Let’s start with some background information for this case study.
TheNextGoal.com was started on 6th October 2011 as part of the Survivor Competition organized by Kiesha from We Blog Better.
This contest provided 5 strangers with a unique challenge of combining their skills to start a new blog and make it popular within 10 short weeks (we were competing against another team for the first 5 weeks, but now there is just one team left – and we now compete against one another).
At present, we are in Week 7, and doing quite well, as you will see later.
Our blog is by no means complete, and this case study is by no means exhaustive.
Step-by-step, I will tell you where The Next Goal succeeds, and where it fails. I hope that my co-competitors would forgive me for being so open and blunt about The Next Goal.
Traffic Overview
Luckily for us, there is no limit to potential traffic in the context of online marketing.
The more, the better, right?
As you can see from the Google Analytics screenshot below, The Next Goal has enjoyed consistently high traffic from 6th October till 19th November (These are the dates that have been used for this case study).
The peak on October 21, clearly noticeable in the graph above, is there because of two major reasons:
- We organized a contest
- We published 28 posts that week. More on that later.
For a blog that started out less than 2 months ago, these are great numbers.
Even better is the Alexa ranking (this ranking is current):
Our Initial Strategy
Our starting strategy was simple: since we were required to beat our competitor blog, we had to publish as many posts as possible.
Quality was never forfeited. Keeping up traffic and interaction level was also paramount.
We dedicated our time and resources to generating unique content and sharing it relentlessly through social media.
Going back to the peak in traffic from the Analytics screenshot above: it’s there because of a contest we organized, and many contestants swarmed over to The Next Goal to participate.
During that week alone, we released over 28 new articles, and the participants certainly got a lot of reading done!
Lack of Attention to SEO
Perhaps our biggest pitfall - SEO - was not on top of our list.
An issue with competitions such as these - where referral traffic numbers are more important than organic search – is that we planned little for our future growth. So at the moment, understandably, our organic traffic is low at 6% (nearly 200 visits).
Admittedly for traffic not centred on SEO, this is not a bad number! But we could drastically increase Google traffic ranking, if we paid more attention to it.
Focus on Content and Marketing
All this time, our focus has been directed towards quality content production and direct marketing using Twitter, Facebook and blog comments.
In Week 6, all of us participated in a Guest posting challenge, and managed 19 guest posts between us. As a result, for the period not highlighted here, our organic traffic has increased by over 60%.
Guest posting does work!
Popular Content
Most of the marketing for The Next Goal has been carried out through Facebook and Twitter, and some of the articles have become hugely popular. We have had an impressive number of page views.
That is 47 visits per page (averaged over total pages on The Next Goal).
Some of our tops posts are shown below:
As you can see, the contest post (Number 4) was hugely popular, and gathered 204 page views within a week.
The other popular posts include interviews (always popular) and first of a persuasion series that I wrote.
What keywords are bringing in visitors?
So far the organic visitors have been diverse. Google Analytics has recorded 197 page views via 103 keywords:
As you can see, there is lots of room for improvement for the keywords ‘meditation’, ‘what really matter’ and ‘Art of persuasion’.
The combined phrase search for these 3 keywords is over 1.8 million, and some clever SEO’s can, no doubt, easily boost our search engine traffic for niche as well as generic keywords.
Otherwise, I am glad that we are already getting searched specifically for “the next goal”, which is always a sign of good publicity!
Social Marketing – What worked, what didn’t
We pretty much failed at Twitter, but had better luck with Facebook and Blogengage.
For 6 weeks or so, Facebook brought us over 501 visits, compared to Twitter’s 215.
Blogengage has been particularly kind to us, turning out to be our 3rd biggest source of referral traffic.
Obviously, as WeBlogBetter.com is the organizing blog, it brings us a healthy amount of traffic as well.
Where do we go from here?
While we still have 3 weeks to go to find out who the final winner of the competition will be, we know what can be changed to improve our traffic, Alexa ranking, PR (which is already 2) and interaction.
We need:
- Guest Posts
- Better SEO
- Better Inter-linking within posts (will help to reduce Bounce rate)
- A product
Plans are already in place to release a product, and we are hoping to launch it in a few weeks.
