Am I fashionably late? Did I miss the party? Or is it time for the after-party?

Either way, I have decided to take the plunge.

After launching Financial Slacker a few months ago, I started reading more and more about the Yakezie Challenge. I visited the site, read through the forums, have seen others join, and now I have decided to take the Yakezie Challenge myself.

 

What Is the Yakezie Challenge?

For those visitors not familiar, the Yakezie site is a support forum for personal finance bloggers, started by the founder of the Financial Samurai website. The Yakezie Challenge is a fun motivational exercise designed to encourage collaboration, interaction, and helping others in the blogging community with a measurable end goal of improving your site’s Alexa Rank to the next level. For Financial Slacker, that means improving the site’s ranking and breaking into the top 200,000 of all websites in the world.

Financial Samurai has a great post describing the challenge, Alexa Rank, and why this is so important, but here’s the short version.

The rules of the challenge are simple enough –

1. Announce your intention to participate with a post on your site and by installing the Yakezie Challenger badge
2. Publish between 2 and 4 quality posts consistently on your site every week for 6 months
3. Build relationships through the promotion of other bloggers, active participation, commenting, and guest posting.

 

Why Take the Yakezie Challenge Now?

I initially held off because I wasn’t sure I could handle posting 2 to 4 times per week. When I first started out, I had a list of things I thought I wanted to write about. After I got through that list, I was a little stumped. It wasn’t until I decided to open up my blog to discussion of the issues I was working on in my own life that the ideas began flowing.

It was also about this time that I decided to stop thinking about what I should be writing and instead focus on what I wanted to write. My blog is new. I’m not using it to make money. I have a few ads and a few affiliates on the site, but those are really more of a way to see progress rather than providing anything of great (or even decent) monetary value.

The Alexa Rank is the same. I first went out to Alexa and claimed the site around the end of February. Just like many others, the rank was somewhere in the 24 million ballpark. But over the ensuing two months, I have seen the rank steadily fall. Faster at first, then a little slower as my postings and commenting on other blogs dropped off. But continued steady drops. Just a little more motivation to keep on writing.

 

What Am I Getting Myself Into?

As of today, my Alexa Rank is 6,827,959.

Quite honestly, the goal of dropping my rank to under 200,000 seems out of reach. Getting down under 1 million seems like an accomplishment, and it certainly will be. But I am going all-in after that 200,000 benchmark.

There is a certain level of accountability created by making a public announcement that I am joining the Yakezie Challenge. After working on this site in relative obscurity for a number of months, I am excited about having this accountability and working towards greater visibility for the site.

I’ve interacted with a few of the Yakezie members and I look forward to meeting many more. It’s a wonderfully diverse group with different backgrounds, goals, and styles.

Lastly, if there is anything I can do for you, please don’t hesitate to ask.

 

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