Your blog is your child. And just like a newborn, it must be nurtured and monitored to ensure that it graduates from pre-school and eventually moves out of the house to achieve success on the wild wild web. I thought about all the ways I could show you
what to expect from your blog and how to track your results, but I finally decided to just prove how marketing efforts have catapulted
RSS Pieces into super blogdom. This way you can see empirical evidence of what the right kind of marketing will do for your blog. Yes, I am seriously going to show you how marketing your blog properly will increase traffic by 40%, page rank by 500% and boost your Alexa rank into the top 100,000 of all sites on the internet.
I’ve been in technical marketing for some time now, so I love breaking down the segments of my online marketing campaign and seeing exactly how effective they are. It helps me understand where I need be syndicating my articles, whose blog I should be commenting on and what the effect a press release has on traffic. So, this is going to be your crash course in blog marketing. You’re going to see tons of graphs and charts right from the back-end of our blog platform along with third party tools like Alexa and iwebtools. This should make it very clear how each part of the online marketing strategy increases traffic and helps us all to quantify the value of everything from commenting on other blogs to participate in Active Rain. Let’s get this show on the road.
Outline of RSS Pieces’ blog marketing efforts
Marketing Effort 1: Domain purchase
January 6, 2006, We purchased the RSS Pieces domain
To avoid being sandboxed by Google when the site went live, we purchased the domain well ahead of our launch date and posted a splash screen. Between the time that we purchased the domain and went live in August, the site received an average of 92 unique visitors per day and went from a page rank 0 to a page rank 1.
Marketing Effort 2: website launch date
August 7, RSS Pieces website launch date
By launching with 5 well written articles, the site traffic jumped 302% over the course of 1 week.
Marketing Effort 3: press release
September 20, 2006, Press Release #1 announcing launch of myrealtyblog
Site traffic increased from by another 586% on September 24th.
Marketing Effort 4: syndication and commenting
October 7, 2006 Began commenting on various industry blogs
By syndicating articles, posting on AR and commenting on popular industry, traffic increased again to 22,836 hits on October 14th.
Marketing Effort 5: directory submission and free tools
October 20, 2006, Began submitting to directories
October 24, 2006, Began releasing free SEO tools to development and real estate community
October 25, 2006, Began submitting tools to
Dzone.
October 25, 2006, Began using
Digg to rate and syndicate posts
Simply from continuing commenting and syndicating articles and adding directory submissions and some development tools, the traffic increased from 25,374 hits on October 20th to 52,512 hits on October 25th.
Page Rank and Alexa Traffic
In January 2006, RSS Pieces had a Page Rank of 0, according to Google, by March we had a Page rank of 1. After the official launch of the website, RSS Pieces Page Rank had climbed to a 3 by late September. If all continues according to plan, iwebtools predicts that our future Page Rank will be 5 at the next Google PR update (likely around Thanksgiving).
RSS Pieces’ Alexa rank was 66, 715. That means that out of the millions of websites that Alexa tracks, RSS Pieces ranked well within the top 100,000. Pretty impressive for a baby website selling a service to a niche market, huh? Think that is impossible for your blog? Not at all. Let’s break down exactly what the ROI on each of my efforts were so you can see what you should expect from doing the same thing.
Wow, look at how much of my traffic can be directly attributed to Active Rain, a full 16%. Now, all that syndicating of articles I do on RealEstateVoices accounts for 9%. Simply pinging Google boosted traffic by 5% and getting involved with the Carnival of Real Estate (hotpads.com) bumped us 1%. If I add up all the various blogs I comment on, it amounts to a full 8% boost in traffic. When you add it all up, the hour that I spend each day commenting on other blogs, posting on Active Rain and syndicating articles accounts for a full 39% of all the traffic to RSS Pieces.
The breakdown of marketing ROI as a percentage of total traffic:
Active Rain Participation: 16%
Real Estate Voices syndication services: 9%
Pinging services: 5%
Carnival of Real Estate: 1%
Blog commenting: 8%
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39%
Couldn’t your site use a 39% boost in traffic?
How to get all your marketing done in less than 1 hour each day
Commenting on other blogs:
15 minutes each day
For a list of some reputable blogs to comment on, check this post out.
Posting a blog article on Active Rain
30 minutes
Syndicating posts on RealEstateVoices and/or Carnival of Real Estate
10 minutes
Directories listings
Just get in touch with Best of the Web Directories; they will do it for you.
0 minutes
Ping services
Pingoat is really the easiest one to use and it will take you less than a minute to do it after each post.
1 minute
Mary McKnight
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Nice stats Mary, it proves that this is not rocket science and success can happen is a short time frame if it is planned correctly and methodically. This should many on ActiveRain that blogging is a real marketing concept and it can do wonders for exposure. My blogging efforts have achieved me this cool stat Mary :)