2010 90-Day Content Marketing Challenge: Getting Started

The “official” kickoff to the 2010 90-Day Content Marketing Challenge is just 2 days away!

Today and tomorrow, we’re going to talk a bit about getting an accurate picture of where you are right now with respect to your online marketing efforts and how to establish an effective content publishing and promotional schedule that will help you achieve your long-term business goals.

Establish Your Baseline

Over the next 3 months, we’re going to focus on measuring the results of your Content Marketing efforts. Therefore, we first need to establish a baseline of where your site is today in terms of traffic. This will help you to accurately measure how much progress you are making – and it will give you a better idea of what is already working for you – and what isn’t.

On Wednesday, I will publish actual stats from this site to show how traffic has evolved over the last 12 months (since the start of the first 90-Day Content Marketing Challenge). We’ll look at numbers for August 2009, November 2009 (when the last challenge concluded) and August 2010. I can’t wait to share this with you – I hope you’ll find the numbers as motivating as I do!

Use a Stat Tracking Program

I currently have a couple of analytical tools installed to track web traffic: Google Analytics and Awstats. A lot of people love and rely on Google Analytics – and if that works for you – great, stick with it. However, I almost never look at mine. Instead I focus on Awstats to track my progress. (It is included with cPanel hosting services. If you have access to it, but aren’t using it – let me know if you need help setting it up).

For the 2010 90-Day Content Marketing Challenge, we are going to track the following:

1. Number of Unique Visitors - to track how many individual visitors land on your site
2. Total Number of Visits - to get an idea for how often each visitor returns to your site
   
3. Links from an Internet Search Engine – to measure the amount of organic or non-paid traffic delivered to your site
4. Search Keyphrases – to measure how many keyword phrases are ranking well-enough in the search engines to deliver traffic

We’ll also talk about (but not measure) a couple of other factors that can help you get a better idea of where your traffic is coming from – and how you can maximize results from what is already working for you. For example, we’ll talk about “Links from an External Page” because this is a great way to see results from your social media, guest blogging and/or article marketing efforts.

Finally, we’re also going to measure backlinks pointing into your site. Quality backlinks make the online world go round – so we definitely need to focus on building lots of them. To track progress for this challenge, I’ll use Yahoo Site Explorer – I’ll go into more detail on this when I reveal stats on Wednesday.

This should give you a good idea of the baseline numbers we’re going to be looking at for the 2010 90-Day Content Marketing Challenge. Tomorrow, we’ll talk about how to develop an effective publishing/promotional schedule for your business.

Til Next Time,

PS Building quality incoming backlinks into your site is the single most important thing you can do to ensure the long-term success of your online business. As a professional writer, I resisted this for a long time, because I was entrenched in the “build it and they will come” mentality of content creation. Unfortunately, great content is wasted if it never finds an audience.

If you would like to take your backlink-building efforts to the next level, check out Susan Myers 13-week link-building course. Susanne has amassed over 71,000+ backlinks (!)  to her very popular site, TheHillbillyHousewife.com, and she shows you how you can, too.