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MatthewBarby
By: Matthew Barby October 13th, 2014
My Recipe for Success: How to Launch a Successful Blog
Blogging
The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
Five months ago, I decided (at long last) that I was going to start up my own food blog ( Pescetarian Kitchen). Both my partner, Laura, and I had wanted to do this for some time, as we're real foodies, so we started to do a little research into the practicalities of it.
One of the other motivations for starting our blog, outside of our love for food, was the fact that we're both pescetarians (i.e. we follow a vegetarian diet, plus eat seafood). Now, when it comes to finding specialist pescetarian blogs, the results are pretty limited. I mean, I could count them on two hands…
That got us thinking… Why don't we become THE pescetarian blog? There's a huge demand for it, with up to 40% of the US population eating "flexitarian" meals (any form of vegetarianism) at some point each week. This growing statistic is also reflected in monthly searches within Google:
The term pescetarian is searched for around 40,500 times every month. This alone was an encouraging stat for me, because it doesn't even take into account all of the recipe-specific search terms that could be targeted (e.g. prawn linguine recipe).
So, five months on, where are we? Well, I'm particularly happy with the results so far, and this is why I wanted to outline the approach that I've taken from a content, social, and SEO perspective to get results.
On the topic of results, here's where we're at right now:
Page 1 rankings in Google for the terms pescetarian, pescetarian blog, pescetarian recipes and pescetarian meals. Go ahead, Google it if you don't believe me ;)
4,700+ followers on our Facebook page
The average engagement on one of our Facebook posts will often result in around 100 likes, 5-15 comments, 20-50 shares and 100-300 clicks through to the website
850+ Twitter followers
500+ Pinterest followers
550 double opt-in email subscribers
30,000+ unique visits to the blog
15,000+ unique visits coming from social media traffic alone
65,000+ backlinks
As you can see, we've made a good start, but there's a long way to go yet. It's worth noting at this point that we haven't really done much outbound link building work (the majority is organic) and we have spent no more than £100/$165 each month on promotion.
Although it's early in our campaign, I'm going to share how we've achieved what we have so far and give you as much actionable information as to how you can go out and replicate the early success that we've had. This will include the exact strategies that I've implemented, the tools that I've used and any tips for accelerating growth.
Phase 1: Analysis
The first step that I take in any new campaign, be it personal or for a client, is a full competitive analysis. This includes:
Insight into the types of content being produced by my competitors
The marketing techniques that are bringing them success
A breakdown of the social landscape, including the types of content being shared as well as the people who are engaging with it
Competitive SEO analysis, looking at competitors and general opportunities
Content analysis
The first and most important part of the analysis is looking at the content that is currently being produced within the niche. All of the promotion channels are secondary to this.
For my food blog I started with a simple Google search to find some of the most popular blogs within the niche. From there I went in and gathered the following details:
The name of the website
The frequency of content being published
The general themes of the content (e.g. recipes, how-tos, diet advice, etc.)
All of their social media profile URLs
I subscribed to their email newsletter to see how frequently they mailed out and what they were sending
Traffic level estimates using SimilarWeb and SEMrush
Insights into the length of their content, the format of the content, and social shares using URL Profiler. You can also use BuzzSumo for this by searching with the competitor's domain name
From these core pieces of data I was able to drill down into what was working for each of my competitors, the types of content that I should be looking at producing, and some of the channels where I needed to invest most of my time.
The key takeaway from my analysis was that visual content was the key. Good photography is one of the biggest determinants of success within the food niche. Unfortunately for me, I'm a novice photographer, and only had an iPhone to use.
I've contemplated showing you some of my early attempts at taking photographs of our recipes, but they're actually so terrible that I'm too embarrassed to! What I will share is the fact that you don't need to be a professional to pull this kind of thing off.
Instead of spending a ton of money on loads of expensive photography kit, I did something that is very logical but, more often than not, overlooked. I asked for help.
I got in touch with a few food bloggers and asked them what they did when they first started out. This simple and optimistic email outreach resulted in an incredible response from Kiersten Frase of Oh My Veggies. Kiersten outlined her exact method for taking great photos with just an iPhone and a few cheap bits of equipment (it cost me around £20/$35 in total). Here's a link to an article she shared with me that talks all about this – I'm sure it will be of use to a number of you.
After this I worked on perfecting my photography (as best I could) so that our content would be able to compete with the competition and build a solid image around our brand. Here's a recent shot I took:
The image of our blog is everything. The visuals are the window into the rest of the content. Without them looking great, everything else would be overlooked. Being overlooked is not what we wanted, so we made sure we invested time into getting everything right before ever hitting publish.
I've spent countless hours simply looking at the way that our competitors were composing images and how they would use them across social media. I firmly believe that this has been one of the deciding factors in the initial success of our content.
Channel analysis
Before we went off and set up a Pinterest, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, SoundCloud, SlideShare, StumbleUpon, Myspace and LinkedIn page for our blog, we needed to decide which channels were right for us. More importantly, we needed to decide which channels would provide the best route to our target audience.
Considering the visual nature of our content, it made sense to drill down on social channels that would really make the most of showing off what we have. Similarly, the main goal was traffic generation, so we wanted to be able to bring a pull-through of relevant people to our blog.
Immediately we were able to ditch some social networks from our list of potential channels, including LinkedIn, Myspace, SoundCloud, etc.
We also made the decision that we weren't going to produce any video content at this stage (mainly due to resources), so YouTube was ruled out (for now). This gave us an initial list of:
Instagram
Facebook
Twitter
Pinterest
Google+
Now came the issue of our time. Although we wanted to get as much exposure as possible, it's not always realistic to start building communities in every channel that you can – it can often have a detrimental effect because you're not able to put enough time into each platform and your content becomes very disparate.
So… we mapped out the time that we could dedicate towards our social media activities. This was a simple process that took into account the following:
Time needed to create a content roadmap across each platform.
Resource needed to produce any platform-specific content on each platform (e.g. resized images, custom tracking links, post descriptions, etc.).
Any extra equipment/software that would need to be purchased or any extra skills developed.
Once we had some estimates for each channel, we could then compare this to the total opportunity for each. Now, this isn't always an easy thing to calculate, but platforms that have an advertising program will often help to identify some rough audience volumes.
For example, within Facebook we did a search for anyone who liked pages related to pescetarianism/vegetarianism…
As you can see from the screenshot above, there are over 6 million people interested in the topics within the UK and the US alone. That's a good starting point.
You can do a similar exercise within StumbleUpon and Twitter.
