How do you market your blog?
Ok, I gather you’ve seen John Chow’s monthly income reports? (if not, there’s the link!), what I thought I’d do on Marketing-SEO.com is post weekly Traffic reports.
Why?
I want to document the complete traffic history of my blog, from start to finish and I want to share it with you, talk about what worked, what didn’t, and generate a discussion on drivinig traffic to blogs that hopefully includes minds much smarter than mine (ok, not too much smarter - my ego is a bit on the fragile side, lol).
I want this to be a learning experience for everyone, I want to show you how ANYONE can take a blog from nothing and build it over time. I’m not saying my methods will be the best or only way to market a blog, but I want to show you an accurate picture of how this blog is growing, and maintaining an open and honest dialogue is, I think, the best way to go about that.
Let’s hope I don’t embarass myself too much!
Ok, let’s set the scene
As you’ve probably read in my welcome post, while I’ve been in and around Internet marketing for a number of years, I’m rather late to the whole social media and blog scene - my previous experience has been ‘old school’, but recent Analysis and consultancy projects over the past several months have got me hooked on blogging and social media. So I’m starting from scratch - not in terms of knowing my theoretical approach, but in terms of applying that knowledge to an actual site, that is 100% under my control and not shared with other individuals in a company.
This is essentially ‘My Story’… I hope you enjoy the reports.
Week 1 - April 7th - 13th 2008
It’s probably not the best of weeks to start a report like this… I haven’t exactly done much to promote this site yet, infact yesterday was only my 3rd post and the first day I linked to it from anywhere!
I’ve been using Twitter now for about two weeks (follow me @martyj), following about 90 people, and have 57 following me - I’ve been quite active, but I’d say it’s only been the last couple of days where I’ve started to feel comfortable that my tweets are adding value to the conversations.
What does that mean? it means it’s still hard for me to get others to pay attention to what I have to say, I’m getting there, but I still have quite a way to go before my followers actually seek out and want to hear my thoughts… that’s not a major issue for me at this stage, my main aim on Twitter is to participate in the community and have fun, I’m not pushing my marketing messages (I think I’ve posted a total of three links to my sites the whole time I’ve been on there), and that’s not likely to change - my goals for Twitter are to manage my brand, network with some amazing individuals and keep up to date with news and events. Twitter is not a medium for direct marketing.
Why mention all that? Because my only source of traffic so far has (indirectly) come from Twitter. My post yesterday Do we need to worry about ‘Tweet Jacking’ was written in response to one of the main discussions on Twitter from the past couple of days, a user selling their Twitter account on eBay. I conmented on related threads at Techcrunch and ChrisBrogan.com and it was from one of those comments (I think), that someone (not me) submitted it to StumbleUpon.
It’s only early days yet, but I think I’m going to have some problems wtih StumbleUpon traffic - it’s well documented that many users there are anti-SEO and vote down anything resembling it when they come across it… having that big ‘Marketing-SEO’ logo on every page is not going to help my cause!
Here’s my Google Analytics traffic chart for the past week.
I’m quite happy with those 106 visits from yesterday, makes the chart look rather lopsided and sets a tough benchmark to keep up with, but it gets things off to a nice start. Here’s a breakdown of the traffic:
If you can’t read that, my top 3 ttraffic sources for this week are:
No real surprises there - I thought referrals direct from Twitter might have been a bit higher (I also have it linked in my Twitter profile), it came in with two hits for the week (so equal 3rd). The bounce rates are quite high, but I think that’s more to do with their only being three posts on the site at the moment (where else are they going to go), although I don’t really expect too much from StumbleUpon (cursor’s don’t stray too far from that stumble button I don’t think).
Feedburner: I only burned the feed yesterday and it is still showing 0. I don’t think too many signed up yesterday, but I know it should read at least 1 (me), will have to wait and see what it says next week.
That’s it… there should be a bit more to report next week, I plan on posting nearly every day this week, so hopefully I’ll be able to drive those numbers up a little and attract some decent traffic.
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