1) Buy a domain name
2) Get a hosting company
3) Installed the wordpress
4) configure the wordpress
5) did market research
6) Select my niche
7) wrote my first article and posted it
Wait for my blog to be hosted

Doing all the above took me mere 1 day. Then I published my blog and anxiously wait for google to index. Hooray, I found my blog on 3rd day when I did a google search on my blog url http://swotanalysistemplate.com
Wow ! I could not believed my blog could be found in mere 3 days. That gave me great encouragement so I spend much time to write more article and posted them. I did google search with keyword with the following keywords:

• swot analysis template
• swot analysis example
• swot analysis matrix

No sign of my blog on google search for several days. Then I spotted something familiar on page#1 on the seventh days when I search for keyword “:swot analysis template”.  Wow!  that was my blog!  I could not believed my eyes until I took a closer look.  yeess,  it was my blog right before my eyes.  it was on google page #1 somewhere at the bottom of t he page 1.  I am sure you appreciate my joy if you were me!

But I could not find my blog for the other two keywords. So, I wrote more articles with such keywords and posted it.  At the same time, I submit slightly modified articles to ezinearticles.com  Another pleasant surprise to me, my articles submitted to ezinearticles.com appeared on google page# 1 after 2 days.  Fantastic, I told myself.  Later only I realised that it was the high PR on the article directory that bring up my blog to page#1.  Then I realised of the power of article directories. There on, I keep submitting articles to article directories as well as posted new articles on my blog. I started to note my blog appeared on google page#1, 2 and 3 with all the three keywords

Then I noted something which is was not so happy about.  The page position remain unchanged for several weeks and the traffic is not heavy. Then I recalled there are more to be done to my blog to drive traffic. So I used the following strategies to drive traffic to my blog:-

1)   DO SEO and SEM ( what on earth are these jargons? )

2) wrote and submit articles to web 2.0 sites

Believed me, that was not an esy tasks, submitting our blog to web 2.0 sites manually takes a lot a patient and hard work.  I hope there is software replacing this manual work.  Besides all these essentials for blogging, I did more researches how to drive traffic. Then I found those link exchange programs and I picked one which has high PR itself and started to managed the links exchange because I want to make sure only relevant sites are exchanged.  I also did email marketing as well as promote my blog on facebook, tweeter, stumbleupon, hubpages etc etc   you name it, I have it. ( Is there any more ?? )

Thanks goodness, the above hard work seems to yield positive results. The traffic has improved from 909 on the first in May09 to 4635 unique visitors in Aug09. 15 days into Sept09, the traffic has recorded 3110 unique visitors. I think all that I did started to yield results but I am not happy.

Why ?  My course mate who build a blog do not belongs to any niche has  PR=4 and traffic exceed 10,000 in Aug09. I could not find his blog using any keyword but the blog received such a fantastic results compared to mine.  His content is not focus and certainly could not be categorised into any niche.  Yet, his result is better.

So, I was lost for a moment!  Is Content the KING ? I wondered!  is TRAFFIC bring in the visitors or Content does?  You make the judgement because I have not idea what should it be !!!