What Happens When You Blog Twice A Day For 5 Straight Weeks?
Week five has come to a close and 49 blog posts were published on the website in 25 business days (this post is #50 to accomplish the goal). It is far beyond reasonable doubt that blogging twice a day has extremely enhanced the online presence of Tresnic Media. Website traffic overall has gone up a ridiculous amount. The website traffic sources have been relatively balanced, which is what I like to see.
Improved Website Traffic, The Numbers:
Website Traffic Increase (overall traffic): 481%
Search Traffic Increase: 427%
Referral Traffic Increase: 440%
Direct Traffic Increase: 570%
Google Search Queries Increase
The amount of keywords that TresnicMedia.com was showing up for on Google before this blogging challenge was 26. Five weeks and 50 new blog posts later, this site shows up in Google’s index for 351 different keywords. From LinkedIn help to iPhone photography, the amount of new pages, informative content and proper on site SEO has taken our website from basically no Google presence at all to driving traffic from a vast array of keywords.
Search Traffic Still Rising
Residual effects from search engine traffic will be a real benefit to keep an eye on over the next couple of weeks. Now that I have a routine of blogging so frequently, I think I may put in place a new personal challenge for January along the lines of guest blogging or maybe interviewing other professionals in the online marketing world. I don’t want to lose the Google SERP momentum that I’ve built up by going back to my sporadic monthly blog post here or there. So stay tuned for maybe two new articles a week posted here on TresnicMedia.com and if you have any special requests, please leave them in the comments or send us a message from our contact page.
The Real Value: Has Actual Business Grown?
What good is website traffic, search rankings and social shares if they don’t drive real business goals, right? Over the course of the last five weeks and fifty blog posts, I have been growing my online network on Twitter and LinkedIn tremendously. Getting some great discussions in a few different LinkedIn Groups. From these discussions and connections, I have made strategic partners that have helped my business grow as a company and with customers. While direct customers have not come yet (ranking is still climbing to the first page for multiple “agency” keywords, which I’m sure will change that), I have met like-minded professionals who have connected me with new potential customers.
Blogging Helped My Sales Process
When pitching leads that I have gotten through my off-line networking efforts, using this blog and amount of information I’ve been able to produce over such a short period of time has proven my credibility and closed deals for me.
Informative Blog Posts Saves On Customer Service Time
When a customer calls or emails with a question, I answer them with a new blog post. That, in turn, becomes a useful source of information for many other clients and prospects who have similar (or identical) questions. This cuts back on the amount of duplicate, 45 minute conversations that I need to have to fix a simple WordPress issue by sharing a new blog post with anyone asking similar questions.
Want To Get Involved?
Like I mentioned above, I think I will be conducting interviews for articles in January or possibly start accepting guest blog posts. If you’d like to be featured here on Tresnic Media, send me a message through the contact page.
Thank You For Following!
If you are reading this, I want to thank you for your attention through the last few weeks (and few minutes of reading this). It’s the comments, social shares and website visitors that make the blogging worthwhile. Thank you for following along and for reading my content!
*I’ve added the sub heading “What Happens When You Blog Twice A Day For 5 Straight Weeks?” due to the immense popularity of the LinkedIn discussions based around that topic headline.
Thank you for this post. I have been sceptical about blogging and you helped me understand its value!
Thanks, Janeen!
Nice post Todd. I would have liked to see your traffic weekly vs a daily chart…but it’s all good.
How did you create your content strategy…Did you map everything out?
What was your biggest challenge?
Also, my dad went to Seton Hall. Go Pirates #newjersey
Hey Jason,
I thought a more detailed chart would be more helpful, but I can certainly show the weekly growth and monthly growth as well. Probably in a content marketing post in January.
I planned about 45 different topics I wanted to cover ahead of time and then picked from them as I was inspired to write on the specific topic. I would have liked to been more strict with a plan, but overall wanted to get out the posts regularly so it was a compromise I had to make.
Go Pirates!
amazing work you’ve done. I’ll be waiting for your Jan. posts as well. You’ve inspired me so I would like to say thank you.
Thanks!
I understand. I am thinking of the same idea…but I want to plan out about half of the posts and either news jack or reply to other blog posts with the other half.