As you have seen, contests are an interesting way to improve user interaction and involvement, so we might just do that again, and offer our product to one or more winner(s).
Just to clarify - all this has been made possible by The Next Goal team - I alone am not responsible for this blitz!
Marketing Takeaway
If you are starting up a new blog, or are struggling to drive traffic, use the social media resources that you have. Better still: organize a small contest or a giveaway.
Quickly increasing your traffic count is much easier than maintaining it that way. Use quality content and high engagement to achieve that goal.
I would love to answer your questions on this case study, and I hope you’ve enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
This is very interesting, I have just started a new blog and within my first 2 months I got my blog up to a PR3 and down to Alexa 3,304,873. Still low traffic but time will tell
Larry Lourcey says
For those following along, the Alexa rank is now under 90K!!! Woo hoo!
Douglas W. Palme says
Ana,
Did you have to use a picture of Manning? I mean come on, the Packers are really the team 🙂
The case study here should be required reading for anyone interested in improving their ranking and overall traffic. As a wedding and portrait photographer our business literally depends on our traffic and even changing our ranking by 5 positions can generate an additional 500 potential leads.
Great job Ana, keep it up!
LOL, Doug - I like Brees.
Tram Tran says
wow, this is awesome, within 10 weeks, the team has been able to rank up Alexa so well. it shows dedication and team work is the key here. I dont think anyone alone can rank the site up that high with that short period of time. awesome job!
Thanks Tram 🙂
Glenn says
Great post Neeraj,
It just goes to prove what can be done with enthusiasm and hard work!
The lessons learned are vital for taking it to the next level,
Good luck with that.
Glenn
Thank you Glenn!
Impressive traffic in such a short period! Great job.
I would caution against putting a great deal of weight in the Alexa numbers, however. With so few users of Amazon’s toolbar your stats can be skewed by the small sample size. That is certainly not to say the data isn’t useful, for comparative purposes especially.
Thank you Jon!
And you are quite right, it would be foolish to depend on a single aspect of ranking; but hey, its a good attention grabber 🙂
Carol Montcalm Biederman says
Hi Neeraj,
Thank you for such an insightful article. I am new to blogging and have so much to learn to be successful, especially in the social media arena. What would you recommend a new blogger such as myself focus the most energy on to increase my traffic flow? Carol
Hi Carol,
Thank you for the kind words. For a new blogger, I would suggest connecting with other bloggers in your own niche - find a mentor if you can! You will be surprised how quickly you can find your feet under someone else’s wings (I will start mentoring after a while - at the moment, I am learning too!)
There is no quick and easy pill for traffic, but I think social media is playing its role. More so than organic traffic. So become active on Twitter (ideally, advertise 1 of your posts for every 5 tweets), share your content on Google+ and StumbleUpon, and find some like-minded individual in blogging world. A little association will be great for incoming numbers.
I just looked through your website, very cool design! I love it. You could make it better looking by truncating your posts (so that readers can click on Read more to read more..else it becomes difficult to navigate), also start building a social presence by having Twitter, Facebook and RSS feed links on your home page. Start building a brand, but don’t forget the person behind it!
I hope these help.
I’m always interested in how Google sees a high ranking in Alexa and compared to the individual with the Google SERP. I going to follow the progress of TheNextGoal.com carefully.
Neeraj Sachdeva says
Yes, I am keen to know more about that too. Keep following. If I get time, I am hoping to document the whole process of this blog (for the first 10 weeks), but only if I get some time!
Thanks for sharing your case study. I just recently started my blog and any advice I can get is always appreciated.
I tried running a giveaway on my blog but I didn’t get a lot of interaction/entries. I didn’t feel like I had high expectations either. I promoted it through Facebook and Twitter. Although I don’t have many facebook likes right now. Can you give me advice on how to increase my “likes” on facebook so when I do promotions more people will enter?
Neeraj Sachdeva says
Hey Ashley, thank you for posting questions, its always nice to know what everyone is interested in.
I have been reading Danny Iny’s Enhancement from Scratch recently, and he has said that a dedicated group of followers can be essential for a giveaway. Do you have that? (If it helps, my free ebook offering did not go down too well last week - only 15-20 downloads, I expected more!) Its not that we lacked traffic, but I lacked traffic (since this was an individual challenge). Anyway, sort out the traffic first.
