As you guys all know, I’ve successfully completed the 31 days of blogging challenge that I set out to do in the month of May. I’ve learned a lot of stuff in these short, but sometimes feeling long, 31 days. If you read my income and analysis report for the month of May, you already know it’s given me a big boost in traffic, and has helped me have the best month since February.
There were a lot of people that wanted to join me in this challenge, but I’m not aware of any that actually finished. Some never started, others lasted a few days and stopped, but I made it through.
How This Blogging Challenge Helped Me
It helped me get into a routine. I was already in a routine where I posted pretty regularly, on average every other day or every 2.5 days. That’s a pretty regular posting schedule in my opinion, but this took things to a new level.
After the 31 days straight of blogging, I feel like I can write posts faster, keep a certain structure, and when I initially thought I’d run out of ideas after the first 7 days, I have more and more ideas on what to blog about to help benefit the readers here.
It’s kind of strange how that works, initially not knowing what kind of content to come up with, but then having content ideas and wondering when you can fit it all in. I have ideas right now for another 60 days worth of blog posts.
One obvious way the regular posting schedule has helped is traffic… I’ve had an increase of 154% unique visitors in comparison to the previous month. My traffic ended up growing so massively I’ve had to increase my bandwidth on this site 4 times last month. Some of you remember that because you emailed me letting me know around 4-5AM!
It has also helped with notoriety and authority across the internet, and helped me get featured in the top 23 blogger analysis on Authority Hacker. Pretty sweet right?
Another thing I’ve figured out is that the more content you have, the more content you have to promote, which means more traffic. You can implement some content marketing strategies and use social media to drive traffic when you have regular content. It helps a lot from a positioning standpoint, authority, and of course traffic.
Something interesting I’ve discovered is that blogging regularly has increased my revenue. If you looked at the income report, you may think it wasn’t a huge increase, but I look at it a different way. I only sent one affiliate email last month and nobody even bought it. All my affiliate income came naturally, with no special campaign or email sequence.
The Problems I’ve Had In the Challenge
This challenge wasn’t exactly easy, even though I feel like it helped me and it got a bit easier as I got through it.
There were many days where I felt stuck, didn’t know what to write about, or I scrapped what I wrote, and it was difficult to put something valuable together. Other times, I really didn’t have the time to post, I had other things going on and really didn’t want to post either, but I still did.
Another problem I have is related to organization of content. Not just for sharing on social media, and I guess it isn’t just related to the 31 days of blogging, but more of an issue in regards to blog infrastructure. As I publish more content, older content is going to be difficult to find. I do quite a bit of internal linking as it is, but is that really enough?
To try and help infrastructure and navigation, I added a right sidebar widget for recent posts, popular posts and comments. It seems like it has helped increase pages per session since I implemented the widget but that doesn’t solve the problem at all, it just distracts me from what the problem really is. So I need to implement a “related post” feature in the blog, in hopes to help guide people to older content as well as new.
I also need to look into using tags in wordpress. As most of you know, I’ve always used Joomla or Drupal for 95% of the sites I’ve made for clients, so I’m not really even “average” with WordPress. I don’t really understand the point of tags when you have categories, so if someone can leave a comment shedding some light, please do so!
Speaking more on the organizational side of things, that’s been a big problem for me with Twitter. I use buffer and it’s been a great tool for me, but when I go back and look at tweets to rebuffer, it’s been difficult to make sure I have the right distribution of posts, and getting some older ones in there. I need to do a lot of organizing, as things right now are kind of a mess!
Enter Your Email for More Awesome Content!
Blog Posts I Wrote In The Challenge
Here you will see the blog post title and a brief summary, if you haven’t read all the posts so far, this can maybe give you an idea of which ones you find interesting.
11 Problems That Cause Most Bloggers To Fail – A perfect post to launch the 31 days of blogging, that outlines 11 problems that prevent people from seeing success with their blog. Blogging isn’t just for internet marketers but could be a great tool for business owners, and great for personal branding as well. Avoid these 11 problems and you’ll be on your way to success with your blog.
Alexa Rank: Climbing The Alexa Ranking Ladder, But Is It Important? – This post is about the often cited Alexa rankings. It’s a metric I’ve been tracking in my income reports, but is it really a metric that matters? Is there any correlation to success?
69 Of the HOTTEST Marketing Statistics To Use In Your Business – A slightly lengthy post of curated content listing a lot of different statistics that you will find interesting in your business, and maybe you can use to help close clients for your services. Definitely worth a read.
Bing Webmaster Tools: The Free SEO Tool Everyone Forgets – I go through the reasons you should have your website verified with bing webmaster tools, along with some of the tools it includes to help you with SEO and the overall marketing of your site. Also, you can get your free $100 credit.
