Web Content Challenge – Will You Join Me?
Trish from WebCopyResults.com set up an interesting 90 Day Content Marketing Challenge. Since Affiliate Treasure Chest is a brand new site, this is the perfect opportunity for another case study. At the moment this blog has just a few posts, hasn’t been indexed in google with the new content and there are no links pointing to it. Traffic is minimal… just a few visitors here or there.
The Challenge runs for 90 days from September 1st (yikes, I’m already a day behind) through December 1st. I will lay out my content marketing plan below and give you frequent updates throughout the month on increase in google response (how quickly new posts are indexed, and how often the site is visited by google bots in general), visitors to the site as well as how many links are pointing to the blog.
Let’s start by looking at the current stats:
Caching of The Site
I have the google toolbar installed and the page rank feature enabled. Next to the pagerank bar you’ll find a little arrow. When you click on it you’ll see the following:
Click on “Cached Snapshot of Page” to find out when google cached your page last.
I will do this for the home page and a cross-section of posts throughout this case study.
At this point none of my individual posts have been cached and the cached version of the home page is from before the installation of this blog as you can see here:
Incoming Links
I am using yahoo site explorer to keep track of incoming links. To follow along go to Yahoo.com and type the following in the search box.
site:www.mywebsite.com (obviously you’ll need to replace mywebsite.com with your own url)
Under “Inlinks” choose “Except from This Domain” to get a report on only links from other websites that are pointing to yours (as opposed to internal links which are links from within your website i.e. the home page linking to one of your posts).
Here’s what’s coming up for Affiliate Treasure Chest at the moment:
Website Visitors
I installed Google Analytics (which is free) to keep track of how many visitors are coming to the site. Over the course of this case study, I’ll share both total visits and unique visitors with you as well as various other data on where they came from etc.
For now, let’s just take a look at a simple traffic screen shot from my google analytics account (told ya this site wasn’t getting much traffic yet).
Ok, now that we have a baseline of metrics established that we’ll check on throughout these 90 days, let’s plan our content creation and distribution plan.
Content Marketing Action Plan
I am going to divide the tasks by type of content and also note frequency.
ATC Blog
- Write a minimum of 5 blog posts per week.
- Conduct keyword research for each post. Choose a good keyphrase for the topic and use it in the title of the post and the content (this will not work for every single post, but it’s a good thing to keep in mind).
Article Marketing
- Write and submit 2 articles per week to various article directories. Keep keywords in mind for those as well.
I will update you along the way on what article directories I’m using etc.
Guest Blog Posts
- Write and submit one guest blog post per week.
Commenting
- Write and submit at least 10 valuable comments to relevant blogs per week.
Social Media
- Encourage readers of the blog to tweet, digg, stumble etc.
- Set up several social media profiles with links to this blog and update several times per week. (more details on this later).
My action plan is slightly different in formatting from Trish’s simply because this format works better for me as far as organizing the content goes. If you are following along (I sure hope you do), pick a system that works for you. You can read Trish’s Action plan here.
P.S. Please leave a comment and let me know what you’re planning to do and let’s keep each other accountable to get this stuff done throughout the next 90 days.
You may also like to read:
- 10 Reasons Why You Should Join The 4th #HAHD Challenge
- Content Challenge Update
- Blog Commenting And Regular Blogging – Content Marketing Challenge Update
- Free Ways To Increase Website Traffic – The 2010 Content Marketing Challenge
- Balancing Content Creation And Link Building
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Hi Susanne – thanks for mentioning the 90-Day Content Marketing challenge – I am excited to see how your case study for this site works out!
I like the analytics you are using to document results – will incorporate some of the same into my monthly updates, as well.