Once I had these stats, I then took the figures from my initial competitive analysis to see the audience sizes of relevant (and bigger) blogs for each channel. Here's how it was broken down:
The big takeaway here was that Facebook was THE platform for growing a large community of followers. Alongside this, Pinterest and Instagram were a close second, with Twitter coming in third.
Unsurprisingly, the social platforms that are very image-led seemed to be the places where the majority of our target audience were consuming content. Off the back of this research we decided to focus primarily on the following platforms:
Facebook
Pinterest
Twitter
We decided to go with Pinterest instead of Instagram because of the fact that they are very similar and we didn't have a huge amount of extra time to work on both (so it made sense to choose one or the other). There was also the fact that Pinterest works particularly well for traffic generation, which is one of our primary objectives.
SEO & traffic analysis
The third and final part of our analysis was to look into the websites that were linking to our competitors, the keywords that we could potentially target for ranking within the search engines, and the websites that were driving through large volumes of traffic to our competitors.
Competitive link analysis
I'm not going to go into all the details of performing a competitive link analysis because this topic has been covered hundreds of times. If you want to get a little more information then you can view this article, this one or this one.
Here's a comparison that I ran through Open Site Explorer:
In a nutshell, this told us that the majority of these websites were very well established and were getting large volumes of linking root domains through to their website. But then, I expected this to be the case.
What I was more interested in was who it was that was linking to the competition, and also how they were linking.
What I found was that some of the best links that all of my competition had were coming from BuzzFeed. This came in the form of recipe mentions within list posts. In fact, the majority of their links were coming through to deeper pages on their websites – primarily pages with recipes on them. This was a key insight because it was clear that we needed to spend a lot of time ensuring that our recipes were as linkable as possible.
Keyword research
As with competitive link research, keyword research has been covered LOADS. In fact, I produced an almost hour-long tutorial on running keyword research for blogs, so you can check out the full video below:
The main finding from our keyword research was that there was a ton of interest around search terms related to pescetarianism (as I mentioned above) with fairly low competition around them – perfect.
Not only that, but there are thousands of potential long tail keywords that can be targeted around specific recipe ideas. This bodes well for developing consistent growth in organic search traffic.
Traffic analysis
To tie together the competitive link analysis, social media analysis and the keyword research, I wanted to have a look into the major traffic sources to my competitors' websites.
There are a number of tools that you can use for this, some paid and some free. The first tool that I love to use is SimilarWeb. By plugging one of my competitor's websites into SimilarWeb I will get a breakdown of their top referring websites.
Now, one thing to bear in mind here is that you need to take these figures as estimates. They're pretty close but they're not spot-on. Here's a snapshot from a couple of my competitors:
Here's another one:
No surprises that BuzzFeed was the top traffic source for each of these websites. From this simple analysis I was able to find a whole host of websites and communities that I could start tapping into to drive through traffic to our blog. Here's a small list of some of the top targets:
BuzzFeed
FoodGawker.com
Huffington Post
Reddit (we found a Pescetarian-specific subreddit)
TheKitchn.com
Tastespotting.com
As well as using SimilarWeb, I took a lot at the keywords that were bringing through the most traffic from the search engines to my competitors' websites. I did this with SEMrush. Here's a snapshot of some of the terms specifically related to pescetarianism:
Again, all of this data is used so that we could map out some content to start competing for similar terms.
Phase 2: Where the hard work begins
Getting the branding right across the site was something that took a lot of time. I wanted to make sure that it was well thought out, related to our target audience and used all of the research that we'd carried out to make informed decisions.
At the same time, I didn't want it to cost a fortune. This was the same case for all of the assets we needed to go along with it. For example:
The website design and development
The blog logo
Social media profile artwork
Banners for advertising
These are just a few things we needed to consider, with more to follow over the coming months. Ideally, the website that we've created has been built to last at least 1-1.5 years so we needed to get it right.
I know it can be tough to know where to start with these kinds of things, especially if you're on a tight budget and have had little experience in running anything similar before. With that in mind, I'm going to share a number of different tools and services that I used (or have used before) to get various brand assets in place…
Awesome tools/services
Branding
Adobe Kuler – before you start diving into your web design and development, you need to get an idea of the colour palette of your brand. Adobe Kuler is always my first port of call, plus it's free.
Mural.ly – this is a pretty smart platform that allows you to map out your ideas in a manageable workflow. It's a paid tool but the entry level package is only $10. I've used Mural.ly to map out all the different things I want my brand to encompass, who my target market is, the channels I'll be using, etc. and it works really well.
Dribbble – if you're looking for some creative inspiration then Dribbble is the perfect starting point to look at some cool designs, brands and campaigns. Always good to get the creative juices flowing!
Google Consumer Barometer – this is a seriously awesome resource for getting deeper insights into the online behaviour of your target audience. Using some of the data within Consumer Barometer, you can start shaping the perception and story of your brand.
99designs – an amazing marketplace where you can get all kinds of creative work done for as little as $99. This can include logos, banners, print work, etc.
WiseStamp – create custom email signatures that can also pull in links from your social profiles, the recent posts from your blog, your latest tweets and much more.
48hourslogo.com – here's another amazing design marketplace. We actually got the Pescetarian Kitchen logo designed here for $120 and the results were amazing. You can check out the design page here: http://www.48hourslogo.com/project.php?id=29142
crowdSPRING – logo design and graphic design marketplace.
Swiftly - small design jobs from just $19. This is great to get little bits of your brand artwork created or tweaked.
Impossibility! – a fantastic domain name generator that will help you to decide on the perfect fit for your domain name. We started using this tool for our blog as we needed to have the term pescetarian within it. We finally decided on going with one of the new .kitchen TLDs that were made available.
Development
Balsamiq – a great wire-framing tool that you can use to map out how you want your new site to look.
Theme Forest – if you're not very code savvy, you may want to look at using a premade website template. You can customise these themes with your own imagery and Theme Forest is a huge marketplace to find the right one.
IM Creator – if you'd prefer to use a much simpler interface without having to know anything about development or code, you can use IM Creator to create a website within their easy-to-use interface.
oDesk – if you haven't heard of oDesk before then you should check it out. It's a great place to hire freelancers to get bits of development work, design work or any other kind of work done. I use oDesk all the time but you just need to make sure that you're taking the time to interview the freelancers you work with.
Build Fire – this can follow on from your website development project as you can create your own mobile apps with Build Fire's platform. The beauty of it is that you can have a HTML5 app for free (no strings attached) and you can also get iOS and Android apps for just $50 a month. They could be a nice extension to your website (it's something that me and Laura are looking at right now).