Google+ Local Is Dead… Seriously, It’s Dead – No, that’s not a click bait title, it truly is dead and I also share my thoughts on the future of Google+, the most hyped up and disappointing social network of all time!
Focus Only On Inbound? The Great Inbound Marketing Hype – This post I talk about inbound marketing and the hype these companies put around it. I discuss some of the myths they like to market to their audience, and hopefully bust up some of the brainwashing going on.
So You Want To Start a Web Agency? Read This First.. – Just trying to shed some light on the “dream” everyone has these days, it’s always better to be informed instead of being blind sided. Knowledge is power.
What I Learned By Going To a Dance Recital – I wrote this the night of the dance recital I went to, which was awful. It wasn’t the students fault though, it was the teacher. This translates perfectly in business, SEO, marketing and pretty much anything in life. Following an incompetent teacher or mentor is only going to hurt you.
Why Social Signals Don’t Effect SEO – A controversial post to some, since many of the well known SEO bloggers and figures have said that social signals should be part of your SEO strategy, but this post says otherwise.
A Video Every Marketer Should Watch – This was a quick post because I was running out of time for the day but many of you loved it. Very valuable, kind of a long video but I recommend at the very least watching it or listening to it in the background while you’re doing something else.
SEO After You’re Already Ranking In Search – Think your job is done once you have your site or a client’s site ranking well in the SERPs? Think again! There’s still plenty to do.
5 Things To Make a Difference In Your Business Today – Do you ever sit there and wonder what it is you can do today to make a difference in your business? I often think, what’s one thing that will continue paying off for weeks or months or even years after I do it? Read this post.
Lead Generation Tip Of The Week: Google+ Communities – In this post I discuss lead generation and traffic generation from using Google+ communities, an awesome resource for bloggers, webmasters and pretty much any business owner.
Deciphering Google: User Experience On Desktop Searches – I think there are a few bloggers out there that are just trying to avoid this news since they’ve been promoting other methods, despite Google announcing the reality of things. Definitely a good read if you’re interested in the Google Algorithm.
Is Keyword Research Important For Local Businesses? – The answer might surprise some of you. I dive into the reasons you may or may not need keyword research for local SEO purposes.
Pay Per Lead Model a Good or Bad Idea? – This is an interesting post that is sure to stir up some debate.. I share my thoughts on the pay per lead business model, for consultants to offer the services as well as whether businesses should be buying it.
A Video Every Marketer and Entrepreneur Should Watch (part 2) – This was another case of me not having much time to get a blog post done, so I created a win win. I shared a video that gives value to the readers and visitors of the blog here, and I didn’t have to write too much that day. This one is featuring Seth Godin, on “Making a Ruckus”.
Avoiding Burn Out For Long Term Success – This post is about something everyone goes through at one point or another. Burn out. Great post for those struggling to may progress, as a mentor once said to me, “Sometimes you have to take a step back in order to move forward.”.
The “Phantom Update”: Google Core Algorithm Change Effecting How It Judges Quality – This update that happened around May 3rd or 4th is perhaps one of the reasons I’ve seen a big increase in traffic, but more specifically, and more relevant to this post, organic traffic. I share my thoughts and the news on this update.
Just a Little Thank You To ALL OF You – My thank you note to you guys and girls that have subscribed, and been visiting this blog. Some of you since the very beginning, others just in the last couple weeks or months. You guys are making it possible for me to continue doing this.
Why Web Designers SUCK. Don’t be a Web Designer – This is probably my favorite or at least top 3 favorites of posts this month. This isn’t just relevant to web designers though, it’s relevant to everyone in marketing or in business. Competitive advantage, unique selling point, proper marketing message, it’s all key to success in the world of business. DEFINITELY READ THIS POST!
SEO Has NOTHING To Do With Submitting To Search Engines – This is a post addressing a common misconception among those in the SEO world. Hopefully this helps people to understand…
Lead Generation Tip of The Week: Linkedin Groups – I discuss another easy way to generate leads and build your network using LinkedIn Groups. This is great for those in the B2B industries as well as bloggers and content marketers.
The Trip Wire and Why It Will Improve Your Business – Awesome post about customer value optimization and adding a trip wire to your sales funnel.
Why SEO Means So Little To Most Businesses – People seem to think SEO is the one thing that will make them successful. It’s not true. It’s only one very small part of the bigger picture. The sooner SEOs understand that, the better they will do when it comes to selling the service.
SEO in 2015 and Beyond: Are Backlinks a Thing Of the Past? – This is an in depth post about the future (and present) of SEO and the emergence of what is called co-occurrence and co-citation. We are seeing co-occurrence taking a huge role in SEO, and the fact that backlinks without co-occurrence are becoming weaker and weaker is pretty telling when we think about SEO in the long term.
