I have been blogging for almost a decade now but being an older blogger and a technophobe I find myself much like Alice in Wonderland.

• For years I struggled with traffic.Even my friends and family were reluctant visitors . They preferred to read my email rather than actually access my blog .
• For years I struggled with content , voice and niche . Do I write about myself and my bumbling journey through life ? Is my niche food, travel, parenting or just blah blah blah?

Well, I just bumbled on through this journey and came across so many interesting blogs and bloggers that I became more and more hooked .

Making friends with Alexa

Sometime last year, I came across a campaign #MyFriendAlexa hosted by Team Blogchatter. I wondered what these bloggers were talking about and bragging about their Alexa Rank dropping every day.

I was intrigued. Who or what was Alexa?

So this year I signed up with Blogchatter and its campaign #MyFriendAlexa.

My experience

To be honest I find myself a dinosaur in the world of social media . Tweeting and Twitter was even more alien than FB and Instagram and Pinterest. Till the end of the campaign I couldn’t understand what my group (group 2) was tweeting about . They all seemed so gung ho and with it that my inadequacy and unfamiliarity with the medium became quite obvious.

I must admit that the conversation went way over my head and I was a silent spectator for the most part.

I was a pretty diligent participant and foolishly thought that one only had to post 8 posts in toto. Since I was traveling from the 20th with limited or no access to the Internet, I posted 6 posts in the first two weeks only to find that I should have scheduled them instead .

Ashwini Dodani who was steering our group had made an excel sheet where we were supposed to drop our links and use this resource to share, visit and comment on others’ posts . Regrettably, I couldn’t manage this and only visited the few who visited mine. It was no wonder then that the traffic on my blog was desultory and dismal.

My visitors in August were 807 with 1715 views while my views for September were 1840 with 820 visitors .

As mentioned earlier, the generation gap between me and the other bloggers was getting markedly wider and there were just a few bloggers with whom I could identify and I assume who could identify with me .

But all in all I learnt a lot about blogs and blogging.

My Alexa Rank when I began this exercise was

1,860, 351 Globally

And 119,089 in India

Today it is 1,026,044 Globally

and 46,056 in India

My major learnings

As with every campaign I found myself getting more and more conversant with different aspects of blogging . Concepts like voice, niche and content became clearer . I began to see the shortcomings in my own blog and realised that I would have to drastically change my strategy if I need to increase traffic, viewership and of course improve my Alexa Ranking.

And of course , I learnt how to blog on the go, use features of my mobile that I didn’t know about and of course using the WP mobile App!

So all in all, it wasn’t a bad experience !

Thanks Blogchatter for introducing me to Alexa and many other interesting bloggers.

This is my round up post for #MyFriendAlexa with @blogchatter .