Conclusion

24 Jul, 2007 Marketing, Education Brian Armstrong

This is the conclusion of my 30 day marketing challenge where I’ll share with you some of the results; both what worked and what didn’t.

All the graphs below show a two months range: the month before the marketing challenge started, and the month of the marketing challenge.

Here are the page views for the last two months. As you can see, thing picked up substantially (and fluctuated) after the marketing challenge was started, with the biggest day being early on with 2,191 views in a day. This was due to lots of people linking to my LifeHack.org article on power napping.

Here is the traffic being sent from search engines.

Here are the top sources of traffic overall and the top keywords.

Overall I received 541 new RSS subscribers, 20,478 page views, 35 book sales, and 198 comments during the 30 day marketing challenge.

Here are some things that didn’t work:

The YouTube video. It brought in only 7 visitors.
Shopping.com’s service which feeds MySimon and other similar “buyers guide” websites. My product listing there received zero clicks.
The majority of my efforts were designed to build links or for other SEO purposes, and its very difficult to measure how effective these were. Some of these helped my rankings in Google, and some didn’t, but Google prefers not to share this information for obvious reasons, so it will remain a bit of a mystery. Like most things in life, probably only 20% of the things I did accounted for 80% of the results.

In conclusion, I think the most important take aways from this experiment are that:

The single most effective way I generated traffic in the short run was by writing articles for other websites as a contributing author. This alone contributed more than 80% of all traffic I got.
In the long run, it appears that my search engine optimization efforts will be the biggest provider of new traffic. This takes longer to get going, but will most likely be even bigger (and requires less work) than writing articles. I suspect that my efforts during the 30 day challenge will continue to pay dividends over the coming months, especially after Google’s next page rank update.

Hopefully this can shave some time off the learning curve for others trying to get a new website built from the ground up!

This post is part of a series on Website Marketing

13 Comments so far »

Steve's Tech Blog said,

Wrote on July 24, 2007 @ 6:43 pm

Too bad that YouTube did not send more traffic. I’m still going to try it because it will lessen the server load anyway. Also, I just released MIS Info Video(free media player) today and will have to redo many videos anyway. Maybe, I will have better luck than you. ;)

Also, like you said, it may pay off later when Google update the PageRank.

[Reply]
Stewart Macdonald said,

Wrote on July 24, 2007 @ 9:00 pm

Hi Brian,

I’ve just read your entire Website Marketing series. Well done! Your results are very interesting. It’s inspired me to try to market my sites more effectively.

Stewart

[Reply]
JJ said,

Wrote on July 24, 2007 @ 10:48 pm

You were successful in getting me here. I added you to my reader last week. I still plan to read through your entire series.

[Reply]
Brian Armstrong said,

Wrote on July 24, 2007 @ 11:27 pm

Thank you! Glad you got some value out of it ;)
Brian

[Reply]
vijay said,

Wrote on July 25, 2007 @ 12:43 pm

Brian,
Good experiment in all!
I will thinking to start the same experiment for my educational blog http://www.softwaretestinghelp.com/

Since educating people on some niche topic will always create buzz.

What you say?

[Reply]
Brian Armstrong said,

Wrote on July 25, 2007 @ 12:45 pm

Go for it Vijay, if you can help people solve problems (and aren’t afraid to polarize people with unconventional advice) it should work well!

[Reply]
Allen Dresser said,

Wrote on July 25, 2007 @ 1:40 pm

Brian
Thanks so much for this marketing lesson. The fact the articles were a key factor in driving traffic was very interesting to me. Sharing your plan has been very inspirational - and I bet a lot of your readers feel that way. This experiment sure sounds like a book or ebook…”Thirty Days to Drive Double the Traffic to YOUR site”…. :-)

[Reply]
Mike Harding said,

Wrote on July 25, 2007 @ 2:32 pm

As a long time blogger, I’m happy to see this series. I’ve now read the entire set of content and have learned a ton. Thanks for taking the time to share this information and the results of your experiment.

I’ve learned a few things and will try them on my own site. Thanks again and good luck.

[Reply]
Brian Armstrong said,

Wrote on July 26, 2007 @ 12:09 pm

Glad you enjoyed it Mike!

[Reply]
Freddie said,

Wrote on February 5, 2008 @ 3:28 am

How about an update? Where are your rankings.

Great series. I am on Day 3, but am excited. I was looking for a step by step plan and I came across this site. Ad me to the success of these efforts.

Thank you,

Freddie

[Reply]
Brian Armstrong said,

Wrote on February 7, 2008 @ 12:52 am

Hi Freddie,

Maybe I should create another page for the update good idea. But here is the short version.

After the Google update I got a page rank of 3, several month later it got bumped up to 4 which is where its at now.

For a while I was humming along getting a couple hundred visitors per day (about double that in page views). Then recently a couple articles got “stumbled upon” especially this one (http://www.startbreakingfree.com/226/) and I started receiving 4 or 5 thousand visitors a day from that. Then it tapered off.

Subscribers have not grown as fast I hoped, I’m at 715 right now. Partially because I lost some people when I moved everything over to Feedburner (Zookoda wasn’t working right anymore). But also because I’m not doing a good enough job of getting people to sign up. I have an idea on that which I may start soon, to give away 2 or 3 of the top ten books written on building wealth, which are emailed to you instantly when you provide an email address. This would increase my subscribers quite a bit i think.

Stay tuned!

[Reply]
Stefan Gabos said,

Wrote on July 8, 2008 @ 2:13 am

Additionally, you can drive traffic to your website by booking it on the home page of http://2famo.us

[Reply]
How To Get More Customer Signups By Doing Less said,

Wrote on July 9, 2008 @ 4:00 pm

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