I’m going to explain exactly what I did within my first week to relaunch a blog and provide as many insights as possible on the effectiveness of the different tactics I used to generate traffic, engagement, clicks, leads, actions and build connections. This should hopefully give you an idea of how you can improve upon my tactics when you come to relaunch a blog of your own.

This blog was officially relaunched on Saturday 17th November, 2013.

Background

• This blog was first launched in April 2011 as a platform to develop my writing skills.
• I had 47 existing blog posts before the blog relaunch.
• The blog built up around 30 organic comments during this time.
• It received negligible amounts of views prior to relaunch.
• Before April 2011, I used no marketing strategies to promote this blog, other than sharing a link to my friends in social media whenever I published a blog post.
• The design changed a few times before I relaunched the blog. This no doubt lost some SEO value that I previously may or may not have built up (watch a Matt Cutts video here for a better explanation)

Before I relaunched my blog, I conducted some research and analysis to formulate my strategies and tactics. As they say, failing to plan is planning to fail. Here is a quick recap on what I did in the run-up to relaunching my blog.

Research. Analysis. Strategy.

• Redesigned the blog myself. I started with the WordPress Responsive theme and made some heavy customisations. How do you like it? (you can learn how to install and customise a WordPress blogging theme here.)
• Spent time optimising and refreshing my existing content.
• Undertook tactic analysis, keyword analysis, content analysis and audience analysis.
• Bought some amazing social media software called BuzzBundle to help me “listen” to numerous social networks. This would enable me to find out who is already talking about my content before I published it. I wanted to track conversations and be able to jump straight in with ready-suited content.
• Updated social profiles and wider online accounts to accommodate new blog updates.
• Finished my eBook, which you can request for free here!
• Developed a content calender.
• Developed a content evolution process (this needs it’s own article!). To summarise, I created a “guided path” for my content so that returning visitors would not be reading random articles on various topics. Instead, the content would flow and complement each other.

Before I jump in and start discussing my first week’s blog activities, you should read my article “Social Media Campaign Launch: Checklist” which should give you some detailed information on what you can do prior to relaunching your blog or wider social media campaigns.

Right, so the relaunch day came and I got stuck straight in!

Relaunch

The first thing I did was start writing more content, with a goal to make it REALLY compelling. My content calender I created as a result of my social listening, research and analysis, looked like this:

I formulated a strategy for promoting each blog post I would publish, which gave me the substance for writing my second post-launch article. You can read my article “How To Promote New Blog Posts For Mass Exposure” which outlines all my strategies and tactics I used.

I stuck to my blog promotion guidelines throughout the whole week, although there were some additional tactics I incorporated as well. These included:

Blog commenting on nearly all of the articles I shared
I thought this was important for two reasons. Firstly, I wouldn’t be “blind” sharing content - I didn’t want to recommend content to my audiences that I hadn’t even read. Secondly, as the articles that I would be sharing would be relevant to my blog, I could offer my thoughts, opinions and advice in the comments section and it could generate targeted traffic back to my blog.

Quora question answering
I spent more time than I previously anticipated answering questions based around my content, in order to engage with people who were already looking for help.

Inbound.org discussions
Similar to my above reasoning for Quora. I spent much less time than I did with Quora, yet more than what I suggest in my blog promotion article.

Re-activated my Triberr account
I have used Triberr in the past to connect with other bloggers and benefit from mutual content sharing, so I decided to reactivate my account and start requesting to be accepted into “tribes”.

Blog Contributions
This happened more by coincidence than design. I reached out to a few people I have shared common online social spaces with for a while to get their feedback on my blog. The conversations developed into wanting to contribute to my blog and a few said they would submit articles in the coming weeks. They also asked me in return to do the same, so this lead to yet another strategy I hadn’t anticipated using for the first week…

Guest Posting
After speaking to a few people multiple times and deciding on possible angles of approach, I decided to submit articles as guest posts to their blogs. I haven’t received confirmation that they have been published yet, so it would not have affected my performance this week, but here is a quick breakdown of the posts I submitted and where they are heading:

• Improving Your Social Media Campaigns Using Graphic Design - Smart Insights
• Social Media “Influencers” - Social With It
• 20 Premium WordPress Themes you don’t want to miss - Krystle’s Virtual Assistant Services

I spent a lot of time engaging with people in different social spaces. I took my content directly to the people when appropriate using BuzzBundle, offering a helpful resource to people who were in discussion about my article topic already.

I made it my priority to remain engaged with both my own audiences and with people outside my online circles, who were having conversations around my content matter. While I was awake, I probably replied to every comment on every platform with less than an hour delay! I also decided to extend my scope by joining more LinkedIn groups, Google+ Communities and Facebook Groups.

I manually submitted my blog to a few directories and search engines that I wasn’t indexed for originally. I think most, if not all, haven’t come back to me with confirmation it’s been listed (not even sure they will?) so I don’t think this has had any impact as of yet.

From all my sharing and commenting, I ended up reading a hell of a lot of content. Here are the best 6 articles I read this week:

• Matt Cutts article/video on image optimisation
• 120 Ways To Promote a Blog… Better!
• Turning Fans and Followers into Fanatics and Friends for Life
• How To Blow Your First Time Blog Visitors Away (And Keep Them Coming Back)
• How to Deal with Social Media Complainers (Infographic)
• 7 Crucial Steps for Successful Blogging

Then… Disaster!

In the middle of the first week, whenever I tried to use BuzzBundle it would crash my computer. I got in touch with support and they were very helpful – arranging a TeamViewer session with me to diagnose the issue. Andrei took control of my computer and ran some tests, which took a while, but ended up finding the problem. I was told a new patch would be released to me within the next two weeks, but this meant my “listening” strategy for engaging and promotion would be severely hampered for the rest of the week. This led to a serious reduction in productivity and efficiency for my most effective method of blog promotion. Shame.

