SPF Has Joined the Yakezie Challenge

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What is Yakezie and how does the challenge work?

Ok, we are late in this announcement but better late than never! Some of our readers may have seen the Yakezie badge on our pages and have wondered what this Yakezie thing is all about Yakezie is a network of personal finance and lifestyle bloggers who are working together to hone our writing skills, increase traffic, get assistance with our blogging and to interact with a great group of people who have similar interests and goals. When we learned of Yakezie we were immediately on board.

So why are we a month late in announcing our inclusion in this network? Simply put, I was confused about how the network works. I thought you had to have blogged for 6 months before joining the challenge but I was wrong. The way Yakezie works is that uses the Alexa rating system to rank websites. Alexa is a dynamic website ranking and information company owned by Amazon, which has over 40 million users world wide. The tool bar is free, and easy to download. Alexa tracks Internet usage of those webmasters/surfers who use their tool bar. Before you dismiss their rankings recognize that Google, Facebook, Yahoo and YouTube are ranked #1, #2, #3, and #4, respectively.

The Yakezie Alexa Ranking Challenge is straight forward. If you’re outside of the top 200,000, get in the top 200,000 within 6 months. I have borrowed this content from the "how to" article by Financial Samurai as there is little reason to regurgitate what he has already written so well. Challengers install the Alexa toolbar and add the Yakezie badge to their site and start writing and networking. After you have been writing for 6 months or breach the top 200,000 sites you have completed the challenge and can join the Yakezie Network of bloggers.

Where we started

We joined Yakezie immediately upon launching our site., November 22nd - one month ago. The resources and knowledge that the challengers and members have was and continues to be invaluable to our fledgling site. At this time our rank was abysmal as we were brand new. Our Alexa rank was 23,118,642. The challenge to breach 200,000 seemed daunting to say the least. However, we had read many success stories at the Yakezie forums about people who started around where we did and conquered the challenge so we became determined to roll up our sleeves and start hacking away at our Alexa rank and grow our site's popularity.

Where we are now

The results have been extremely encouraging. Check out our weekly improvements:

• End of week 1 Alexa Rank: 3,470,162 (almost 20 million improvement!)
• End of week 2 Alexa Rank: 1.723,940 (over 50% improvement in rank)
• End of week 3 Alexa Rank: 1,178,97 (approximately 33% better!)
• End of week 4 Alexa Rank: 741,879 (broke 1 million!)

Our rank is now 668,177 and we are very excited by the progress. We have learned a LOT from other Yakezie members who are very helpful and keen to spread knowledge. They are also very patient with new bloggers who have lots of questions. GO YAKEZIE!!!

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