On Week 3 I'm Learning I need a BackLinking Strategy

Hi business-minded-mommas!

I have oh-so-exciting news! Remember how last week I pretty much had a 100% bounce rate and my average time on page was…let me see…roughly…0 seconds?

Well guess what happened this week! That bounce rate went down, down, down. And the average time spent on page went up, up up! (I mean, we’ve still got a ways to go, but hello progress!)

How did it happen? I’ll give you a quick overview of my blog analytics, then we’ll take a look at what changed this week, why I’m suffering from a lack of a backlinking strategy, and perhaps see if we can make some conclusions…

1. First off – A quick look at some blog analytics:

I’ve still got one problem site (HGIS, you little stinker, you!) But the rest of the sites seem to be making forward progress. MT and BLS are the sites I spend the most time updating, and they seem to be performing the best, with bounce rates of 50-60%, and average time spent on page of 2.5-4 minutes. Cool.

I wanted to find out last week where my very few blessed visitors were coming from. Here’s what Analytics is telling me for MT:

3 visitors from: (direct)/(none)
2 visitors from: !.com/referral

What the heck do those even mean?

(direct)/(none): Well, I found this article about it. And basically it says that Google doesn’t know where the traffic came from, so it’s an “unknown” source. Great. Helpful. Read the article if you want to know more.
!.com/referral: Well, it seems like a “referral” is just when someone reaches your site by clicking on a link from another website (the referrer is that other website). But who in the name of time is !.com?? According to this article – they’re a con artist!! Spam!! So probably these aren’t real peeps anyway. Meh, and my analytics are skewed once again. So…referrals are good. Spam is bad. I need some non-spam backlinking strategy in my life!!

With so few numbers of visitors, it was important for me to not have Google Analytics counting my own visits to the sites. You can input your IP address into Google Analytics, which is what I’ve now done to stop it from counting me, myself.

Next up Action: get some freaking real backlink referrals 🙂

Social media backlinks
Comment backlinks
Directory backlinks
Come up with a backlinking strategy!

2. What new things I’m trying out this week

I’m installing new plugins on my sites to see what their impact is in a week’s time:

SumoMe
W3 Total Cache
Better Click to Tweet
Yoast SEO
Manual Related Posts

I’m also now set up with Google Search Console on all my live sites, with sitemaps submitted!

And I’ve entered my sites into pingomatic.com so that my new articles get indexed faster

For BLS, I’ve also followed the top 10 other websites out there with similar content (“competitor” websites), so I can see the types and frequency of emails/newsletters/posts they’re spreading out into the world! I wonder if I can somehow get them to link to me…see? Backlinking strategy to the rescue again – it’s a need!

3. What lessons I learned this week (including where I totally failed)

Lesson 1: A blog post of 2000 words with 5 images and two content upgrades (downloads that also collect email addresses) takes me 5 hours to complete right now. 5 hours?! Are you kidding me? Why so long??

Action: That process has got to become more efficient – my goal is 1.5 hours.

Lesson 2: Just because you’ve got a Facebook or a Pinterest page doesn’t mean people will see it! I don’t have any engagement with my content yet.

Action: More frequent posting could help? Or following others on a daily basis?

Lesson 3: It’s important to have a posting rhythm (something I’m sorely lacking right now).

Action: Put a weekly posting schedule for each live blog together, and a monthly newsletter plan, as well as a twice-daily social media posting strategy.