400 posts

Yesterday, I passed the 400 post mark. 400 posts over 18 months. Wow! Roughly a post a day for a year and a half. Is that a lot? Is that too little? I really don’t know. What I do know is this — when I use my ‘pass or play’ methodology, traffic to my site increases and my ‘pipeline’ fills…

My good friend [and brother in law] Jim Gilligan has a blog that he’s starting for his life coaching business at EffectiveLiving, LLC. Jim asked me how many posts he should create before he goes ‘live’. I told him a dozen or so is enough to get started but recently I did an experiment and I believe the number at which you start to see good results is closer to 100 over a 3 month period. Here’s a real world case study…

I had neglected my business blog for a little over a year — my passion was politics and I was attempting to leverage my social media skills in the political space. My political blog was ranked most influential in Wisconsin a dozen times earlier this year and my Alexa ranking rose to within the top million sites in the world, but it didn’t get me what I wanted. More business. One year ago today, my business blog, however, had only served up 147 page views for the month. The whole month. Two weeks ago, I got 233 pageviews in a single day and my traffic so far this month is 11 times greater than a year ago [and the month’s not even finished yet]. By the way, the Alexa rank on my blog is currently 338,142. All this as a result of 100 posts over a 3 month period. Pretty good return on investment, I think — especially when you consider the process by which I find blog content — that’s my real competitive advantage.

When I started to re-emphasize my business blog in July, I got 124 pageviews that month. Anemic. Using my trademark ‘pass or play’ methodology every day, I built the numbers to where they are today. ‘Pass or play’ you say? Yes, ‘pass or play’. Our family card game is called ‘Pitch‘ [I now believe there’s a wikipedia entry for EVERYTHING]. At the beginning of the game, you look at the cards you’re dealt and decide whether or not you want to bid to control the game. Me? I look at the news in Google Reader and pass on news that doesn’t interest me and play on news that does, either as a ‘featured article’ or a blog post.

Using my ‘home base and outpost’ strategy my post quickly ripple throughout the web using social media connections to move them along [more on that another day]. By the way, if you didn’t see it, you’ll want to read this post on listening to the internet…

By the way, I’ll be doing a class Friday at noon central on using Google Reader like a ninja. Contact me if you’d like in — it won’t be free forever!