Well, we are not 25 posts into our 99 Challenge (99 blog posts in 99 days). Every now and again I’m doing a blog update to let those of you following along to know about the challenges, successes, failures, and stats that we have been monitoring since we started.
Posting Frequency
As you all know, I’ve been trying to do 1 post per day. However, life gets in the way and I’ve fallen behind a bit. Shoulder surgery, sick kids, all the good stuff. Actually I fell behind a lot more, but I was able to double post a couple of days to help make up some ground.
Also, I made en executive decision and decided not to just count blog posts, but new pages as well. When we built our site 2 years ago, we did not do a lot of things that we should have done and are starting to correct those problems.
I personally think it takes a lot more time and effort to do website pages because with those pages you’re selling your business and services. There are a lot of things that you need to do correctly in those pages as this post on Homepage Layout begins to show.
Date Challenge Started: January 7th
Date Today: February 10th
Days Past: 34
Posts / Pages Done: 26
So as you can see I’m still a bit behind, but I should be able to make this up by the end of the challenge.
Blog Traffic Update
Since we started this challenge, our website traffic has increased by 86%. When we did the blog update after 10 posts, we had increased our traffic by 43% at that point, so as you can see, we have doubled it since then.
Once again, we are not doing ANY other promotion for the website or any paid advertising at this time. We are simply posting our updates and then updating our 4 social media accounts (and we have missed a couple of updates with these). The four social media accounts are:
- Google+
Increase to our social media followers has not been outstanding, but it typically never is for a lot of the information that we are posting and also the frequency that we are posting it.
I’ve stated previously in other posts about how sometimes the frequency of your blog posts can actually drive followers away from your site because you are bothering them too often. I think that this may be the case for a couple of them, but we will test that theory in a later blog post.
Regardless, our followers have grown a bit, but not by leaps and bounds. We will also test this in a later post as well.
So Far So Good!
Well, I can’t complain to this point. Traffic is up, the user experience is up (people are staying on the site for longer periods of time), and client interaction seems to be rising as well (people calling for services).
However, it’s still a challenge. Putting in the work every day for almost a month and I still haven’t hit the big jump in the traffic numbers yet. I know that some of you may think that 86% is a good jump, but you also need to understand that our numbers started out VERY low as we have NEVER promoted this site or done any traffic generation. We will reveal those numbers at the end of the challenge.
So stay tuned as I will do another blog update at about post #40 or so.