I had to do something quickly to change that.

Funnily enough, right at that time Alex Jeffreys Coaching Program came up, and after thinking about joining for a day or so (the coaching fee was a bit of a stretch for my budget!), I thought that I really don’t have anything to lose, and I truly DID need some help. So I signed up!

The coaching started last Monday (6 days ago), and I now can truly say that it will be worth every penny and lots more if Alex keeps delivering like he has so far. On Monday night (for me, in Germany, unfortunately from 12am onwards…) the training call went on for 5 hours!!!! The question and answer section alone went for 3 hours or so, where you could talk to Alex personally. I couldn’t listen to the whole call as I absolutely had to catch some sleep , but the interesting thing was the topic he discussed in this first call:

Setting goals, planning tasks and getting organized!

That’s exactly what I had been struggling with over the past few weeks. Alex goes into great detail how to do your goal setting and daily/weekly/ monthly planning, and gives you all the help you need. I will have no problems on getting back on track and moving onwards and upwards with my online business now!

I can’t wait for the next call, even though I will probably have to listen to it in the members area after the recording, because even I need to get some rest

If you have ever wondered whether you should join a program to learn Internet Marketing, or to take your existing business to the next level, I doubt that you will find a better man to help you than Alex Jeffreys. He wants you to succeed, and he wants to help you – no matter if it takes 5 or 6 hours at a time!