Traffic generation
Once we'd got the website developed along with the logos and imagery, it was time to start focusing on the traffic generation side of things. I'll break this down into some of the different channels that we focused on and then go into detail on the specific activities that we carried out to get results.
SEO
As far as long-term traffic generation strategies go, SEO is top of the list for us. As I mentioned in the analysis in phase 1, we carried out extensive research into which terms our competitors were ranking well for, as well as some potential keyword opportunities that we could target. After this it was time to align this to our content strategy.
Schema.org markup
Before we started planning out specific content ideas, we set a few things up within the blog to ensure that our site was optimised as well as it could be. The first was to implement Schema.org markup.
Schema.org markup is particularly useful for food blogs as it enables you to mark up specific webpages that contain recipes in order to display them differently within the search engines.
In the image above it shows the search engine snippet for one of our recipes. It has an image of the dish, the total cooking time, the number of calories within it and then the usual title/description.
When compared to a lot of the other competing results, it's clear that our SERP snippet is much more clickable:
The best part of this was that we didn't have to do any coding at all (or even know how to code this up). Instead, we used a simple free WordPress plugin called ZipList that allows us to enter in a few extra details to our WordPress posts and it will add all the necessary Schema.org markup that can enable Google to display a custom SERP snippet.
Page structure
Aside from Schema.org markup, we also set up Yoast's WordPress SEO plugin. The main reason for this is that it's completely awesome! It allows you to manage your URLs, sitemaps, meta data and tons more. It's worth having a read of this post on different on-page SEO factors and then working your way through them with the help of Yoast's plugin.
Content
The majority of our link acquisition strategy is geared around a more organic, earned approach. We're focusing on developing great content (in the form of recipes, primarily) that others will share and link to. This obviously has some level of manufacturing to it in order to gain traction, but our ethos is to focus on content first, links second.
With this in mind, our content has to be right.
To begin with, we gathered a huge list of potential keywords that were food/recipe orientated. From there we mapped them out into a huge spreadsheet and identified the keyword competitiveness score for each ( Moz metric), along with the total monthly search volume. From here we could start creating a list of topics to write about (i.e. different recipes we would cook up) and then marry them up perfectly to our target keyword.
It takes time to start ranking for a wide spread of keywords like this but getting content together for each of your target terms is the right starting place. Over five months, we've published 72 recipes that all focus on different search terms from which we can start bringing through search traffic. It's worth noting that keyword search volume isn't the only factor that's considered when creating new content, but it plays a big role in it.
BuzzFeed
As I mentioned within the first part of this post, BuzzFeed is a key traffic driver to the majority of our competitors. Having a look at some of the links they have acquired from BuzzFeed show that they are generally from having their recipe(s) featured within list-based posts.
Not only that, but they're cashing in on some seriously powerful links (DA 92).
I made it our goal to get a feature within a BuzzFeed article. Not only was I interested in getting a seriously powerful link, but the traffic potential off the back of one of these posts is huge, especially if it goes to the front page.
I didn't just achieve this once - I managed to get two of our recipes featured in two separate posts that hit the front page of BuzzFeed.
Here's how I did it…
I began by getting in touch with a ton of food bloggers to start building relationships with them. My hope was that they would see some of our recipes and potentially feature them within some articles on BuzzFeed – it soon dawned on me that they weren't the ones that were publishing the posts. I carried on the relationship building work because it resulted in some natural links from their own blogs, but knew I needed to go and do some deeper research into BuzzFeed itself.
BuzzFeed has a community platform where anyone can make an account, log-in and publish a post. Now, you may already be seeing dollar signs right now, but you need to roll that tongue back in. Unless your post gets promoted for a community feature by the moderator team (who are notoriously strict with their submissions), your post is going nowhere. Oh, and you're not going to get any dofollow links of value because they're just coming from an orphan page (they're often nofollow if it isn't promoted for a feature anyway).
Having said all this, if you do manage to get a community feature, and from there it gains enough traction to be pushed into a category feature, and then from there it has so much traction that they push it to the front page… well, you could be looking at some serious exposure.
Here are the analytics for one of the posts that I had hit the front page with (BuzzFeed has its own analytics platform):
So here's what I did to get a deeper understanding of what content performswell on BuzzFeed:
I crawled BuzzFeed.com over a weekend using Screaming Frog SEO Spider to get a huge list of URLs that I could use to start running some analysis on.
I went through and filtered out any irrelevant URLs so that I only had the URLs of actual posts on BuzzFeed. This was in excess of 65,000 URLs and came from a whole host of different authors and categories.
I ran the URLs through URL Profiler to gather backlink data, social share information, word counts, post titles, etc. Essentially, I gathered a ton of information around the content on the pages so that I could analyse it further.
After this, I ran all of the URLs through a tool that I've had developed for myself to do some extra data scraping (if you're not sure what this is, don't worry, but you can check out a post I wrote on it here). Using my tool (which I'll be releasing to the public for free soon), I extracted the author's name, the article category, the date/time it was published, the total views the article had, plus a load of other things (you get the idea).
Once I had all of this data (it was a LOT of data), I started to dive into it and find trends. Essentially, I did everything that I outline in my content analysis case study, but for BuzzFeed.
From all this analysis, I was able to find out some of the following things about BuzzFeed's posts:
The optimum number of list items to have in a list-based post to gain interest.
The perfect headline length.
The ideal length of the article to get social shares.
The most popular authors and categories on BuzzFeed.
These are just a few of the findings I took. Once I get round to putting it all together in a publically coherent format, I'll publish my full analysis results for you all (you can expect that in a month or so).
Here are a few tips that I'll give you now that could help you to get a post published on BuzzFeed:
Do not try to promote anything within your article. The editors will see straight through it – trust me (I've had some unsuccessful posts because of this).
Only link out to anything that will directly improve the BuzzFeed reader's experience. The mod team doesn't like links, but if, for example, you're mentioning a recipe, it could be a good idea to leave a link for the reader to see it in full.
BuzzFeed's moderation team will take at least 24 hours to get back to you. If they don't get back to you then your post hasn't been approved.
Make sure you stick to the format of BuzzFeed. List posts are a winner, but you need to study the types of related content on there already to find a fun angle. Anything remotely salesy will fail.
Once you've hit publish, run some social advertising to seed through some initial views and gain some traction before the mod team looks at it.
If all goes well, you'll get an email like this…
From this post alone we had over 6,500 unique visits to the blog. That also resulted in around 200 email sign-ups, tons of social shares and a flurry of organic links.