As for Facebook likes, try and get your friends to send out a message. Offer something extra to Facebook users. If you have a free ebook or something, tell your site visitors that they can get the book if they ‘like’ your group on Facebook. Just offer ‘unique’ incentives to FAcebook users, before and after they join your page.
Also, the day you start a giveaway, line up 4-5 guest posts on different blogs to ensure that you get definite traffic on those days. Do let me know if you have more questions!
I really enjoyed and learn some couple of things form your blogging experience.But what really interest me is the part you talked about how new blog can get traffic quickly.You mentioned that one should create a blog contest and make use of social media.
My question is can this method work for niche like fishing?
Hi Kay,
This won’t be particularly effective for a niche site like fishing. You are looking for dedicated followers that will keep coming back even when the contest is over. You have to appeal to these followers. Even though we managed to maintain good traffic level after the contest, we did lose a few one-off survivors.
If you already have a small (yet strong) base of followers - then go for a contest. Else, I’d definitely recommend forums and Yahoo answers. Remember, there is no one-size-fits-all, experiment and see what works best for you. I’d recommend forums and YA to start with.
Hi! Neeraj,
I think a team member of yours stopped by my blog sometime ago. Thanks a lot.
Your site is properly designed and the name suits the purpose. I pray you win the competition. IJN. Amen.
Rated up,
Chukwuka.
Thanks mate! There are quite a few of us, so we keep hopping around 🙂
Wow what a great case study Neeraj! I guess the say 2 heads are better than one sure hits the nail on the head.
Well in your case 5 heads 🙂 I guess starting a blog as a team could be a great way to build out a big blog in a short period of time.
It’s time to start accepting guest posts on my blog and gather some team members
Neeraj Sachdeva says
Thanks Joshua. After this experience, I would recommend starting as a team - we have been very creative with the designs and the posts - even though they are sometimes personally biased.
I have been looking around to see if any website promotes ‘buddy system’ where two or more people can collaborate to fire up a blog. But I guess that monetization and time management is the biggest issue. If two strangers can get past that, there is certainly scope for excellent performance such as this.
Hi Neeraj,
This is awesome. I have a lot to learn from your case study. Are you doing much link building (backlinks)?
Neeraj Sachdeva says
Thank you Jens.
Not actively. We have had a few guest posts (around 20-25), then some of us have mentioned about TG on our personal blogs; otherwise, most of the backlinks have been from commenting. Going forward, we have not decided how we will proceed with this, but we’ll know the details after Week 10. Ideally, some SEO combined with strong keyword promotion will be useful for us.
Just checking on a free backlink checker, we have nearly 1000 links (all combined - to the main page as well as deep-links).
1000 links in only 6 weeks? That’s amazing!
Neeraj Sachdeva says
Hi Cristian, Alexa is just one of the ways to measure a website’s reach. Google PR, number of backlinks, traffic etc are many other different ways. However, it is standard, and it is global. Hence there is a certain level of consistency in Alexa rankings. But hey, at the end of the day, if you are getting the desired revenue, Alexa ranking shouldn’t be your biggest concern.
This is very impressive and definitely is the result of hard work. (It took me 3 long months to get Alexa rank of 414,000…)
Neeraj Sachdeva says
Thank you Laur!
Great share Neeraj….
A very interesting case study, enjoyed reading each and every aspect of it. The hard work is clearly visible in it
Last but not the least Good luck !!
Neeraj Sachdeva says
Thank you Salman! Good luck to you too!
Wow - impressive stuff. I’m learning and struck by how much there is to learn and how much I have to wade through before getting to the best advice. Having done this I feel I was better prepared to read your post above and understand the context a little.
I find it even more impressive given all of the time I’ve invested trying to learn this stuff. I think I’m doing OK but could never build traffic the way you have in such a short space of time.
In the end the more I read, the more I believe that putting high quality content at the very top of your list, whether on your own blog or elsewhere is the best route to sustainable traffic. There are obviously tricks and shortcuts but as you say above, unless you have great content, that will just die down again after the effect of the tricks and shortcuts wanes.
