Let’s start here…

“Without question, blogging provides an effective way to market your business, be a valuable resource and build your personal brand online. And most folks know that, generally, the more frequently you blog, the higher your traffic. But does that mean you should follow the advice of many to create a new post every single day?

Focusing only on traffic numbers, instead of the concentrating on sharing content and building relationships will send you down the path to burnout. Here at WebWorkerDaily, we have multiple writers contributing to help keep the content fresh. But for one-person blogs, blogging daily works for some and not for others.” Source: Just How Often Should You Blog? – WebWorkerDaily

Go to the source for some good thoughts on ‘how often’ — it’s really good stuff! In the meantime, I’m heading in another direction…

I just closed out my best blogging month ever traffic-wise. What was significant to me was that I did it in a ‘short’ month with no speaking engagements. Usually, when I have a chance to speak, my traffic spikes because all the seminar attendees check out my site — it’s usually good for a couple hundred pageviews. In February, however, I did it all on my own, post by post by post. I’ve already laid out all my tactics and tools in the series “Top 10 Tactics and Tools for Tightening your Tribe” and yes, I used them all this past month. I did make two significant changes, however. #1 I redesigned my site using the ‘Thesis’ theme which promises some kind of magic SEO foo and really seems to have delivered for me. #2 I experimented with spreading my posts out throughout the day. Instead of posting 3-5 posts at 6:00 AM, I spread them out every two hours or so throughout the day. Whether it was one, or the other, or both, my traffic’s going nuts!

HubSpot gives me a grade of 96 on my site, Google tells me I have 6,076 pageviews over the past 30 days and Alexa tells me my site is ranked 484,123 in the US. Not much left to prove from my perspective and the thing that excites me most is that my success is the result of a systematic process I can teach to anyone. I usually benchmark myself against local radio station WTAQ because I like to see how I fare against ‘old’ media in my market. They have an Alexa ranking of 116,615 which is really awesome. It thrills me that I’m actually ranked higher than local social media wunderkind Dana VanDen Heuvel [a good friend to e1evation], although I’m sure that won’t last long. He’s at 520,219…

I’m certain my traffic will drop some during the upcoming month as I’ll be directing a great deal of my creative energy toward three projects I announced in February. They are the Social Media Academy — an online training class on the top tactics and tools for effective social media, The Damn Good Social Media Guide — the accompanying ebook, and last? A weekly podcast. I’m currently looking for beta testers for the Social Media course. If you’d like to save yourself the $499 fee and get all the content in a rough format for free, comment, call or contact me and let me know. As always, thanks for reading…

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