And nice! Is that the weekly chart in the smaller image?
Happy New Year Todd!
The smaller image is the Google Search Queries chart.
That’s a great strategy for some link baiting and commenting as well! I’m sure you can get some good discussions on your site that way. Will this be on thedsmgroup.com? Keep me posted with your new articles! http://twitter.com/tresnicmedia or send me an email through this site
Yes, it will be on http://www.thedsmgroup.com site. We are almost done with our new site, which will go live in a few weeks. I’ll keep you in the loop.
Oh, I see that about the search queries.
Like Fred said, great job following through with your goal!
Very nice approach and good documentation Todd. I’m impressed with your follow-through and happy for your results. I’m a big fan of consistent blogging. It brings organic happiness!
Thanks Fred!
Hi Fred,
I’m a newbie doing blogging and my website is not even closed to be on the first Osage. Besides blogging often any other recommendations to make my presence in the web? Thanks
Hi Todd
Way to go, a huge commitment, so glad it worked out for you. I am curious if you did Call to Actions and landing pages for every post? That is what I find takes the time, I can churn out the blogs, but it is the next two steps which can take as much time (and require other tasks too — like premium content creation etc.). How did you manage that aspect?
Melanie
Thanks, Melanie!
The only real CTA I have is the ebook in the header of our branding. I intend to set up more CTAs for our different specific services and match them to the post content for new articles going forward (currently working on a LinkedIn series to go around our LinkedIn marketing service).
I basically set aside about 90 minutes a night to write two articles and on Saturday morning’s I would usually churn out a couple more. I’ll be writing a blog post next week on how to take ideas, outlines in Evernote and 90 minutes a week to set up a time efficient blogging routine, so make sure you check back or follow me on Twitter (@tresnicmedia)
Dear Todd,
Thanks very much for the informative and candid reporting on your results. Can you tell us the length of your average post, and approximately how much time per day or week you invested to achieve these results? Also, any tips in hindsight on how to stay productive in your blogging efforts given such a busy blogging schedule (anything you would do differently now that you have gone through this)?
Hey Al,
I’m glad you liked it!
I don’t have an exact calculation, but I’d say the average post was between 500 and 650 words. I usually aimed for 500 and sometimes fell short if it was a simple topic or got a little long-winded or more detailed on deeper ideas.
Staying productive with your blogging efforts is really based on commitment. If you can set a goal and lean on the goal as your motivation, it makes it a lot easier. Since my goal was so clear, it was easy to keep pushing. Also, being extremely passionate about an industry like online marketing that has so many places to pull content ideas from makes it a little easier.
One big tip: make sure you are constantly saving your post drafts! I had lost about 2,000 words when crafting a long article/series when we lost our Internet connection during Hurricane Sandy. Since I was writing in WordPress, I didn’t think about continually saving the draft and when we lost the connection and I hit update, the page refreshed with an error and I lost everything. Now I write my blog posts in Evernote and then copy them over to WordPress for formatting and publishing.
Todd, Great post. Weekly blogging also provides the discipline that’s required if you’re going to be really successful. My leads are now 3-4x greater then what they were a year ago. Can you please speak to the time commitment involved, and also how many words your average post was, and if you found if that made a difference at all?
In one experiment, I spent months collecting a variety of what I considered to be the “best” Facebook advertising examples (shameless link here: http://info.laura-kinoshita.com/blog/bid/60126/12-Great-Facebook-Ad-Examples), which immediately got more inbound links than the previous 2 months of blogging, but it also took four times as long. And, to keep the weekly pace up, I had to blog on Saturdays, and that got to be a bit tedious.
So, please speak to how you balanced writing high quality posts with your time.
Thanks, Laura! I hadn’t thought about the discipline trait, but thanks for pointing that out, makes me feel even better
My time commitment (as mentioned in a previous comment after you posted) was about 90 minutes a day on average. If I had time on the weekend, I would get a jump start so that I wasn’t pressed to have to get something out last minute at all. I don’t have an exact number, but I would estimate about a 500-600 word average for the blog posts. I don’t believe any fell under 350, but some certainly went well over 600.
Roundup posts can be great, and certainly good pieces of link bait. What I would do for that type of post would be to save them to a delicious bookmark or in Evernote when I saw something I liked, then go back every week or two and see if I had enough to put together an article.
