Creating a Blog Strategy – Article Site Makeover Day 1
I have the plan, I have the overall strategy, and by cobbling together pieces from the strategies I’ve learned over the summer I know what I want the finished product — the big picture — to look like. But as I started to set up the new blog, I realized that what I don’t have is an actual strategy for each individual site that makes up that finished product.
Fortunately for wayward bloggers like me, Dr. Mani created a two-week course back in August called How To Launch a Blog in 2 Weeks. I didn’t take part at the time because I was in the middle of the 30 Day Challenge, and didn’t want to get distracted. I’m so thankful that he’s left it available on his blog for now because last night I spent the evening going through the first part and creating a blog strategy for my new article blog.
Since this is an older site that’s getting a makeover, the first thing I did was gather up some statistics so that I have something to measure against. Unfortunately i forgot to grab the traffic statistics before I changed over to the new hosting account, so I’m starting from scratch on those. Here’s what I do have to use as a starting point:
- broad match for main keyword phrase: 43 of 82,500,000
- phrase match for main keyword phrase: 25 of 23,300
- alexa ranking: 2,617,123
- page rank: 0
Pretty pathetic for a domain that’s been online for two years, but not surprising given how little time I spent on it in the last few months. I got really frustrated with the quality – or lack thereof – of the articles being mass submitted. In the end I was allowing maybe 1 submission in 10 to actually be approved.
The new version of the site will be an article blog, with mostly my own articles. Once I get established as a provider of quality information and get a steady flow of traffic coming in, I may open it up and invite other authors to submit. But there will be some pretty strict submission guidelines, and it will definitely be a manual submission and approval process.
The domain has been active for about 2 years now, but I have done no list building at all yet. This time I will be building a list that will recieve a weekly digest of the most popular articles, along with a sponsor ad promoting either one of my own reports or an affiliate product.
Onsite monetization will be through contextual advertising and affiliate marketing to begin with.
I also have set up my financial targets up to the end of 2010, beginning of course with the Moving East goal of creating $700 per week of reasonably reliable income.
Since this site is in a market which many of my niches target, it makes a good base on which to build an authority site, as well as test out new niches and create a steady flow of income.
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With the use of some very SEO and wordpress comments, I was able to turn one of my websites from stats worse than yours (far worse) to something much more noteworthy in under 4 months.
Check it out – google search for ‘freelance website design’ (on page one – alfredfox.com) and then try ‘website design’ (within first 100 results out of 850 million+) Pretty neat.
Keep at it, you’ll get it.
Good for you Ruth! I think I’m going to check out Dr. Mani’s blog to see if that’s still up. I need to rework my own strategy for my designnewbie.com website.
Looking forward to see what comes forth from your new strategy.