Thanks & thanks Ana for introducing me to Neeraj & TheNextGoal
take care & best wishes,
Alan
Neeraj Sachdeva says
Yes, content is important. But, I do think that if you market well and are clever with SEO, you could reduce the need to write 2 articles instead of 1 (of course, I am presuming that two articles are weighed more than one!)
Alan, thank you for the kind words. I know its off-topic, but I like your website and the subject matter (I want to be life coach, at some point, and I see you have interesting articles on that…I am hopping over now!)
Take care,
Neeraj.
Hey Neeraj,
no probs - I’ve been a coach for a while and get to choose my clients these days. Our lifestoogood website (which started as an experiment) is actually us trying to find creative ways to give as much as we can for free or as near free as possible - so if I can help you in any way aside from the content we have on our site, please do just let me know.
thanks & very best wishes,
Alan
Wow!! that so awesome Neeraj, my 1 month old blog too had soared into 600k Alexa rating in just a month. 😀 Anyway, keep up the good work and continue doing your stuff 😀
CHeers!
Neeraj Sachdeva says
Thank you Herbert. Keep tracking your progress, you will be surprised by how far you have come in anther few months!
Cheers.
Cool! I think real SEO traffic would come in around the 6th month. But you’re not doing bad at all with the rate of traffic you’re getting. Only Ana Hoffman can generate more traffic, right Ana? Wink*
Neeraj Sachdeva says
Thanks Sean! Yes, can’t wait for the real SEO traffic.
Very nice progression Neeraj, It’s pretty exciting to get a blog started, isn’t it? I’ve started several blogs and the initial launch is always the most exciting part, and the most exhausting. It’s nice that you’re sharing your stats like this, it gives other bloggers, including me, inspiration.
My latest blog, Hot Blog Tips, is 3 mos old (parked for 6 months before that) and we’re at 90,700 and Google PR 3. That kind of start actually forces you into high gear.
Neeraj Sachdeva says
Hey Brian! It is very exciting indeed. We are definitely past the ‘Will we, won’t we’ mark, and there is no turning back. The speed at which we are getting indexed and searched for is awesome!
I understand that there are other blogs with better and worse stats. My idea, as I always like to preach, is transparency. As you rightly put it, this is a good way to inspire and inform people.
I also notice that you have strong interaction (lots of comments) at your blog. Could I ask how you managed it in such a short time? As good as our comment rate is (15 per post), your’s seem better, and I am curious to know if there is something we can all learn here.
Thanks.
While I’m not new to blogging and do consider myself a professional blogger, I’m certainly no expert Neeraj. I’m here learning from others like Ana but what I try to do is initiate the interaction and give the readers/subscribers reason to keep coming back.
1) When someone leaves a comment I try to reply and interact a bit.
2) If someone leaves a comment and they have a blog that I can relate to I try to leave a comment on their blog. I will admit that it is getting harder to keep up with but so far that’s what I’ve been doing.
I also keep my blog do-follow with commentLuv Premium installed. The do-follow does seem to bring in more comment spam attempts but I guess that’s part of the job. I delete those before they get published.
I second all these tips, Brian - they definitely encourage interaction.
Tram Tran says
me, three !
Replying to comment and let others know that you reply is really important. I use a plug-in to let them know via email that I replied to their comments and appreciate the reader’s opinions=). Say hi sometimes on my blog=) I ll def. say hi back
Amazing story, and quite a wonderful experience! BLOG ON!
Neeraj Sachdeva says
Thank you Dave! Glad you enjoyed it.
Hi Neeraj,
Very informative study. I recently started my 3rd site. One of the main reason I started this sites was to try to experiment with it.
Although I dont really care much for Alexa ranking since its not really an accurate description of your actual data, I found out one easy way to decrease the number is to simply install an Alexa widget on your site. My new site went form I think 3 million plus to just over 1 mil in juts 2 weeks after installing the widget.
Neeraj Sachdeva says
Thank you Satrap!
I have heard about the Alexa ranking toolbar, but haven’t had the chance to implement the widget yet. Shall certainly look into it.
Hi Neeraj,
Fascinating study. I read about the blogging contest and was very interested to see the results. The interim lessons you’ve learned are very educational. As you incorporate SEO more into your writing, your traffic should continue its drastic increase.
What would be the most important advice you would have for bloggers who don’t have a team in place to publish multiple articles a day?