Community/bookmarking websites
Another area that we identified as a huge traffic driver was the vast array of food-orientated communities. We spent quite a lot of time in our analysis stage to see which communities our competitors were most active within and decided to focus on the following:
Reddit (/r/pescetarian/ and /r/foodporn/).
Food Gawker
Tastespotting
There are a few others that we engage within, but these are the big three. Food Gawker alone has brought through just under 2,000 referral visits.
The beauty of these sites is that you just need to submit your post URL to them and (if approved by the mods) they can start bringing through traffic to your blog directly. They're no different to inbound marketing communities like inbound.org.
Without going into too much detail here, the big thing to remember is that you should analyse what is working within the community before you start sharing. It took me quite a while to get any of our recipes past the Food Gawker moderator team because they have very strict guidelines. Instead of just crossing my fingers and hoping for the best, I did a similar exercise to what I did with BuzzFeed and analysed the components of a top-performing post on the site, then attempted to replicate that with my content.
After this small piece of research, we now know exactly what the Food Gawker team are looking for. This applies to most online communities (key takeaway: spend time researching the communities before engaging).
Email
In terms of our current priorities, our email subscribers are top of the list, even above SEO. So far we're at 574 double opt-in subscribers (I want to emphasise the fact that these subscribers actually want to read our emails).
If we have a load of people give us our email addresses to enter a competition then they do not go into our mailing list. The only way they do is if they double-opt in (i.e. give us our email to enter a comp and then get in touch with us via email to confirm they want to receive the newsletter).
At the end of the day, there's no value in having someone subscribed to your mailing list that doesn't want to be there. It just gives you an unrealistic idea of how large your following is.
That aside, email is one of the most powerful ways for us to get our content shared, bring through consistent traffic to the blog, and also (in the longer term) generate revenue.
You'll see once you get onto the blog that it has a number of different call-to-action areas (we use Optin Monster for these). We try our best to keep them non-intrusive and have been doing loads of testing to see what gets the best results. At the moment we're getting around 4-6 new subscribers every day, which has doubled from last month.
As it stands, the top three converting channels for new email subscribers are as follows:
Google Organic (21.10%)
BuzzFeed (14.77%)
Facebook (14.76%)
We measure all of our email signups through Google Analytics via event and goal tracking (check out this tutorial I wrote on setting it all up). I'd strongly recommend you track this because it gives you a clearer idea of where to focus your efforts.
When it comes to actually managing our email marketing campaigns, we use GetResponse. There are tons of different email platforms that you can use, but I find GetResponse to be one of the best out there. You can set up autoresponders, create custom landing pages, integrate directly with WordPress and Google Analytics, plus it's very cost-effective.
Social media
Social media was always going to play a huge role in bringing traffic through to our blog. If I'm honest, we were never expecting the kind of response that we've had. We currently have a social media following of around 6,000 people – all of which we've acquired in just 5 months.
The traffic we bring from Facebook alone contributes to a large percentage of our overall web traffic.
I could spend all day talking about everything we've been doing within our social media campaign, but instead I'm going to give a summary of the things that have really worked for us to get some seriously quick growth. If you're interested in the full details, I've recently published our full social media strategy for building a following from nothing (likely to be of interest!).
Here are the top-level points that have made our social campaign a success:
Managing a fluid content posting process across each of our social channels.
Running periodical competitions to give away prizes that are relevant to our niche and that our readers will love.
Remarketing to website visitors via Facebook ads.
Marketing to the followers of my competitors.
Working on as much in-content call to action as possible.
Social media posting process
Where I've talked about managing a fluid content posting process, I'm referring to the way in which content is scheduled to be shared across each social network. Our strategy for this actually came from a fantastic Whiteboard Friday from Rand Fishkin.
Rand talked about the optimum amount of times you should post the same content across each social channel, offering a visual originally created by KissMetrics:
This has worked wonders for me, but you can adapt it slightly for each different channel you use. All I do is resize each of my post images to the optimal size for the individual social channel, then schedule all the shares of that post in Buffer.
Competitions
Competitions/giveaways work really well for driving social engagement and we've seen a huge uptake in our social media off the back of running some competitions.
One thing to be careful of here is to make sure you're giving away something that is relevant. It's all fair and well giving away an iPad in a social competition, but you need to decide whether the people engaging with you care about your brand at all or if they're just in it for an iPad (it's usually the latter).
Just as an example, we recently gave away a three-month supply of popcorn. From this we had 956 entrants in just 3 days. Not bad at all!
Remarketing via Facebook Ads
Facebook has some incredible advertising options that enable you to grow your social media following full of engaged and relevant users. This looks like it's going to get even better with the recent introduction of Atlas's people-based advertising platform.
One of the ways that we've been able to really grow our Facebook following so quickly is through remarketing to all the visitors of our website. Considering the number of people that we've been bringing through from the likes of BuzzFeed, Reddit and Food Gawker, it would be crazy if we didn't attempt to capture them into our social following.
The results have been amazing and we have spent less than £80/$130 a month doing so.
I'm not going to go into all the details of how to set this up because I've already done this at great length here.
In-Content CTA
One thing that I always mention to people when they ask me about growing their social media following is that most of your social engagement will come from outside the social network itself.
If you have enough social call-to-action within your content, your readers will begin sharing your content across social media and start being the ones who are helping to promote your brand organically.
Here are a few simple things that I've used to do this:
Social share buttons (here's a great free WordPress plugin)
Social-gated locked content (here's a plugin you can use)
Pop-ups to prompt social shares
Final thoughts
Just before I sign off, I want to emphasise the importance of analysis and measurement. You can see within the first phase of this case study that I dedicated a large amount of time to getting a full and detailed understanding of the niche. This included the content, my competitors and the social and search landscape.
Alongside this, measurement has been a key driver of growth within our campaign. If you don't understand what you're doing right and what you're doing wrong then you'll never be able to adapt.
I use tons of different tools to measure the success of varying aspects of the campaign. One that you may have heard of before is Cyfe. If you haven't heard of it, go check it out (you can get a free account). Essentially, Cyfe allows you to integrate loads of different tools into one central dashboard (for example, Google Analytics, Bit.ly, Facebook, Pinterest, SlideShare, Moz, GetResponse and tons more) – it's awesome.
Just set some KPIs and make sure that you're analysing the results regularly. If you find that one channel in particular is working really well, shift more of your resources into it. If one isn't, find out why and work on a solution.
