Poor Student No More

It has been six weeks since my decision to get out of debt before I graduate and since my first post on my introduction to debt.  Since then, I have successfully set up and learned how to use Google Analytics and Google Adsense, learned how to optimize my use of keywords for search engines, and written 14 posts on student debt, debt consolidation, good debt and my plan to get out of debt.

My Progress

• To date, I have made $26.05.

• I have had 115 visits, 188 pageviews, and 91 absolute unique visitors.

• Out of the 115 visits, 14 are direct traffic, 28 are from search engines, and 73 are from referring sites (Twitter, Stumbleupon, Twellow).

• I have increased my Twitter followers from zero to 467 in about two weeks and started tweeting about my journey, which has driven the majority of traffic to my site.

So what’s next?

I am hoping that with more legitimate and valuable content, my site will rise in the search engine ranks under keywords like “student debt,” “student loans,” and “debt consolidation.”  To make this process a bit quicker, I am planning on building links on other websites, encouraging feedback and comments from readers, creating an email list-serv, and continuing to use social media for direct marketing (Twitter, Facebook, and Stumbleupon).  The goal is to increase the amount of “organic traffic,” or visitors that come from search engines.

I am also planning to learn more about online marketing techniques that can be valuable in driving more traffic to my website.  I am very new to online marketing and have not yet figured out how to optimally reach my target audience.

As the weeks go on, I am learning extensive information about student debt and college loans — things that I should have known long before I got myself into this mess.  Ultimately, I hope that this will eventually help others look before they leap into the black hole of student debt.

Peace, love and loans,

Jess

Most Recent Posts:

• October 17, 2009: Student Debt in Politics (1 Comment)
• September 16, 2009: A visceral emotional response to my debt. (2 Comments)
• September 16, 2009: Video Post 3 (4 Comments)
• September 9, 2009: Interest Rates and Debt (No Comments)
• September 2, 2009: How To Build Credit (2 Comments)