So… what happened?

The Complete Stats

Here is a breakdown of the real performance of all my tactics and strategies and what it meant for different metrics. If you want to learn how you can setup and optimise your Google Analytics dashboards, read my article here.

Blog Metrics

Social Media

Search Engine Rankings

Leads

I received one direct lead this week. It’s not clear if this was a result of my blog relaunch, or past marketing exposure/efforts, but it’s worth highlighting the real value in social lead generation.

Ezine Articles

My articles were only published and live for 3 days of the week after waiting for moderation (it can take a lot longer so I’m happy to get fast-tracked after a few conversations with an Ezine moderator!). A quick breakdown includes:

“Lesser” Networks

Networks like Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon, BizSugar all were pretty bad. In fact, they probably generated less than 10 unique visitors between them, with zero engagement. I can’t complain much though, as these networks were not a priority of mine and as such, I put little to no effort into trying to engage on them. I was mostly just broadcasting content to them as part of my blog promotion routine, with the aim of engaging if anyone acted on my posts.

Affiliate Marketing

I promote products that I have used myself and believe would be beneficial to other social media managers and enthusiasts. Here is a quick recap on the affiliate clicks and impressions:

Quick Analysis Overview

Quality Not Quantity
It’s important to remember that, while generating traffic is important, the audience value is of paramount importance. Why would you care if you had thousands of daily visits if no one ever read your content or acted upon it?

So with that in mind, I thought I would share some feedback I received throughout the week.

If you’ve read my article on how to promote blog posts, then you might recall me saying that Ezine is notoriously strict on quality guidelines. I thought I’d post this to reinforce something that definitely needs reinforcing – I REALLY tried to ensure everything I wrote was quality. Well, Karen thinks so 🙂

Social Marketing
To use a famous quote from Lord Sugar in a slightly different context, I should “Smell what sells”.

• LinkedIn was the highest referral traffic social network: I’m going to push forwards by joining more groups and actively contributing more to discussions. One thing I didn’t do much was use the homepage update stream to spot networking or promotional opportunities.
• Quora under-performed from what I expected. I don’t think my content, engagement or timing was the reason why it was ineffective, so I’m going to spend less time on it in future.
• Google Plus also underperformed. I’m going to spend more time engaging and less time broadcasting or promoting in the future.
• Pinterest was shocking with 1 unique visitor all week. I have read a few articles that recorded Pinterest generating significant traffic - I didn’t experience any. I could have put a lot more effort into commenting and engaging, but I will probably maintain a quick broadcasting approach to pinning and repinning in the future and not allocate more time to it other than that.
• Facebook and Twitter performed as expected, so I will try to build on my strategies for these networks.

These slight adjustments to my tactics and approaches should improve my social domain-related performance. Spending more time on better performing networks has to. Or so one would expect…

I’ve also included a quick recap on my keyword strategy. I picked relevant keyword phrases instead of single, competitive keywords in order to have more chance of ranking in search engines.

• “Social media manager” and “freelance contract” were always going to be hard to rank in 7 days, but there respective positions are not too bad considering they’re competitive keyword phrases.
• Overall, I’m happy with the other two article rankings for now – it’s a good start and I’m by no means an SEO expert. Remember, I only used social marketing strategies to promote my blog relaunch.

How to Relaunch a Blog: Conclusion

It’s been a long week! I think I’ve got a good idea of what went right and what I could have done better. Hopefully, you have learned something from my experiences of relaunching a blog and can improve your own strategies.

While pondering on what I could have done better, I can’t help but think that after BuzzBundle went down, I was trying to be in too many places at once and was spreading myself too thin. BuzzBundle fortunately solves this issue, but my contingency of manually “listening” to the social platforms could have been more productive. I think the traffic graphs highlight this too, with a steady increase up until BuzzBundle broke, then they dropped for the next few days.

I’ve also been able to better understand my own limitations in social marketing and found areas where I can improve. Timing is key with so many other initiatives going on in the background, so I can definitely improve my efficiency and productivity even more here. I think that if I didn’t discover a few things like this, the exercise would have been in vain.

Finally, if you are thinking of launching or relaunching a blog around the same niche, then I think the most important things to take from this include:

• Do your research! It WILL improve your first period after relaunching a blog.
• Choose your networks and channels wisely and stick to what is working.
• Remember to engage! Social marketing is about people, not software. You can’t get to know robots and they definitely won’t engage back.

What’s Next?

Stay tuned in to see how my blog progresses after a month of inbound marketing. I will write another report like this, but using the data from the whole month for a better sample. Here’s a teaser of what content is coming in the next few week’s or so…

• A thought leadership piece based around your strongest quality in life and how you can use it for social marketing.
• Content evolution strategy.
• A day in the life of a social media marketer
• How to speed up your WordPress blog
• Hopefully a follow-up on my guest post on Social With It (which was called Social Media “Influencers”) asking some Top Industry experts their thoughts.

I will also predict that when BuzzBundle is back, various metrics will dramatically improve. Being able to find out exactly who is talking about specific things you have content waiting for, within a few clicks, is so great that I cannot say enough about the software. It takes all the trolling and hard-work out of social listening and allows you to organise your time more efficiently, while maximising your output.

I’ve also been accepted for authorship on Social Media Today. Stay in the loop by subscribing to my blog or following me in social media and I’ll be sure to let you know when that article is published!

Is there anything you want me to write about specifically in the coming weeks? If you let me know what you want to learn more about, then I’ll take all suggestions on board.

If I may, could I ask you how you think I can improve? Any constructive criticism would be much appreciated, so please leave your suggestions in the comments box.

How would you have relaunched a blog differently?