I’ve had some friends in the past few weeks ask me, “How did you come up with the name Jason Boom dot com?” Can you guess my favorite response? I’ll give you a hint — it’s a scientific creationist theory.

“It was a Big Bang”

Even more people have asked how I received so much traffic so quickly. That’s a little more difficult to answer with one phrase. For that reason, I’m writing this post to blow apart what’s happened since January 12th and look at each individual piece of the experience, with a little back-story.

The Big Bang
My About page describes my situation fairly well. I’m a technical writer, freelance writer, small-time web host, and computer savant. For about 12 years, I had a ‘fuse’ that I refused to give up — cigarettes. January 7th of this year, I quit. I threw the fuse away. With that came increased energy and a renewed interest in pursuing my dreams.

One Friday evening, I sat down at my desk to surf popular blogs. I revisited my Google Reader which I’d largely ignored for several months, and sifted through some posts. One post from ProBlogger attracted me to the idea of writing my own blog. I read so many of his posts that day that I can’t pinpoint now which one it was. I’ll think of it eventually.

So then I went to my GoDaddy account to see what domains I owned. There were around eight to ten in there. Of the ones I had, I only considered one a viable name. I setup the domain and installed Wordpress. This was a Friday. By Saturday, I posted to this blog, under a different name.

The Sound of an Egg Cracking
The first post was closely followed by a second, where I showed off my office space. Darrin at Problogger had taken a video of his HQ and submitted a challenge for everyone to follow suit. On the ProBlogger.com site, I left a comment with a link to my office space post. Someone followed that link to my blog and commented on my workspace. I was so excited! I had a visitor.

It’s important to remember I was wanting to smoke during this time, so I was entrenched in this project. Mrs. Boom was quick to point this out on a few occasions, but mostly she let me stumble and trip over the internet without nicotine.

I ran across blogs that showed me Entrecard, which I promptly signed up for and installed on my sidebar. I wrote another post — a Sunday post, which was more playful than anything. Without nicotine it was difficult to sleep. I would lay in bed during these early nights and come up with creative ways to get the word out about my blog. Sunday the 13th I decided to change my domain name and create a brand that would be memorable. I wanted something easy to remember and something I could have fun marketing. Jason Boom was born.

Learning to Walk
I think for new bloggers, the first month can be crucial. It can make or break new blogs. Who wants to keep writing if no one listens? It can be depressing to only have a few readers after a couple of weeks. I didn’t want that to happen. Not on my watch. My whole meme, ‘exploding across the internet’ would be for naught. I had to make it work. But how?

I had the Entrecard widget on my blog, and I began to see a little traffic. I also visited 50 -100 blogs a day. I signed up for RSS feeds that interested me, and dug my heels in as I prepared to market my blog. I talked to my wife, and we agreed on a budget, initially of a $150.00.

I found a company that offered inexpensive logos, so I filled out their form, and three days later I had the Jason Boom image. I took the logo they created and fit it into my website. Through those first five days or so, I was constantly looking to make my site more readable, usable, and convenient. I wanted everyone to love the look and feel of it. This included taking a two column sidebar and making it a single column. But that’s boring, right? I’ll just tell you how I received 238 unique visits in one day, only 8 days after my blog went live.

You Pay for What You Get
I became a member of MyBlogLog and Entrecard. I signed up with BlogRush. I commented on various blogs. During that first week, I also took challenges from various blogs to write about topics they chose, or I responded to their memes. I can’t really say how many blogs I commented on, only that it was a significant number. Those comments always carried weight with the post or discussion too. I never just comments, great stuff, keep it coming, or anything of that nature. I kept it real, yo.

So I read the major Make Money sites (not that I claim to be that breed of blog myself). I do it to keep up with trends. I read them to see what the Jones are doing. From John Cow’s site, I read he was leaving town. Not only was he leaving town but he was leaving the country and wouldn’t be posting for two weeks. However, anyone who had quality ideas could have a chance to guest post. The old cow bell was ringing in my ears when I read this. I knew having a guest post would clearly be good for traffic.

That night I lay in bed mentally writing what had to be the most pun filled post ever on John Cow dot com. I felt like I was rolling out puns with machine gun efficiency. I couldn’t be stopped. I decided after laying in bed for an hour that I would just go write it down. Maybe then I could get some sleep. After explaining myself to Mrs. Boom, I hammered out the article and saved it for the next day.

The following morning I edited it and refined the text, adding a few points to lengthen what I shortened moments before. I went to the Cow’s site and submitted it. After that, I waited. Three days, actually. One day and someone else’s post was published. I was downtrodden but still held out hope. After all, I had a dynamite piece. I knew it would go live. And go live it did. I checked my email Monday evening and noticed I had received a comment from Wordpress, but it wasn’t my blog! It was from the John Cow dot com site. I was so excited. And what’s better? Everyone loved the piece.

How It’s Stacked Up
Part of my budget has included advertising. I’ve bought twenty dollars worth of ad space through Project Wonderland. I’m going to dedicate a post soon to that experience. What I will say now — It was worth spending 13 dollars on Entrecard exposure. I had limited clicks but more than 50K impressions. Close to 30K of those were from unique visitors. Wow! For a measly 13 dollars close to 30K people had seen my brand. That’s a good start.

My Google Analytics code was broken until the 19th of January. I have very little traffic measurements before the guest post went live, but can tell you on Sunday the 20th I only had 11 unique visits. The 21st my guest post was published on the Cow’s site. I had 155 unique visits, followed by 238 on Tuesday, and 196 on Wednesday. It’s slowly trickled down towards the 110 mark most recently.

However, with the amount of people who found out about me from that sudden burst of traffic, I feel I’ll be visited more often. I’ve continued to use Entrecard, which I need to convey carries a lot of my success.

Conclusion
There have been a few things I will analyze to write about later, like my ad campaigns and networking. These are things that must be honed with experience. So the first two weeks of this blog has taught me that my instincts for marketing this blog seem to keen and on the mark. I hope to share my success with all of you, in order to help you market your blogs to the world.

Stick around…We’ll have a blast.