The Quadruple Marketing Threat: Getting Clients Cheap and Fast – This post is a very useful post for pretty much anyone in business, utilizing 4 powerful marketing methods that can greatly increase your conversions and add massive amounts of revenue. Best thing is, it’s cheap and fast.
Pre-order: Ice Cold Email Gold The Ultimate guide to Cold Email Marketing Mastery – This is the official announcement of the launch of my cold email guide to help people be able to have better deliverability, and to just extensively walk people through how to profitable cold email. I’ve been using MASS cold emailing for years now with great success, and it’s now your turn to make some money with it.
What I’ve Learned From 29 days of Consecutive Blogging – A post sharing a few things I’ve learned while doing this 31 days of blogging challenge. Definitely worth a read if you have your own blog or you plan on starting your own blog sometime soon.
Business and Marketing Shortcuts, What YOU Need to Know – I discuss a problem that plagues many business owners, marketers, and freelancers out there, and that is the concept of shortcuts. I’m a fan of shortcuts, but there are some that can actually harm you in the long term.
Stop Wasting The Most Valuable Thing In Your Life – Day 31I discuss a topic about wasting something very valuable to you, me and everyone else. That valuable thing is time. Don’t waste it. By the way, it’s not a waste of time reading it, so go ahead and click the link.
Going Forward, What’s Next?
Many of you have asked me what I intend to do after the 31 days of blogging. Am I going to post once a week? Twice a week? 3 times a week?
I think the evidence provided by the increased traffic, suggests that I should continue blogging every day. It doesn’t mean I will, but I think it’s something I’m going to continue doing for a while. If there’s a day where I don’t have much time and can’t blog, no big deal, but for the most part I plan on continuing this posting schedule of once a day.
In the future, I would like Income Bully to be the one stop resource for everything to do with marketing and running a business. I would like to have other contributors, as well as having MORE than ONE post a day, but that’s the long term goal.
For now, I will continue pumping out new content, and try to address some of the issues I’ve had during the 31 days of blogging.
I’m fortunate enough to have a rapidly growing blog with a very diverse audience. Web designers, SEOs, freelancers, agencies, marketers, offline business owners, entrepreneurs, other bloggers, are coming to visit this blog regularly. I have a wide range of content that I can put out, which makes this pretty unique and the blog itself has a huge amount of growth potential.
Signing Off
Thank you to all of you that have been following me for the 31 days of blogging, I’ve been enjoying your comments, emails, and appreciate you continuing to come here for new content each day.
While the 31 days may be over, the content is not over, and will continue to keep coming. Hope you’ve enjoyed it and continue enjoying it!
Blogging is a great way to generate traffic, make money online semi-passively and a great way to invest your time especially if it’s a topic you’re passionate about. You can start your own blog today for as little as $4/mo and get your free domain name. You can also save an additional 10% by using the coupon code, “IncomeBully”.
Keep up the good work. Rarely do I read a post that isn’t useful to my business on some level, and I can’t say that for many of the biz-blogs out there.
Thanks for the comment Rich, that means a lot to me. I will definitely keep it up as long as you keep coming back 🙂
Tags are totally optional. But they do help to describe the content beyond what the category does.
For instance, if you have an article about george washington and categorize it under presidents or george washington, but you mention ben franklin in the article, you can then tag it with ben franklin and george washington.
Here’s a good description of when tags can be useful, plus another example:
https://en.support.wordpress.com/posts/categories-vs-tags/
Hope that helps.
Jack, thank you for the comment. I took a look at that link, but I’m still not quite sure if there’s a real benefit to adding tags. Is there an SEO benefit? Is there a user experience benefit?
I really enjoyed following the 31 days Nathan. You’re one of the only people I trust when it comes to anything related to marketing.
Thank you Skye, I’m glad you’ve been finding the posts valuable. I will continue to deliver!
Nathan, I am not even going to try to explain tags. I tried to figure it out a while back. If you go to a series of supposedly authoritative sites they seem to all give you a different description, list of benefits and guidance on use. I suspect that means the real answer is…. “It depends…” ; )
cheers,
chris
Well, if I figure it out and it actually benefits me, I may have a blog post idea I guess. Thanks for the comment Chris.
Thanks for sharing such a wonderful information. Looking forward for your next post
Thanks EWC!
I wonder what the word count max for a comment is?
Categories vs. tags… I don’t see them as going against each other but working with one another. The first thing you have to consider is how they are displayed in WordPress. In the title section of a post, where it displays the category the post is in, it will also display any tags that may be associated with the post.
If you think end user usability for a moment.. I will use “Local Lead Generation” as an example. Local Lead Generation would be a Category. Within the post you discuss SEO, PPC, e-mail marketing, Google Business etc. These become tags and are displayed agin in the same top section by the post title. So me the end user now has the ability to see what else you have written on the topic of say “SEO”. This allows for the transition from a list of content to a list of content in CONTEXT to what “I” the end user might find of interest.
