Content Challenge Update
It’s about time I gave you a quick update on the Web Content Challenge I’m participating in for 90 days. I’ve been pretty good at creating regular content on the blog, leaving comments (my goal is 10 per week), and writing and submitting articles. Unfortunately the editors at Ezinearticles.com are taking their time approving them so it may take a little while before those efforts start to really show. That’s ok tough. We’re working on stuff that will benefit us for years to come.
I have been struggling a bit with the guest blog posts. I’ve found quite a few places that will accept them, but so far I’ve only written one of them – shame on me. I’ll have to step up my efforts and catch up on these.
As far as social media etc. goes, I’ve added a signup box to the blog and set up the aweber blog broadcast feature. It will email anyone that signs up a copy of each blog post as it is posted. This should help greatly with returning visitors and building a relationship with my readers. If you aren’t already building some sort of a list with your website or blog, I encourage you to set that up this week. I’ve also been using twitter quite a bit. I changed the wp template I am using to include some of my most recent posts. You can see it in action in the right sidebar.
Time to look at some stats.
Cache
My cache using the google toolbar still looks like this:
which doesn’t make much sense considering that I know for a fact that google is regularly crawling and caching my site. I can go to google, type in Affiliate Treasure Chest and my site comes up. Toward the bottom of that listing you’ll see a link that says “cache”. Clicking on it will show the following cached result.
The good news is that google is definitely crawling and caching the site. I’m just not going to worry about the google toolbar results and write it off as a bug. Looks like the site is already being crawled regularly which is a good thing.
Incoming Links
I am using yahoo site explorer to keep track of incoming links. Go to yahoo.com and type site:www.affiliatetreasurechest.com to see the latest results. As of right now I have 19 incoming links. Most of them from blog comments from the looks of it. That’s already a pretty good improvement over the results at the beginning of the challenge.
Here’s the screenshot from yahoo site explorer. Not that I clicked on “Inlinks” and chose “except from this domain” to filter out any internal links.
Website Visitors
Last but not least, let’s look at the most important metric – website visitors. After all getting more people to visit the site is the whole point of this content challenge.
Here’s the screenshot from my google analytics account.
That’s quite the improvement isn’t it? We went from 4 page views to 314 pageviews… not bad at all.
Quite a bit of this traffic came through a tweet by the fabulous Lynn Terry from Clicknewz.com and SelfstarterWeekly.com. Here’s her tweet
If you’re not already following her, I recommend you do at twitter.com/lynnterry
To recap, I’m definitely making progress and traffic to this new blog is increasing at a pretty nice steady pace already. I just need to step up my game a bit and try to get caught up on those guest blog posts and crank out a few more articles to be submitted to other article directories as well.
How about you? What have you done this week to generate more content and drive more traffic to your website?
P.S. Ready to learn more about Article Marketing? Check out Jeff Herring’s Article Marketing For Beginners. It’s a great course and though I’m not a beginner by a long streatch, I’m learning a lot from Jeff and am writing more articles as a result of his coaching.
You may also like to read:
- Blog Commenting And Regular Blogging – Content Marketing Challenge Update
- Web Content Challenge – Will You Join Me?
- Targeted Guest Blogging and A Challenge Update
- Free Ways To Increase Website Traffic – The 2010 Content Marketing Challenge
- Clickbank and Article Writing For Commissions – CopyCat Recipe Casestudy Update
Tags: web content challenge, web content creation
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I found your blog through Lynn’s tweet. So far it has been worth my time to check it out. Good luck with the content generation challenge. Generating content is always my biggest issue.
I have gotten to the point of trying to convince my friends and co workers to write content for me in a jv effort on whatever niche they are interested in. So far no takers.
Glad you like it. Coming up with fresh content is certainly a challenge. And finding others to write it for you (without paying them) without them knowing much about Internet Marketing is even harder.
What I’ve had more luck with is approaching others who have a website and product out there already and asking them to write a few guest posts for me.
The best way to do that is to build a relationship with them first, get to know them before you ask them to write for you.
I’ve got a question. How did you find the blogs that accept guest posts?
I’m starting with people I know and simply asking them if they’d like a guest post or two. You can also google your market and submit a blog post or guest post. You won’t always get a reply, so email and ask first before you spent time writing a lot of content for them.
Hi Susanne
Loved reading your update – it is amazing what kind of impact this can have in a such a short time!
You might want to check out articlebase.com for faster approval on some of your articles – they quote 72 hours, but I’ve seen them turn around results much faster.
Thanks for sharing your results!
My EzineArticles submission is taking a long time too. No worries – once it’s out there, it’s out there forever!
About guest posts, I would welcome one from you at ClickNewz.com. I’m also open to doing a cross blog conversation (oops – reminds me I have an email from you!). AND… I’d love to have you as a co-host on a topical webinar soon. Maybe we can tie all of that in together ;)
Loving your blog here!
Lynn
Thanks Trish. I really need to spread my articles out a little more to build a deeper link profile. I’ll get some articles submitted to Articlebase.com and a few of my favorite article directories.
Lynn, you’re absolutely right that the value of an article especially on a high ranking directory like Ezinearticle.com comes more into play in the long run. I still wish they’d hurry up though :)
Of course I’d love to write a guest post on your blog and yes, we should definitely do the cross blog conversation soon. Co-hosting a webinar sounds like fun as well. If we can tie it all together even better :)
Glad you’re linking the blog. It means a lot coming from you.
Susanne