Blog Update… Ten Posts In

You’re going to want to read this blog update… but first, DOH!

Yep, my blog posting has been derailed. My project has hit a point where I couldn’t keep up, and now I have some making up to do.

It started on Friday. I did my post on Friday and actually started a post for Saturday and I just ran out of time. Life got in the way. Wife, kids, kids activities, work, exercise, etc. It happens.

As with all of you, time can sometimes be an issue. It got the better of me and here we are on Monday and I now have to do a blog post for today and make up 2 more (for Saturday and Sunday). But as I said before, it’s about meeting a challenge and holding myself accountable.

I wanted to update you on the progress of the “99 Challenge” and let you know how it’s been affecting the traffic to the site and so on as I stated in Post #1.

Blog Traffic Update

When I started the challenge, I mentioned that I wanted to SHOW you how blogging can affect a site and wanted to have various blog updates to show you what has been happening.

I also need to let you know that the ONLY marketing that I’ve been doing for my site is blogging. After I make my blog post, I do update my 4 social media profiles (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn). I am NOT doing ANY other marketing for the website at this time.

No paid traffic, no link building, not boosting my posts to get likes in Facebook. NOTHING!

Traffic is up… a bit!

So far, traffic to the site is up by 43%. No… that is not a typo. Daily traffic to the site has risen 43% since I started this blog posting challenge 12 days ago. And once again, I’ve just been putting up the blog posts and sending out social media updates to the 4 big social media outlets that I mentioned in the above paragraph.

How is that possible you ask?

Well, it’s a few different factors really. But first, when I’m doing these blog updates, I want to point out a couple of things about how the traffic is measured.

• Traffic is measured using Google Analytics.
• My IP address has been blocked from registering in Analytics stats because I’m obviously on my own site a lot (making sure the posts look OK) and don’t want those views to skew my numbers. If you want to do the same, take a look at this article (takes about 2 minutes).
• I’ve blocked all known traffic bots. These are search engine spiders that artificially register hits to your site. Actually they ARE hits, but not by human eyes. Unfortunately they are probably in YOUR stats as well. Read this article on how to do this (takes about 60 seconds).
• I’ve not done ANYTHING different in my business other than blogging. I’ve had a few meetings in the last 10 days, but nothing more than usual (previous clients) where there would have been an influx of visitors to the site.
• I’m not going to tell you EXACT traffic numbers at this time. I will at a later date and I will explain why then. I told you I would be transparent, but you’re going to just have to wait.

So, How Did I Do This?

I did this by blogging about specific keywords and subjects. For instance, Post 3 is about blogging tools and was written around that specific subject.

That particular subject has an average of 590 searches a month (over the last 12 months) per Google’s Keyword Planner tool. I talk about finding out how many searches a keyword has by using the planner tool in Post #3.

Did that particular post bring in 590 visitors in the last week? Absolutely not, but it did bring people into my site who were interested in what I had to say about it. The same thing goes for the other 9 posts that I have done.

That post was optimized correctly around the keyword “blogging tools”. We will talk more about optimizing a blog post later.

Then after the post was written, links and updates to that post were sent out to the 4 social media sites that we use. Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and LinkedIn and that’s it. I only made 1 update on each platform for each post.

Nothing more!

Nothing more… and that is the honest truth.

You see, I did not just post to post. I did my research and found topics that we’re searched for based on what I wanted to write about (blogging).

I wrote specifically about those topics, optimized them and then I let people know about them through social media updates and hashtags (where applicable).

Now with all of that said, do I predict that my traffic will continue to go up by 40% over the next 10 blog posts? NO… but I’m going to continue exactly what I’ve been doing. This was a good jump and I did expect traffic to rise, but maybe just not that  much. But just wait and see what happens over the next 20 posts. I will give you another blog update at Post #20.

Until then… Keep Building Your Business.