A guest post by Dennis Yu, CEO of BlitzLocal, providing local lead gen for professional service firms.
3 months ago, Keith Wilcox decided he wanted to be a full-time daddy blogger . He had no experience blogging before, no programming experience, no affiliate marketing earnings, and no money. His story shows that anyone who works their butt off, despite whatever excuses, is the most important thing to success.
As you can see from his Google Analytics, he went from 20 visits a day 3 months ago to 400 visits a day and growing right now.
But he had to wait 80 days, blogging every day– seeing almost no results– before finally the traffic started to come. A lot of folks will give up before they hit that point. This is what it took him to this point:
* 156 posts– about half of which are in Spanish. More on that in a moment.
* 19 guest posts on other blogs– necessary to build up link juice.
* hundreds of comments on other blogs with similar topics– to build real relationships.
* 4 revisions to the website– having to learn how to use WordPress.
Remember that it took 3 months before he saw anything.
A couple weeks ago, he started ranking on weird keywords, such as “cell phones suck”, “peeing outside “, and “getting fit setting goals”.
None of these terms is a competitive term– they have at most a million search results when you type them into Google. A competitive search, by the way, is one where there at least 50 million results in Google– for which there is a lot of traffic. But now that he’s ranking #1 on “getting fit setting goals”, it is a good sign towards ranking on “getting fit”– at which point he can run affiliate ads.
Of the 156 posts that he’s written, most of them didn’t produce any rankings or traffic. But he used his Google Analytics to tell him which of these were good posts, according to Google, such that he could write more about those topics. For example, he wrote a post on unnecessary baby products — and soon not only ranked #3 on that term, but got a couple hits a day on it. If you see Google Analytics give you traffic on certain keywords, then take Google’s advice and write more about those keywords!
Keith then assembled a top 100 list of stay at home dad bloggers, reached out to each of these bloggers individually, to tell them that they were selected and made the list. That took a lot of time, but many of these other dad bloggers appreciated the award, then linked to him. They invited him to guest blog post on their blogs and they would also write articles for his blog. Building up high quality links from sites that already rank on terms you want to rank on leads to results like this:
There are 32 million results and he’s ranked #2.
The next step for Keith is to continue building up his traffic base, relationships with other dad bloggers, and start running affiliate ads for baby products and whatever keywords Google brings to him.
And what we’ve seen is that the level of effort to go from 20 hits a day to 200 visits a day is the same amount of effort to go from 200 visits a day to 2,000. That’s the beauty of traffic– that it multiplies quickly once you can get some momentum. You have to write a few good posts on your own blog (not blogger, typepad, or another free site) to build up a site that is worth linking to– then get other folks to start linking to you. That increases the power of your site, which then causes your old pages to start to rank. That’s why traffic multiplies.
So keep up your efforts to build up your own site– to post something each day, network with other folks who rank on your keywords, to guest post on their blogs, and to make top 100 lists. And tie in Facebook, if you want to really take it to the next level.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
This gives me hope. I am just getting started at http://www.danglavin.com and getting vewry little traffic but then again I am just getting off the ground.
So did Keith just start writing the blog for fun or was it always intended to run affiliate deals from?
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I’ve been doing quite a bit of promotion for my affiliate blog recently. I’m not sure I’d agree with the need to keep on posting every day though. It’s a fine line. If you post constantly, it’s easy to lose the quality of the content. The end goal for me is to have a site where when something gets posted, people listen.
I’d say headturning content, a unique slant and a lot of networking is the best recipe for success. I guess it depends on the target market. We could all have great Warrior Forum blogs if we had the time of day to post that much shit.
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Wow, This is a really inspiring story about building traffic. It’s funny that the most unusual terms get search hits. I wrote a review on a CD Ronald Jenkees, and I now get 5-10 hits a week from search engine traffic from the terms in that post.
I also wrote a review on Get High Without Drugs, and I get traffic from that on a weekly basis as well. As mostly a review site, It is hard for me to target those particular topics too much, but it gives me ideas on how to pick topics that will rank.
Again, thanks for the inspiring post!
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I think guest posting on other blogs is a great way to reach out to a new audience and to get relevant backlinks to your own site. Agree with using some analytics program to see what pages are getting traffic and building more posts around those topics
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I’m surprised he hasn’t held a contest on his blog yet to try to build some more backlinks or even subscribers yet.
But very interesting case study, Dennis.
Jay
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