Neeraj Sachdeva says
Thank you Carolyn!
Yes, good SEO implementation will really boost our blog. There are a few plugins that we haven’t been able to use yet, but when the competition is over, we can improve our SEO efficiency with them.
Your question is very interesting, and I will go against the grain to answer this:
If you are looking to publish multiple posts a day - DON’T! Unless it is necessary, and as long as you do it rarely. I cannot even begin to tell how mentally and emotionally taxing the last 7 weeks have been. The idea of competition, and that too against our own team-mates is very daunting.
The reason I would dissuade anyone from publishing multiple articles are:
- It becomes difficult to build links, market the articles and carry out general admin work on your blog
- People are happy with one post a day; anything more, and done consistently, can be overkill. Sometimes less is more. Anything more than one a day can be huge turn-off.
- It is not difficult to write 5 articles a day, but it is difficult to write them with same consistency and fluidity. Spreading them apart and editing them is more important than writing them.
On the other hand, the Alexa rank is a good upside. Beyond Week 10, I would hope to see less frantic, more SEO friendly posting on The Next Goal. Something that would get more readers involved (having said that, we have over 1450 comments for 92 posts - that is over 15 comments per post!)
What I would recommend though - and I cannot stress this enough -is to Guest post. This might seem ambitious, but you would do very well to make one guest post for every 3 posts you make on your website. The benefits of link-building, increase in popularity and marketing cannot be stressed enough.
Neeraj, I greatly appreciate your in depth and considerate response to my question. I agree, less can be more. It’s easy to overwhelm your readers with too much information. I have found that when I post a very strong article I should skip a day of posting to let that article mature.
Your Google Analytics were fascinating. Thank you very much for revealing them in the article. Your results are diametrically opposed to mine. At my blog I get 2/3 of my traffic from search engines, with the rest being split from referring sites and direct traffic.
I have tried guest posts, in fact, my blog is published on a major metropolitan newspaper website on Thursdays each week with a link back to my blog, but still search engines bring most of my traffic.
I’m thinking the biggest difference may be the topic of my blog which is personal technology for the everyday person. I write about a lot of subjects people search for, which wasn’t my intent, but I’m thinking my SEO must be working.
My bounce rate is also very low, <5%, so I'm keeping the readers for a while once they arrive, which is good.
I find this sort of data fascinating and am very grateful you shared your information with us. Best of luck with the remainder of the contest. I look forward to reading about the results!
Thank you Carolyn. Tell me, do you try and ‘market’ your strong posts more than the other ones? I usually try this with the posts that I think will/might be warmly received.
As for Guest posting, I think they help to build reputation as well (as long as you get to post on well known blogs), and its also good for backlinks.
As for your bounce rate, Carolyn, I don’t mean to contest it, so don’t take this the wrong way. I have seen these extremely low numbers before, which are in realistic scenarios, unheard of. This has happened to others as they had the Google Analytics code installed more than once (check your html and php files). I would strongly urge you to look around and ensure that there is only one Analytics code on your website.
Thank you for your wishes! I appreciate the discussion!
Hi Neeraj,
I must admit that you’re working very hard, within 2 months you’re getting good amount of traffic and decrease alexa rank.. that’s awesome. I wish you good luck for your contest, and I favor you to win this contest. 🙂
Neeraj Sachdeva says
Thank you Riya. Your enthusiasm and wishes are warmly received!
Hi Neeraj,
I know and quite agree that social media sites are great resource of huge traffic. But my question is how would you get your fans on Facebook, How would you search them and ask them to join them?
I mean is there any specific strategy you follow and same question for twitter as well. 😉
Neeraj Sachdeva says
Aarti, I’ll be honest with you - we don’t have many Facebook fans - only 88.
We have not been very active in recruiting Facebook fans, partly because none of the challenges in the contest have focused on it. Just like our lack of SEO, this has been our failing. In terms of strategies, you could do these:
Applicable to both:
Organize contests and get people to follow you, as part of the admission criteria. This is a quick and easy way to increase your followers (and fans). In order to keep them there, you have to make it worth there while and offer them content/information they like.