TL;DR
Invest time into analysing your competitors, the content in your niche, the search landscape and social media before doing anything else.
Get an armoury of tools and services that you can use to get results from your campaigns, whatever your budget is.
Content first, links second.
If you're in the food niche, BuzzFeed is a huge traffic driver!
About MatthewBarby — Global Head of Growth and SEO at HubSpot, award winning blogger and lecturer. Find me on my digital marketing blog or drop me a tweet.
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shivanipatelonline
shivanipatelonline 2 years ago
Thanks a lot Mathew, I was looking to understand Buzzfeed process in detail.
3 0 Reply
MatthewBarby
Matthew Barby 2 years ago
No problem - BuzzFeed has been an amazing traffic generator for me.
1 0 Reply
J_MacDonald
J_MacDonald 2 years ago
Very interesting post to read. I enjoyed the emphasis on competition analysis. It's so important to start with an end goal in mind on how to beat out competition when you are trying to be successful in any business venture. Keep up the good work!
2 0 Reply
Sheena_Schleicher
Sheena Schleicher 2 years ago
Great example of what should go into blogging, and also branding in general!
I love that what you portrayed is not just SEO or branding or content development or user experience or social or any other one-off. Instead, you took a very holistic approach which yielded great results... kind of reminds me of the "better marketing" Moz stands for.
Great job! I suspect your site/brand will continue to be a success! :)
2 0 Reply
Kumail-Hemani
Kumail Hemani 2 years ago
Thumbs up for this post Mr. Matthew!
2 0 Reply
JamesNorquay
James Norquay 2 years ago
Good post Matthew, some great strategy points here for anyone looking to develop a blog and promote it heavily. One good site for branding is DesignCrowd so that is also worth looking into. I noticed the re-marketing via Facebook recently when I visited your blog, nice one mate.
2 0 Reply
MatthewBarby
Matthew Barby 2 years ago
Thanks, James. I haven't used DesignCrowd before you I'll check it out :)
1 0 Reply
Alex_Moravek
Alex Moravek 2 years ago
It is an awesome post Matthew. BuzzSumo is one of the most important tools ... :-)
2 0 Reply
paulamartinpaula
Paul Crock 2 years ago
I love working with BuzzSumo.
paulamartinpaula edited 2 years ago
1 0 Reply
anthonyprive
Anthony Privé 2 years ago
Hi Matthew, very good post thanks for sharing. Are you not worried sites such as Buzzfeed might become the next target for Google?
2 0 Reply
MatthewBarby
Matthew Barby 2 years ago
Hi Anthony, I think that most of the crap that goes into BuzzFeed doesn't see any SEO benefit. The big issue that BuzzFeed need to tackle is people using their community area for Parasite SEO (if you don't know what that is then check out this: http://www.sudorank.com/guide-ranking-parasite-web...
The reality is that the SEO benefit only comes when your content is promoted, and this goes through very strict editorial. I'm not worried that Google will penalise BuzzFeed because the only links that come from the site are editorially worthy.
2 0 Reply
anthonyprive
Anthony Privé 2 years ago
Thanks for the reply Matthew. I get what you mean. Just worried sites such as Buzzfeed, although there are good stuff on it, might be Google's next target.
With content going from "He Beat Her And Murdered Her Son - And She Got 45 Years In Jail" to "67 Times Kanye West Has Smiled Throughout History", the context and relevancy of the whole site is kind of compromised really...A bit like the more you want to cover, the less relevant you are. But anyway, as you say if it's done well, why not doing it.
Never thought I'd mention Kanye West on Moz...sorry about that.
4 0 Reply
MikeLowry
Mike Lowry 2 years ago
Great post and the links you share are the most valuable Matthew !
I didn't know Adobe Kuler, Dribbble and many more before your post , its great for the designers. Thanks .
2 0 Reply
MatthewBarby
Matthew Barby 2 years ago
Hey Mike, you may want to check this post I wrote a while ago that outlines 64 different content marketing tools : http://allthingsseo.com/content-marketing/64-conte...
There's loads of goodies in there :)
1 0 Reply
RoverStore
Ashley Johnson 2 years ago
Thanks Matthew for a Good Link.
2 0 Reply
tpullin
Tiffany Pullin 2 years ago
Really great post, thank you! I have been hard-pressed for fresh ideas to make an art blog visible for a friend. Thanks for providing tips that are both actionable and modular to different types of blogs.
1 0 Reply
SarahCC
SarahCC 2 years ago
Matthew, A handful of minor questions.
You have done 72 posts over 5 months, roughly a post every other day. Did you launch with just one post or did you launch with a few already on?
When did you feel ready to do the buzzfeed article and bring that sort of traffic to the site? How many posts did you have up?
Can you touch on your budget for the blog? Do you plan to recoup those costs?
Your post is fantastic and a huge resource. Are you going to publish an update on moz in the future? If not or these is another way to hear about your progress/preferred tools and techniques, can you post that?
1 0 Reply
SarahCC
SarahCC 2 years ago
Matthew Disregard the last question. I've found your blog at http://www.matthewbarby.com/ and feverishly taking notes.
1 0 Reply
TopLeagueTechnologies
Susanta Sahoo a year ago
Excellent post on starting a blog! I can't believe how I had missed out on this one. This just gave me enough hope start a food blog for my city as it seems there's one around yet. I will keep your tips in mind while approaching the blog content development Thanks again!
1 0 Reply
Satishk7g
Satishk7g 2 years ago
hi Matthew Barby,
Thanks a lot for showing ideas on how to launch a successful blog, I used to read at every place about this and i found this one to be good to understand.. I am going to create new blog considering all of your tips. Once again thank you very much..
1 0 Reply
SAM578
SAM578 2 years ago
This a great post, i have used some of the valid points and seen the effectiveness.
Thanks for sharing this. So helpful.
1 0 Reply
David_Epstein
David Epstein 2 years ago
Thank you for taking the time to write this, Matthew. It's a resource I'll return to.
1 0 Reply
sandeepkumar
Sandeep Kumar 2 years ago
Best post I ever read on a blog start up, Bookmarked, Matthew I am planning to launch a new blog about SEO, PPC, Social Media and Email Marking, But Gadgets, Bogging, designing are also my area of interest and I want include these too. would you suggest what will be better a stand alone on on-line marketing or I can write about all my area of interest in same blog.
sandeepkumar edited 2 years ago
1 0 Reply
qasimsharif
Qasim Sharif 2 years ago
Thank you for the post!