All of this sounds great and wonderful, and from a usability aspect it really is good stuff. However from a webmasters perspective it opens up a can of worms. By just short of default with WordPress in terms of SEO we have to take into consideration what “Yoast” is going to do with this information. Considering the pages that a tags link goes to is “dynamic” Yoast places a no-follow association, not only to the post link but with all of the pages listed on the dynamic page. Your basic SEO waste of time.
So there is the fork in the road. Do nothing or go in and set Yoast to allow this type of content to transfer with a do-follow consideration. The later is a bit of work. Not only are you dealng with a bit of code to get this done, but now you have the considerations of possibly 100’s or 1000’s of duplicate pages built over the course of days and months. So one would have to go into Google Analytics / Webmaster tools and do a bit of filtering etc to correct this issue. Or do a manual delete of unwanted pages. so basically probably in the lines of to technical or to much work.
So where does that leave us? Context based content listing really is a cool feature to have. I find the solution being a Page ( not a post ) that is developed for each of the tags that I use. from there you can get a recent post plugin and display post by tag association giving you the desired effect without the undesired amount of hassle.
It turns out these pages do very well in terms of SEO. 10 articles with images and 150 word snippets of text on a page with the same context can only be a good thing. Its great for the end user, and its great for the blogger as well.
And that’s the short winded version! LOL
So if I were to start using tags, you’re suggesting to remove the rel=”nofollow” to benefit from search, is that right? However, if I used tags for just user experience purposes, I wouldn’t even need to worry about it nor would I have a shit ton of duplicate content. But, if I did remove the nofollow, wouldn’t the rel=canonical tag fix any potential duplicate content issues?
So I tried it out Paul, and it seems like the tags are now set without nofollow, but it also doesn’t change the URL structure, just using permalinks I initially created so I shouldn’t have any issues with duplicate content. Guess I need to go through a bunch of posts and start tagging next. LOL.
As I said… “Its sounds all great and wonderful” Its pretty spring flowers and sunshine… LOL but we are talking dynamic pages here. You click it creates a page. I click the exact same link on a page and it creates a “New” dynamic page link and displays the exact same content. 100 other people click it, and there is now 102 dynamically built pages that are all the same. The only difference being the session identifier.
For SEO, we could care less about the link ( this is not an entirely true statement ). we look at the content correct? you now have 101 pages of exact match content. Enter the above stated “Can of Worms”. All of this CAN be corrected In GA along with setting cononical tags. I say GA for the sake of tracking pages and flow. The most straight forward article I have seen on this process is here ( it really isn’t that hard btw): http://blog.crazyegg.com/2013/03/29/remove-url-parameters-from-google-analytics-reports/
*** A quick note to anyone not so familiar with this stuff. the change in GA ( Google Analytics ) will not change the way the URL is displayed on your site, only how it is seen ( and reported ) in the back end in GA itself. ***
Paul, thanks for the comment but that doesn’t make much sense. Every CMS that uses rewrites has dynamic pages, whether wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, or Magento. Whether you have a tag or not, it is a dynamic page that redirects using SEF settings. Even if there were 10,000 pages of duplicate content and you used the canonical tag, would it really matter? As for the tags, there’s no change in URL structure at all from what I see, sure it would be dynamic but that’s no different than any other page on this blog or other blogs that still display or redirect to the permalink. I’m not seeing what the problem is.
instead of referencing an off page link set-up I will wait for you to set the tags on your site to use as reference.
ok with an amount of time spent… it appears that WordPress corrected this with update 2.3.0 and most people are currently running WordPress 4.0.5 ( or there abouts )
So as The Bully has stated using tags will send the traffic to a defined page and not a dynamic page ( As I was stating )
*** If you do find that you have an old setup of WordPress I found thatafter updating I would have to go in and alter the permalink setting and then revert to the original for there to be a change. ***
Thanks for looking into that further Paul. Good to know, and good to share with others that may have that problem.
As far as tags, there is another way to look at it. Your tags can get indexed and show up in the SERP’s. I build a lot of local pages and add lots of tags. Often times the Tags show up ahead of the actual post. I could care less as they end up at the same place. Just think of it as another way to get traffic.
Thanks for the comment Matt. I’ve seen some articles and blog posts that suggest the same. I could imagine from a user experience standpoint and trying to increase pages per session and related metrics that it could also help. Hopefully tonight I have time to go through and add tags to all the posts here, and maybe see if there’s any noticeable difference in behavioral metrics.
I love the new related post section you added. Is that based on tags or how are they selected?
The plugin is Zemanta, just based on content I guess. I think it automatically looks for related post based on category and title.. I haven’t had a chance to go through all the posts yet, but when I do I will choose what I think is the most fitting related content.