Become a Digital Influencer (Episode 3, May) @johnelincoln

Well this live case study has now been going on for 2 and ½ months. In this post, I will give you an update on what happened in April. This will also be the final update. What?! Noooo! Yes, it is true… We hit the goal… I’ll explain more. When I started this live case study, I wanted to demonstrate how to take your website to thousands of visitors a month using the strategies that I showcase in my book, Digital Influencer, A Guide to Achieving Influencer Status Online. My goals were to get the website to thousands of visitors a month, generate new business, grow brand presence, collect emails and sell copies of my new book. Here is a quick recap for you. Month 1 (which was only a half month at 15 days) I launched the new website and was able to generate 537 visitors. I gave you a recap of my cost, all my strategies and my plan moving forward here. 537 visitors in month 1 of a new website was encouraging, so in month 2 I made an equal push. In month 2 I gave you my strategy, my costs, my goals, etc. I told you everything going on with the site. Through my work, I was able to increase users 506%, building traffic from 537 visitors to 3,255 visitors. I broke down everything from the traffic channels to the goals accomplished to my next steps in this post. Now it is time for month 3 and the final episode of this series. Don’t worry, the blog is not going away, I will just not be reporting on each month. However, I will fill you in on how things are going from time to time.

Digital Influencer, The Final Episode – May Recap

So now let’s talk about May.

My Goals

Last month I shifted my focus from capturing emails to getting subscribers on YouTube. I kept with that focus all of May, it paid off. So that was a main difference. May goals were to get YouTube subscribers, grow traffic and get exposure for the book. I didn’t make the push I had intended for lead generation or emails. That seem to have a much better fit on Ignite Visibility and we currently have plenty of people asking for our services. So shifted the goals, just a bit.

The Strategy

Here was my main strategy this month.

• Involve others
• Continue running the influencer awards
• Beef up email automation
• Alert people when mentioned
• Keep it positive
• Go extra heavy on social media

The Implementation

First, I have to admit that I did almost nothing on the site this month compared to last month. But it really didn’t matter, because the traffic generation machine was already in place. That is one thing I think a lot people don’t get about content marketing, once you get a machine in place traffic continues to build. What I mean by that is that blogs were being written, posted and promoted exactly how I wanted. Big thanks to the team for their help on this. If you don’t know the background here read about it in episode 1. This month I finally got around to fixing the home page. It had been a little bit of a battle, but I like the way it came out. It’s direct and to the point. Take a look below. Here is Desktop  Here is Mobile  I am assuming that when people come to convert they already know who I am and they can probably benefit from consulting, my book or subscribing to the blog. That was really the main technical change I made. There is some basic CRO strategy that goes into this, but nothing super fancy. One other new thing I did this month was run some ads ($100) on StumbleUpon. I have always liked that site and have developed a system for generating traffic there. At one point, I had a site doing 40,000 to 80,0000 visitors a day from StumbleUpon, so it is a great go-to. One thing to keep in mind, the visitors will skip past your site very fast unless you give them a great reason to stay so work hard on your content, landing pages and calls to action.

My Costs

My costs remained the same this month.

• Content writing services cost per month $400 a month.
• Hosting is $10 a month
• In Facebook ads this month I spent $75 on promoted posts.
• I spent $100 on StumbleUpon ads
• SumoMe costs $100 a month.
• That is a total of $685.00 a month to run the site

My Traffic and Goals

OK, so the moment of truth. Here is what was achieved this month.

Books sold

This month I sold over 100 copies of my book Digital Influencer. I know that doesn’t seem like a lot, but it is 100% self-published and I am spending nothing on marketing outside of this blog. Writing the book, self-publishing on Amazon Kindle, creating a print copy and now launching the audio version in the next 2 weeks has been an amazing experience. I love to write and people love the book. I put everything into it, left nothing on the table and it is helping people so that feels good. Also, proceeds go to charity and that is an added bonus for me.

YouTube subscribers

In May, I gained 1,468 YouTube subscribers. I had a great call to action and pop-up, you can see that here. You can see the subscriber growth here. And you can subscribe to the channel and check it out here.

Emails collected

Because I took the focus off of emails, I only captured 60 emails addresses the entire month.

Traffic to the Site

So after 45 days, how much traffic was I able to generate in month 2 and 1/2 of the site (May).

• The website did a total of 5,576 visitors, 5,254 of which were new, 1,265 visitors were from StumbleUpon ads.
• 52% of that came from social media
• 40% of that was direct
• The rest was from search engines, referral and other.

Rankings in Google

I never went into this site thinking of it as an SEO project. As many of you know, however, my main specialties are SEO, social and CRO so it is hard for me to ignore it. I did zero link building on the site and didn’t even really optimize it. But from the shear quality of the content, the buzz, the social shares and the earned links, it actually as a pretty nice SEO growth curve. I mean, I did do some basic keyword targeting in the posts, but nothing fancy… Here is a report from SEM Rush that shows rankings. It now ranks for 109 keywords in Google. Here we see the keyword rankings.

Wrapping It Up

Thanks to all the enthusiastic readers of this series of posts. If you want to keep up with me, follow me on Twitter, read the Ignite Visibility blog and read the latest posts on John Lincoln marketing here. If you have any questions, ask below! Good luck in becoming a digital influencer!