1 0 Reply
JasonNelson
Jason Nelson 2 years ago
Really detailed and well presented, Matthew. Nice work! I'd be curious to know how you think having a .kitchen domain has impacted the success of your site? Pros and cons? Thanks.
1 0 Reply
MatthewBarby
Matthew Barby 2 years ago
I certainly don't think it has hindered it. It's clear that Google looks at the word 'kitchen' as a ranking signal for search terms related to it. Considering the semantic relevance of the word kitchen to my content, it seems to be helping. Too early to say right now though, but I'm running some tests.
2 0 Reply
Jkesey
Jacob Kesey 2 years ago
I'd like to take a quick look at the keywords you mentioned you were ranking for and break them down by who links to you for each keyword phrase and how often. The keywords and top links are:
Keyword: pescetarian
Linked most by: Findmyblogway.com
How many times?: 6,320
Owner of site?: Matthew Barby
Keyword: pescetarian blog (pescetarian food blog)
Linked most by: Findmyblogway.com
How many times?: 34,781
Owner of site?: Matthew Barby
Keyword: pescetarian recipes
Linked most by: no links for exact phrase
How many times?: 0
Owner of site?:
Keyword: pescetarian meals.
Linked most by: no links for exact phrase
How many times?:0
Owner of site?:
It appears that a majority of incoming links are your own and the 2nd most source is a blog roll (whyisthereair.com). What I take away from looking at your link profile is that there's definitely manipulation going on here, and that it works. Over 90% of all incoming links are from your own domains with a considerable amount of trust. I think a key take-away on success here is that link networks and blog rolls should be credited here, at least somewhere.
Jkesey edited 2 years ago
1 0 Reply
WyattInternational
WyattInternational 2 years ago
.
WyattInternational edited 2 years ago
1 0 Reply
MatthewBarby
Matthew Barby 2 years ago
Hey Jacob,
Nice investigative work. The links from FindMyBlogWay.com were from my author bio (this was another blog that I ran). This site hasn't been live for nearly two months now though, so there's a lot more going on than just that. For some of the pescetarian related search terms, the fact that I have the keyword within my domain name will be helping a lot - not to mention the links from BuzzFeed that are geared around pescetarianism and vegetarianism. There's also some links from Reddit that have been live for several months now that have added a huge amount of value.
To answer your point though, my blog aside, blog networks do still work. It will be a long time before they don't because the reality is that it can sometimes be impossible to trace whether a domain is part of a network or not. When most people think about blog networks they think of poorly spun text and spammy domain names that have come from previously expired domains - this is a large part of the blog networks out there, but many major brands build their own networks using quality content, developing a community and a social following so that they can boost the rankings of their main site.
1 0 Reply
dealwaves
dealwaves 2 years ago
We are working towards adding blog page to my deals website: [link removed]. We are thinking of adding some local restaurant deals and blog articles. I believe this post would be a great help in analyzing things to focus on while writing blog article.
Great job and thanks for sharing.
KeriMorgret edited 2 years ago
1 0 Reply
elaine.lin
elaine.lin 11 months ago
Thank you so much for posting this guide! I recently started a food blog, Food Parsed, and I found this advice really helpful. I especially liked all of the data analysis you did, and I'm going to try to get a Buzzfeed feature up.
1 0 Reply
LMcLaughlin
Lauren McLaughlin 2 years ago
Matthew,
Great article with lots of good resources and ideas. Congrats on your success. As a pescetarian myself, I will be sure to begin using the blog for recipe ideas :)
Quick question--my company's website has our WordPress blog embedded into the site itself. However, in order to post and share individual entries to our various social media pages, it must be done through the separate WP webpage. How do you suggest that I integrate my WP blog and company website to make the two webpages cohesive to one another? As of now, it would be rather difficult for a reader to view our blog page and associate it with the company name.
1 0 Reply
conor1005
conor1005 2 years ago
Hi Matthew,
Great article, very helpful.
I am at the start of a similar journey, however I am less experienced but learning a lot. Currently a lot of my time is invested in the research stages, so I was happy to hear that you too put great focus on this.
I am getting to the stage where I can start producing some content and then distribute it across the web via different channels (social media, buzzfeed, etc.). Distributing the content is a hugely time consuming task in itself, let alone having to write the content as well. From what I gather, you do write the content yourself? I am not a writer, nor am I am expert in the topic my content will be on. I have learnt from my research that in order for my website to succeed my content needs to be truly great and truly unique. I am familiar with sites such as eLance, where I can hire people to write the content for me. I guess I am struggling as to where to start with this whole 'producing content' stage as I know the content needs to be great, and unique, however because I am not an expert the field I am entering into, I don't know how to go about identifying the articles I could write about that are both great and unique.
Because you seem to have an interest in your Pescetarian Food Recipes, and you know a bit about them, I am sure it was relatively easy for you to come up with great and unique Food Recipes that made your site a great source of information, but I guess my overall question is, how would you have gone about creating your content if you didn't know anything about Pescetarian Food Recipes and you weren't a good writer?
P.s. The topic my blog is on is Home & Garden / Interior Decor related. I have researched my competitors and know the articles that work from them, but struggle to come up with unique content ideas to differentiate myself from them.
Thanks
1 0 Reply
Jules_Blackwell
Julian Blackwell 2 years ago
Awesome post! Love posts like that work through a real example!
Looking forward to the piece on the findings from the Buzzfeed analysis :)
1 0 Reply
ataller
Saurabh Sharma 2 years ago
Pure explanation about setup an great blog with very useful tools.
1 0 Reply
technopro
technopro 2 years ago
Channel analysis : Like what it pays to see some of its competitors to start.
Very good post !
1 0 Reply
vmcheckout
VMCheckout One Page Checkout a year ago
I just love the social media schedule system that is given by kissmatric, it is really helpful to increase the social media traffic.
1 0 Reply
Rhean
Rhean 2 years ago
Hi Matthew! Great article and great tips! thanks for sharing. Being a french speaking person, some of your tools and traffic sources will need to be updated in my language.
1 0 Reply
Inbound-Boulder
Inbound Boulder a year ago
Wow congrats on your blog, this is defnitely an amazing blueprint.
1 0 Reply
dchristensen3
Dustin Christensen 2 years ago
Great post, Matthew, congrats on the success of your blog. I have two questions for you - first, how has your experience been with the .kitchen domain in regard to branding, memorability, etc. (not just SEO/rankings)?
Also, for social contests do you have any recommendations for using a third party to manage the contest, or did you do everything yourselves?
Thanks again for the breakdown!
