To encourage myself in achieving this goal, I thought that a reward was only fair and decided to buy myself this watch once I achieve the goal. Besides turning my challenge into a game, this also gave me the opportunity to receive something tangible rather than just the 25% increase in traffic.

In between my full time job at EC and client work, I had to step outside of my comfort zone in order to increase traffic over the month of September. Reading 4 Creative Ways to Attract More Visitors to Your Website served as a good start to draw a plan and come up with new ideas to help me achieve this goal.

The Download section on my site is a good resource point for designers and it was already attracting most of the traffic towards my site, yet this wasn’t enough. I needed to give away more downloads, upload more projects and post them on inspiration galleries, and also write new articles on my Blog and Tumblr page. The highest peak was after I posted the blog post The Eight-pointed Cross Epidemic, followed by download pages and projects pages. I was very close to reaching my target, however in the last 24 hours of my challenge I was still 96 visits short from reaching my goal.

That’s when my friends jumped in to help and started posting links to my site on Facebook, Google+ and Twitter. Not only did I reach my goal, but I was offered a full-time job as a Web Designer and was also asked to contribute in writing for a local arts and design blog. All of this within 2 hours.

By the end of the month, Google Analytics showed a 31% increase over September – 6% more than I had aimed for. Great success!

The traffic in those 2 hours was higher than my site had ever received in the same time span. Visitors to my site were aware that this was part of a personal challenge and the fact that this had turned into a game enticed users to take part in it. This worked very similar to gamification techniques although there was no reward for them.

The whole challenge was an excellent way of pushing myself to reach new targets, be more productive and engage new users to my site – all for the prize of a watch.

So what do you want to achieve this month? Start your own challenge and try it for yourself.