Having a clear goal in mind made it a lot easier for me to keep pushing through. Also, outlining a bulk of the article ideas ahead of time (that took maybe a half hour, tops) made it easy to pick and write out when I didn’t have anything fresh coming to mind.
A tip I give to my clients and students for to make the actual writing process easier, is to think of your blogging as if you are writing an email to someone asking you a question. Most of the time, people can easily crank out a 400 word email about something they are knowledgable about with no problem. (Check out my article on this here – http://tresnicmedia.com/get-started-with-business-blogging-communicating-with-your-customers/)
Hi Todd,
Great results. I’m glad to see that others are seeing the same sort of results we are getting from our blogging.
We did a similar experiment recently. We stopped blogging for a couple of weeks and then went back to normal. Our rankings dropped quickly when we stopped blogging, and came back just as quick when we started again. You can see our results in this post: http://www.more-business-online.com.au/blog/surging-to-the-top-of-the-search-rankings
We also haven’t got any direct business from our website yet. It has led to increased brand recognition to the point where we have gained some new referral partners and also some referral business from these partners.
It’s great when you meet someone at a networking event and they say “I’ve heard of your company”. Another example of how blogging works.
Best of luck with your inbound marketing.
Cheers,
Ken
Thanks, Ken!
GREAT POST.
I would like to featured here on Tresnic Media,
Great post and very helpful to have hard numbers to back up the value. Thanks for sharing!
With respect to “Informative Blog Posts Saves On Customer Service Time”, this is a really good point. Many companies use communities for customer support for exactly this reason but if a community isn’t appropriate or you’re just not there yet, a blog used this way is a great alternative.
Thanks, Christine!
It even helps when answering questions. For instance, how to take good pictures with your iPhone (http://tresnicmedia.com/iphone-photography-tips-for-beginners-guide/) or how to format your WordPress posts (http://tresnicmedia.com/how-to-optimize-a-wordpress-post-on-your-website-for-search-engines/), it saves me the time per client to have to explain these things.
It’s also a lot easier when someone contacts me to meet and discuss working on a project, if I send them to an article that explains SEO or the video on our Services page that talks about everything we do. It gives them a brief intro before we sit down together which helps the sales process.
Thanks Todd for giving us direct results and surely I would follow the same…
Thanks, Khizar and good luck! Keep me posted on your work and results!
Like everything else ,don’t forget the results are greatly affected by the quality of the blogs and where they are placed . When he hired a cheap servcie the results were awful . When we did them ourselves the results were great .
Hey Bert! You’ll certainly want quality content on your site, that’s the cost of entry. A lot of those cheap services are going out of business or not offering SEO services anymore because they can’t just get a ton of spam links to rise a website in the SERPS. It takes real people and actual work.
Todd,
Thanks for the article. Nicely written and should motivate most anyone to blog consistently!
Thanks, Mike!
Ive been posting lots of blogs recently, but I can’t seem to trigger comments below my blogs. I also can’t seem to trigger people to want to join the site as quickly as I want to. People are leaving a few comments, and I get a few people signing up..just not as much as I’d like. Any suggestions?
A lot of that depends on your industry and what they are signing up for. Is it a newsletter or a $100 a month subscription? Some industries are harder to gain a quick connection to your customers with. Some generic advice I can give would be to make sure you have content for the top/middle/bottom levels of your sales funnel so that it nurtures your visitors from discovery to connection. Ask questions in your posts so people feel inclined and welcome to comment.
Blogging it is one of the signal that shows Google we are active online. It’s so simple, you spend time blogging or do some social networking, Google will reward you.
Make sense ? Yes to me !
I think Todd, you touch a sensitive subject mentioning “Informative Blog”
Thanks for great article.
Thanks, Mike! Yes, climbing search rankings and becoming a credible source to Google is definitely important and valuable. But don’t lose sight of your customers, they are the ones who should be benefiting the most from the information that you blog about.
Can’t agree more Todd!
Actually we all should focus first on clients providing valuable information and forget about all search engines … for a moment.
It should all start and end with the customers. If your site was developed with good code and your content strategy focuses on relevant topics, the search engines will take care of themselves.