1 0 Reply
KiyoW
Kiyo W 2 years ago
It's really great to see that you were still successful while making the conscious decision to forego Youtube. Many don't understand that if it doesn't make sense, you shouldn't devote precious resources to it (especially in the small business and startup arena)
1 0 Reply
Prime_Nutrition
Prime_Nutrition 2 years ago
Great blog idea. Stay healthy and keep following your passion.
1 0 Reply
Granulr
Granulr 2 years ago
What an excellent post, getting right down the the nitty gritty. Great process to follow for anyone, and I've learned a couple of new things to add into my process too.
1 0 Reply
T0BY
Toby Bateson a year ago
Thanks for this, lots of specific action points. Very useful.
1 0 Reply
LindaLV
Linda Vassily 2 years ago
Wow! I had to put this aside to go over more in-depth tonight otherwise I'd get nothing else done this afternoon. [And as a fellow pescetarian, I want to take some time to look at your blog as well...] I did notice one funny thing, Moz's Open Site Explorer, gives your site a domain and page authority of only 1. And yes, I did check and saw that you are on page 1 of Google. :-) It looks like Google was quicker than Moz in picking you up...
1 0 Reply
crowdsite.com
Roel Masselink 2 years ago
Nice story, and great blog! I got a suggestion for the amazing branding services, we got a great service called crowdsite.com , get great designs from European designers within hours.
crowdsite.com edited 9 months ago
1 0 Reply
Daviender
Daviender 2 years ago
Thank you Matthew, really great post, Buzzfeed thing was new to me.
1 0 Reply
MatthewBarby
Matthew Barby 2 years ago
Yeah, BuzzFeed is great, but just remember what I said about researching your topic before going a publishing a post.
1 0 Reply
Daviender
Daviender 2 years ago
Yes you are right, I too believe that topic research will be the most critical part of using BuzzFeed to leverage it effectively for overall marketing process.
1 0 Reply
jkeys1313
jkeys1313 2 years ago
High volume and low competition is the toughest part of what you've done above. It's not easy to find terms with even moderate volume and low competition. Congrats on finding a sweet spot! Nice write up an examples, very useful info!
1 0 Reply
MatthewBarby
Matthew Barby 2 years ago
Yeah, it often takes a lot of time to find those opportunities, but they're always there within every niche. It's worth the upfront investment of time to identify them.
1 0 Reply
AnnaMorrishQC
Anna Morrish 2 years ago
Really great post. Buzzfeed is a great publishing platform, that can push relevant traffic, it's just about getting the content right. Some great ideas to try here.
1 0 Reply
paints-n-design
Andreas Becker 2 years ago
there is still no german buzzfeed or reddit alternative ... :/
Sometimes it is hard in germany, but in that case we can get much more traffic with Facebook i guess
1 0 Reply
Walter.Schaerer
Walter Schaerer 2 years ago
As far as I know www.heftig.co is Germany's BuzzFeed copy. It has the same drawbacks its original model site has.
2 0 Reply
paints-n-design
Andreas Becker 2 years ago
thx a lot - i try
1 0 Reply
MarketingBees
MarketingBees 2 years ago
Great story Matthew! I'll keep an eye on your blog from now on :)
1 0 Reply
rubenalonsoes
Rubén Alonso 2 years ago
Great Matthew!! This a good "tutorial"! I'm gonna take care the point about Buzzfeed, very good. Thanks for the tips!
1 0 Reply
Brett687
Brett Thompson 2 years ago
Great post Matthew, It's good to get some insight on the Buzzfeed process. It's something I've been wanting to work into my process for some time but have not had a great deal of time. I have had some great success with Reddit though.
1 0 Reply
MatthewBarby
Matthew Barby 2 years ago
If you're in a niche where BuzzFeed could be a relevant target then it's definitely worth exploring. Their online reach is only growing and the exposure that you can get is huge.
1 0 Reply
mrcarter00
claudio cuccu 2 years ago
Great post Matthew,
I do not know where to post this. So I am sorry if this is not the best way to ask you a question.
But something really peculiar has happened to my webmaster tool and I was wondering if any of you had the same problem. If not it would definitely be a case to study. Our blog is called http://www.inbali.org/
We are really young and small. Usually around 1200 impression a day. But look what happened the last two days
Sending this with the same hope I would send a message in a bottle in the ocean. but hey, you never know
thank you so much in advance
claudio
[links removed by editor]
Trevor-Klein edited 2 years ago
1 0 Reply
Trevor-Klein
Trevor Klein 2 years ago
Hello, Claudio!
This is the sort of question that's great for the Q&A section of our site; we try to keep the comments on the blog posts relevant to what the author discussed. Good luck with your site!
1 0 Reply
sawarams
Sawaram Suthar 2 years ago
I should say, the is amazzzzzzzzzzzzzing post I really inspired with your patience to write a long and compete strategy been used in making blog success.
1 0 Reply
Prateekjain
Prateekjain 2 years ago
Really good post. Great for beginners starting out their blog.
We're getting ready to re launch our learning blog so this came across my feed at the right time. We will definitely implement this recipe for its improvement.
Thanks a lot for sharing.
Prateekjain edited 2 years ago
1 0 Reply
MatthewBarby
Matthew Barby 2 years ago
No problem - let me know how you get on!
1 0 Reply
Obbserv
Ravi Soni 2 years ago
Hello Mattew
We have started writing blogs. Please tell how can we make it better and useful.
Thanks for the reply!!
[link removed by editor]
Trevor-Klein edited 2 years ago
1 0 Reply
Trevor-Klein
Trevor Klein 2 years ago
Hi there, and welcome to Moz! Please keep comments on the blog posts relevant to the author's post; this isn't really the place for asking questions about your own sites. For that, we'd recommend the Q&A section. Good luck with the new blogs! =)
1 0 Reply
DigitalDivya
DigitalDivya 2 years ago
Nicely written post. Hard work pays and that's what you got, you worked for it so you are getting results and also patience is must. Good going.
Thanks
1 0 Reply
MatthewBarby
Matthew Barby 2 years ago
Thanks!
1 0 Reply
Sam.Lambert
Sam Lambert 2 years ago
This may seem obvious, but it's oh so important: write interesting stuffs.
There's a billion and a half other tech blogs to read, so I need some reason not just to read yours, but to share it and link to it will work out for your successful blog start.
1 0 Reply
brianlang
Brian Lang 2 years ago
Hi Matthew - Great post and great info about breaking into the food blogging niche.
What do you do with emails from contest entrants that don't opt in? Have you tested sending them updates on your content or are they just discarded after the contest is over? Also, do you see an increase in blog subscribers when you hold a contest?
