Some of you may remember a post a long time ago about my joining the Yakezie Challenge. Since that time, you have seen many Yakezie related posts and guest posts. Today I broke the 200,000 Alexa ranking benchmark and “officially” completed the challenge. Here is a note I sent to my friends in the Yakezie. I thought I would share it here with you as well.
On October 7, 2008, I started a new project called Narrow Bridge Adventures. At that time, it was hosted at Blogger and I knew enough about blogs to start them but not to grow them.
On March 8, 2010, I joined the Yakezie Challenge. Inspired by Well Heeled, I joined the “wolf pack” (think Hangover) and posted my Alexa ranking of 1,297,451. (I was the 53rd comment on Sam's ‘Alexa Ranking Challenge' post)
As the Yakezie evolved, I was grandfathered in because of my old school involvement, though I never quite broke the 200,000 mark. My PageRank was growing faster than my Alexa ranking was falling, so I was happy. But I knew I was not really part of the wolf pack.
My ranking continued to drop and never took any major steps backward. Over the last fifteen months in the Yakezie, I have built friendships and relationships that have had offline and online interactions. But I still never quite broke 200,000.
I never really cared that much until I got an encouraging e-mail from Sam one day a few months back encouraging me to make an extra effort to hop over the hurdle (I was sitting around 250,000). That was around the time I ran the Yakezie March Madness and started the Yakezie blog swap. My ranking was sitting around 210,000 at that point.
So I kept plugging away, commenting, networking, doing what I know works but seemed to work very slowly for me. About a month ago, I had the opportunity to meet Sam in person and got a few ideas to cross the last 10,000 mark and officially “beat the challenge.”
I am proud to say that today my Alexa ranking is 197,535.
While my path to get here was long and unorthodox for Yakezie standards, I made it. Thanks to all of the friends I have made along the way. Thanks to all of the links, roundups, support, referrals, guest posts, blog swaps, Tweets, Stumbles, Tip'ds, shares, e-mails, Diggs, and virtual high fives.
You are all an amazing group of people. I am proud to be apart of it. And now I can confidently say that I belong with this group of amazing bloggers. As always, if you ever need help with anything, you will get it unconditionally from me.
-Eric
I don't have a big goal to lower my Alexa Rank to 100,000, but if it were to happen I wouldn't complain. As always, my goal has been to write useful, original content to help you in your personal finance endeavors. We will see what happens in the future. Thanks for reading and supporting the site.