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You may have noticed a sudden increase of blog posts here on my blog at KevinHDavis.com. If you are enjoying the new flood of content, please let me know in the comments. Sometime at the end of May, I was talking to my good friend Robby LeBlanc on the phone and he mentioned he was going to start blogging daily as part of a 30 day blog challenge Jeanette Cates was co-hosting. I had never participated in a 30 day blog challenge before, but I have done several 30 day Squidoo challenges with Tiffany Dow in the past.
With a Squidoo challenge, you pick a topic, build a lens and then do everything in your power to increase it’s lesrank or traffic and the one with the top lensrank or traffic at the end wins the bragging right. Through the process you learn many new things along the way. The spirit of the challenge brings out the competition in you.
A blog challenge is a little different, it is more like a marathon. The challenge here is to post at least one blog post each day. The idea behind it, at least on my side is the 30day of repetition will create a habit that I then continue after the 30 days. I used to run my blog using RSS2Blog, an auto blogger posting articles several times a day. When I felt like it, I would make a post here and there.
Late last year, I recieved an email from another friend here in Salt Lake that attends my monthly training, Sara Lambrinos from Sites By Sara. Her question for me “When are you going to start posting real stuff instead of these articles from 2 years ago”.
Ouch! So in December I shut the autoblogger down and commited to blogging on a regular basis. January started OK, and then quickly went downhill. Thanks to the challenge, I am now starting to actually enjoy writing each day.
So, back to the title of the post. How has the challenge affected my site stats?
May/June Stats Comparison
As you can see from the screenshot of analytics, everything has improved but Pages/Visit, however this is pretty close to the same period as last month.
Traffic is up 55%
Bounce Rate down 12%
New Visits up 14%
Now my blog isn’t some super popular one yet, but it has basically been dormant for 6 months. Nothing like a good challenge to put some wind in my sails. The blog posts are also going out to my fan page at http://www.facebook.com/onlinemarketingconsultants through the Networked Blogs application on Facebook, and of course the #Blog30 updates on Twitter.
I also gained 31 new subscribers to my list so far this month with 10 double optins. Hopefully they are continuing to get some value out of the new posts.
My RSS feed subscribers has actually gone down according to Feedburner from 1391 on June 1st to 1374 on June 16th, which I think is kind of strange but Feedburner reporting can be kind of glitchy sometimes.
UPDATE: Also checked banner ad stats for the blog
Banner Ad Stats for KevinHDavis.com
Anyway, a big thanks to Jeanette Cates, Robby LeBlanc and Sara Lambrinos.
Keep on blogging,
Kevin
Kathryn Griffiths
June 18, 2010 at 9:09 am
Yes… my stats have been excellent. I’m not sure I’ll be blogging daily after the challenge…but I will be at last 3 times a week.
Warren… I notice you have an I Contact banner. Do you prefer IContact over Aweber. Are you using double or single opt-in. I have recently been in the middle of a debate about the matter. I’ve been using double opt-in but have been advised not to. They say it really does make a difference in your opt-ins.
Would love to hear your point of view.
Kevin
June 18, 2010 at 9:42 pm
We are using AWeber for most of our lists, but promote Aweber and iContact. We also use AutoResponseplus on our own server for coreg lists like what we are running here through ListCrew on this blog. All of our lists are double optin, and we think it works best that way. We ran single opt on a big launch in August 2009 and Aweber was flooded with bogus optins from a spammer in Europe. Aweber was great, worked with us and we addressed the issue together, staying operational while switching to double opt. The spammer put 8K-10k bogus email addresses into our list they scraped off the web. They were real email address, but mostly support email address for various company websites. We did have a leads contest going on, but decided not to see if it was actually someone in the contest hiring the spammer to boost their optins. With recent changes in merchant account rules and more scrutiny in most areas, I would stick to double optins.
For local marketing clients, we also recommend mailchimp to get started. They can start for free, and don’t have start paying until they get 500 subscribers. They usually like that.
Kevin