1 0 Reply
MatthewBarby
Matthew Barby 2 years ago
Hey Brian,
You can't use emails that haven't been opted-in so I don't use them to email my newsletter content to. Instead, I add them into a custom audience within Facebook and display targeted ads to them - this gets amazing results.
2 0 Reply
brianlang
Brian Lang 2 years ago
Awesome - thanks!
1 0 Reply
TheClassicGamer
TheClassicGamer 2 years ago
Congratulations. In depth content with a bunch of resources, awesome. Keep up the great work.
1 0 Reply
blackglass
Blackglass Agency 2 years ago
nice work on the .kitchen domain.
blackglass edited 2 years ago
1 0 Reply
MatthewBarby
Matthew Barby 2 years ago
Thanks - I couldn't resist it!
1 0 Reply
PP_user
PP_user 2 years ago
One of the most useful articles I've seen for a long while. As somebody else also mentioned, it's so thorough. The piece on Buzzfeed is especially useful as I've seen competitors get a lot of traffic from here and didn't know the best way to approach getting similar traffic form there... until now
1 0 Reply
Kaitlin
Kaitlin McMichael 2 years ago
This is post is kind of amazing. I appreciate the comprehensive analysis of blogging - so often I hear content writers / bloggers who say "I'll write great content, and the organic traffic will come." But writing great content is not enough; keyword research and a well-rounded online marketing approach are what bolster great writing so that it gets noticed.
1 0 Reply
Workado
Workado 2 years ago
Looking forward to the tool you'll be releasing to do a lot of the scraping! :)
1 0 Reply
steviephil
Steve Morgan 2 years ago
Great post, Matthew. It's c. 5am as I'm reading this and I'm now craving prawns (as you do)!
Regarding FB advertising and this statement you made:
"The results have been amazing and we have spent less than £80/$130 a month doing so."
Are you able to divulge the amazing results, i.e. what kind of ROI you saw (if "ROI" is applicable - e.g. if it's more of a brand-building exercise).
P.S. Are you entering the blog into the UK Blog Awards 2015?
1 0 Reply
MatthewBarby
Matthew Barby 2 years ago
Hey Steve,
This is more brand building, but the results I was referring to were more geared around a combination of traffic and newsletter signups. On average, my CPC was around £0.02, so the traffic return has been incredible. The traffic coming from Facebook also has around a 2% conversion in newsletter signups, so this has been a really cost effective route of newsletter signup acquisition.
In terms of UK Blog Awards - yes, I am :)
2 0 Reply
steviephil
Steve Morgan 2 years ago
Nice! A quick bit of maths (based on that CPC) suggests that £80 = 4,000 visitors, and that it also = 80 newsletter sign-ups... £1 per newsletter sign-up.
Good good - so have I! ;-) Would be cool if we were both shortlisted!
1 0 Reply
Nick_Davison
Nick Davison 2 years ago
Have you been salivating over that King prawn and Crab spaghetti recipe too Steve? Looks delicious!
The branding looks great Matthew, top job there, but have you thought about enabling user accounts so that visitors can create a "favourite recipes" list? As a fellow foodie I regularly use the BBC good food website and that is one of my favourite features of their site. I also think it might make people more inclined to simply return to your site for reference as opposed to printing the recipe.
1 0 Reply
MatthewBarby
Matthew Barby 2 years ago
Hey Nick,
That's a great idea. We've been thinking of a few improvements to the UX/functionality on the site, but this is probably going to be a job for the start of 2015. It's been added to my list though!
1 0 Reply
ersatz-laptop-akkus
viivan tan 2 years ago
Awesome article，thanks a lot for sharing!
2 1 Reply
Internet_Local_Listings
Internet_Local_Listings 2 years ago
Wow, this was incredibly thorough. Thank you for all the links to those tools. There's a lot of options out there--so many that it can sometimes seem overwhelming. But having them all in one neat list like this is immensely helpful!
1 0 Reply
MatthewBarby
Matthew Barby 2 years ago
No problem - I agree. There's tons of tools out there that you could use, but it's important to make sure that you're only using the ones you need.
1 0 Reply
Walter.Schaerer
Walter Schaerer 2 years ago
Stellar post, thanks for sharing all this insight!
We run a travel blog called travelmemo.com and since we started covering more and more gourmet restaurants recently we will try some of your food niche approaches, e.g. Reddit. Otherwise we're more into photography than recipes, hence that niche won't apply.
1 0 Reply
MatthewBarby
Matthew Barby 2 years ago
Hey Walter,
Glad you found the post useful. I think that you may enjoy this article that I wrote early last year: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-build-links-to-your-blo...
It's a case study of how I carried out the SEO for my travel blog (yes, I ran a travel blog as well!). I'm sure there's lots of useful stuff in there for you :)
1 0 Reply
metarichie
Richie Lauridsen 2 years ago
Great post, thank you.
1 0 Reply
JerrodDavid
JerrodDavid 2 years ago
Great post! I love the re-marketing stuff. Big fan of it myself. I have a few follow-up questions and one suggestion. I always suggest commenting on the top blogs in your niche and building a relationship with the grassroots community. I think that it shows that you have an interest in the niche outside of your own blog.
What traffic source creates the most repeat visitors?
How many repeat visitors do you get per month?
How do you monetize this traffic (I assume you are as you are buying traffic and have a newsletter)?
I have a generic question about blog traffic. What is a good time on site, pages per view, and bounce rate for a blog (I am referring to a blog with a 1 page layout and multiple posts on the page)?
1 0 Reply
rmaleady
Rachel Maleady 2 years ago
This was such a great, thorough post! I have a main lifestyle blog, but have thought of branching out to more niche-specific ones and taking a similar approach as you. Now if only I had the time...
1 0 Reply
NialToner
Nial Toner 2 years ago
Great piece Matthew. I've recently started a food blog of my own with my fiancée (pikalily.com) and we have been going from strength to strength and I regularly get more organic traffic than some of my clients (which is nice).
You have some great tips here and a few areas I need to look at. You've made some great strides in the past few months. I've actually come across your site on a few occasions and while I'm anything but a pescetarian, I do enjoy the way you have your recipes laid out on the page. Some great images as well which helps. I'd never even considered using Buzzfeed for my own food blog but I might look at it in the coming months - I'm sure I can get something on it for great Irish food recipes :-)
Would love to pick your brain even more on your results over the past 6 months.
Trevor-Klein edited 2 years ago
1 0 Reply
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