90-Day Content Marketing Challenge – October Results

I can’t believe November is here already.  That means we are now 2/3 of the way through the 90-Day Content Marketing Challenge – and it’s time for another update.

Frankly, the results this month were a little mixed – but there are some really good things going on behind the scenes that have me excited about where things are heading. (I’ll go into more detail about what I mean by that in tomorrow’s post).

But first, let’s look at the numbers. (Psst… the really good stuff is at the end! )

The good news is that I didn’t lose any ground in terms of unique and overall visitors to the site in October. The bad news? I didn’t gain any, either. You may recall, in the 1st 30 days of the Challenge the number of unique visitors to the site increased by 2.3x over the previous month. (Click here for the actual stats and graphs from September).

As the chart below indicates, the number of unique visitors in October was roughly equivalent to September (and significantly higher than August), while the number of overall visits increased slightly.  The main growth came in number of page views (1730+ more). Time on site also increased in October (from 7:10 to 7:29).

Another area of growth for October was in number of back links to the site.  At the time of the last update, the number of incoming back links to the site was 49.  The graph below (from Yahoo’s Site Explorer) shows that number has increased to 89 since then.  (I’m still not seeing a lot of links from the Article Marketing I’ve been doing – so am hopeful those results will show up before the end of the Challenge).

Another exciting trend I think worth reporting is the increase in traffic delivered to the site by Search Engines.  Here are the results from August:

Here are October’s results: (Note: I removed the images that showed up in the results above before the Challenge began).

As a writer who focuses on creating Search Engine Optimized content – this is EXACTLY what I was hoping to see. What has me MOST excited about this trend is that it takes time for content to “mature” from an SEO standpoint. Therefore, seeing a six-fold increase after only two months of concentrated effort is really exciting. (If that sort of thing floats your boat, anyway).

To summarize, in August (the month before the 90-Day Content Marketing Challenge began), the site was averaging around 21.6 visitors/day. Okay, I guess, for a site that was only 2.5 months old and wasn’t being marketing at all.  Since then, the average has increased to a consistent 75+ visitors per day.  Not a bad overall increase considering creating fresh content and promoting it is the only form of marketing being done at this point. (I have done zero advertising for my writing business while this Challenge is underway to prevent skewing the results).

Tomorrow, I want to talk a little bit about what worked – and what didn’t – in the month of October and how you might be able to apply those lessons to your own Content Marketing efforts. I’ll also share a couple of cool opportunities that have come my way as a direct result of this Challenge – not the least of which has been a nice increase in my writing business.

Til Next Time,

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