My 30 day blogging challenge: Was it worth it?

It’s my day 30 of Sark eMedia’s 30 Day Blogging Challenge and I made it! Yes, I posted here on the Totally PLR blog every day for 30 days. Woo hoo!

It’s been a lot of work, but has it been worth it? Let me explain…but first, my goal:

My goal for this blogging challenge was…

I did some research on where people go to buy PLR and I came up with three main ways:

1. They Google it, e.g. ‘[subject] PLR’
2. The Warrior Forum
3. On a recommendation from a trusted person (probably on a mailing list with an affiliate link)

I’ve already done number 3, I know it works and I’m doing it again. I’m working up to number 2, but I’d not really done anything about number 1.

Blogging and content marketing in general is a marathon, not a sprint. So I wasn’t expecting huge results in 30 days. But I felt I could give this blog a nice kick-start in that time, and the accountability I would get from having a group of bloggers around me would really help.

This goes beyond just SEO, though. Because if you Google ‘[subject] PLR’ you get tons of pages and you have no idea of the quality of the product you’re looking at. Some don’t even allow you to download a sample for free. So I wanted the posts on this blog to be more than just SEO fodder and to get across that I care about quality and my clients, too.

So what happened?

Search Engine Optimization

In SEO terms I’ve slowly crept up page 2 for several relevant key phrases over the 30 days. Given that PLR is very competitive (and PLR stores are often very good at SEO), that’s not bad at all.  And this blog has got a trickle of search engine traffic for the first time, too. There’s definitely more progress to be made because some of the pages in the search results above mine are two years old (that matters for WordPress tutorials) and I even saw one site above mine that no longer exists.

I’ve been blogging since 2009 and I must admit I’ve lost my blogging mojo the last few years. But this 30 day challenge has got me back into good habits, especially using the Yoast SEO plugin to optimize my posts consistently.

Content marketing

I’ve tried to post a variety of posts, from ones about what PLR is and what you can do with it, to tutorials that demonstrate what I do (as well as teaching readers something useful) to posts that are about me and how I work. This was partly to experiment with what people respond to and which days they respond best, and also to just get some good content on  my blog. Now I have a bank of useful posts I can share them in future. For example, yesterday someone in  Facebook group said they were overwhelmed by the thought of setting up an autoresponder and I was able to show her this post to give her some ideas.

I’ve also updated my What Is PLR? page based on the advice of people who didn’t understand what I’d written when I did it myself 🙂 and I’ve updated my about page.

Social media

I’ve been posting links to my post to Facebook and Twitter. I haven’t had a lot of traction on Facebook because I don’t have that many likes and the reach is so low these days. But I have a few solid blog posts that I think I’ll use a Facebook ad to promote in future. I have slowly been getting more Twitter favourites and shares over the 30 days, which is very nice. I’ll probably set up a plugin to automatically post links to my new content to Twitter and see if that helps keep this going.

The 30 Day Blogging Challenge has been invaluable for keeping me posting and I’ve met some new bloggers as well as some old friends there, too.

Did I use any PLR?

Yes, I did. And it sped up the content creation a lot. But I edited everything I used to make it my own, and I only used it when appropriate. There’s none in this post, for example.

In Summary

Yes, it was worth it! Thanks very much to Sarah and Kevin Arrow, and everyone else who was part of the challenge for all your support!