When I first started with online marketing, it was something I stumbled upon because I was very particular about my coding when I built websites and then wanted to deliver fun and quality information to my audience. (Check out my article discussing this here – http://tresnicmedia.com/how-getting-drunk-and-learning-to-cook-taught-me-about-content-marketing/)
This post is really good and well formed but I am little bit confuse about blog post that where is it done, in website’s blog or in different guest blogging sites.
Thanks, Henry. The blogging was done here on site. Check out the articles and let me know what you think – http://tresnicmedia.com/blog
Thanks for sharing this chart Todd. I think it’s great. I’m a brand new blogger – still learning a lot. This really helps boost my confidence that if I stick with what I’m doing, I’ll be able to contribute to the online world and also build a profitable business. That chart is just the kind of proof I like to see.
Thanks again!
Candace A. Chira
Thanks, Candace! What type of blog do you have? Just remember to be persistent and know your audience. Find out where they are online and interact so they want to go and read what you’re blogging about.
Thanks for your reply Todd. My blog is about internet marketing topics. Feel free to stop by if you’d like. There isn’t a ton of stuff on there yet but I’ve got a lot of upcoming things that will be up soon. Have a great weekend!
I too struggle to get comments on my blog. I am trying to blog 3 x a week. Having six kids my time is kinda limited. Perhaps you could offer suggestions for my site to be improved Todd?
William
Hey William, that’s a great plan to have, now it’s just about execution! I would say it’s easier to actually blog (write your blog posts) once a week, and do all three and then schedule them to go out during the week. Two articles I wrote that can help you are here
- Productive Blogging Routine – http://tresnicmedia.com/boost-your-business-blogging-productivity-with-evernote/
- Batch Blogging To Save Time – http://tresnicmedia.com/batch-blogging-and-scheduling-posts-in-wordpress/
I went to your site on my laptop and it looked like it was only designed for mobile? I would suggest getting a desktop version of the site design up for sure.
Amazing article Todd, congratulations
It is really hard to make 50 post in 25 days. I am impressed because your users grow was solid and stable. With no doubt one the best e-marketing experiments I have seen in long time
Keep working like that!
Thanks, Victor!
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Hi Todd, interesting experiment. Would have loved a nice graphic on this page so I can pin this page on pinterest. I have a board on there where I collect stuff for work. This would make a good post.
Hey Brandi! I’m glad you like the experiment. The images on the page don’t work for pinterest?
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Great article!
I inadvertently did the same thing on one of the blogs I work on and got pretty much the same results. Sometimes I posted more than one article and most of the time I had only one, but I always put up at least one thing. I did it to primarily keep my site in front of readers so they wouldn’t forget it, and it’s worked so far. So it’s great to see your work quantified!
Steve
Thanks, Steve! What market is the blog you did this with in?
It’s in Virginia, specifically NoVA right outside of DC.
Steve
That’s awesome to see such a strong effect in different industries like that, congrats!
Hi Todd! I could say that you are a toilsome blogger. I am amazed with the time and effort you exerted in making these contents. I want to be like you. You showed us the importance of content marketing. I just want to know if you hire a writer or it is only you who are accomplishing all of the contents. Do you have any time table in writing this? Would you mind if I request certain topic for your next post. If yes can you please write more marketing strategy that will help us bloggers to gain back links. Thank you.
Hey Jenny!
Thanks for the compliments
So far I’m the sole content developer for Tresnic Media but that will be expanding in the very near future.
We can certainly add back link strategies to our list of post ideas, thanks for the suggestion!
- Todd
Thank you, you have inspired me as a Maine Wedding Photographer, to try blogging twice a day. Did you schedule your posts to help save time. Hope you’ve noticed a bit more buisness since first publishing this article. How long is your sales cycle?
Thanks, Erin!
Yes, definitely batching. Peruse through the blog here for all sorts of tips on creating and managing content for the best results.
Here’s an article on batch blogging – http://tresnicmedia.com/batch-blogging-and-scheduling-posts-in-wordpress/
We’ve definitely generated leads and strategic opportunities through our blogging efforts. Our sales cycle is about 10-12 weeks for long term projects, 2 weeks for short term projects.
Good luck!
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