As for specific strategies:
Facebook: Befriend people who are in the same niche as you, and invite them to join (you might have to reciprocate, but that is not bad at all). Advertise on your website that FB fans will be given a freebie (a document/an ebook), something that will not be available to your regular readers. This will impress people and they will flock to your fan page. Also, mix things up sometime, ask them questions and make yourself available once every 2 weeks for an hour long sessions where you will answer any questions on Facebook!
Twitter: You could use one of the programs or hire someone from Fiverr to get more followers. This is good if you want to ‘bulk up’, but you might not get good response in follow up tweets. Add those people that you want to follow, and hopefully they will follow back. Also, in order to connect with more people, RT their tweets, respond to their messages and generally spread goodwill. Internet contains a lot of chatter (esp Twitter), there aren’t many personal conversations going on there. You will do well to interact with people.
Hope these help. Please let me know if you have any other questions.
Those are good tips for getting more Facebook fans. Contests work very well in drawing in fans. Many or most seem to stay on for the long haul if you take the time to be active on a regular basis with the page and updating it and running new contests, etc.
-Jean
Check out Empire Avenue.
There, helping to promote your “investments'” social media channels helps to boost their share value in your portfolio. 😉 It’s a game, but it can also be good for meeting lots of people who are happy to play along and check out your blog, your facebook pages, etc. As with any other social media channels, be human and be courteous - no one likes to feel like a number or a metric. Be prepared to reciprocate - or better yet, give first, then ask for others’ support.
That it is! (Hey, just being an “impressive case study” ought to bring in more traffic for TheNextGoal!)
If you click the link below this comment, you’ll find a free report over at TheNextGoal on easy things you can do right now - proven tips to boost your Alexa rank, based on experiments I did on my own blog.
I’m sure it was just an oversight, but you forgot to mention there’s a free report with proven tips for improving your blog’s Alexa rank available from TNG, as well.
Great post, Neeraj! Excellent recap of the past seven weeks. I was just telling someone this morning that it’s amazing what a dedicated team can do - faster, better together - in seven weeks. As a solo blogger, my Alexa stats are about 193K worldwide and 59K US - but it has taken about 5 years to get there and stay there! (Of course, I usually just thumb my nose at SEO and find my blog ranking highly for things like “brain eating amoeba” instead of “children’s books.”) As long as you’re having fun or making money, it’s all good. But when we can have fun AND make money, we’ll have to go out and get our Superbowl of Blogging rings and flash ’em proudly.
Neeraj Sachdeva says
I think great, unique content and word-of-mouth marketing have been key here. But we can certainly improve on SEO (as I type, we are already registering more than 11% traffic from search engines this week, which is almost double of the 6% traffic we had). We are also indexing faster!
That’s fantastic! I guess it’s also proving out the notion that ‘what gets measured gets done’!
I am part of BlogEngage community and in general I like the people there but I have a hard time gaining any traction. Suggestions on how to become a more involved member?
Thanks!
Neeraj Sachdeva says
Ryan, I understand that BlogEngage can seem daunting at first, but there are a few tried and tested methods:
1) Engage with the community - goes without saying! This would involve you discussing and voting for the articles you like. This will help you get on top of BE top-users list, and will become easier to be noticed.
2) ‘Friend’ those people whose articles you usually like. Usually, let them know so they can add you too (it becomes easy for them to look at what you have shared). This is an excellent method to build relationships.
3) When you see someone online, chat with them, get to know what they do.
This method has not been tried yet - Guest Posting. If you are already on BE, you can get better publicity by posting there.
Beyond all this, Brian is an excellent chap (and host). Email him and ask him for ideas to make your experience much better. I am sure he would reply positively.
Hope these help.
I would agree with Neeraj..its important to give feedbacka nd support other bloggers first before asking for favours and requests…karma works both ways..if you give you receive. Take care
Larry Lourcey says
Great to stop for a sec and look at those numbers Neeraj. It has truly been an honor being your teammate on Team Frog!
I can’t wait to see where those Alexa numbers are when this contest finally ends.
Neeraj Sachdeva says
Likewise Larry. I love your passion and creativity towards the blog! I think 100,000 at the end of 3 weeks would be ambitious, but we can certainly see increase in organic traffic, something I am very excited about 🙂 Did you know that the post you have shared here (about Chris Rene) has got the most organic traffic this week? I think there’s a case to be made here about celebrity-pull!