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:
- They Google it, e.g. ‘[subject] PLR’
- The Warrior Forum
- 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!
Well done Helen. Clever of you to use PLR content yourself – practice what you preach.
I need to leverage FB more too but as you say it’s harder as the organic reach is so low.
Have you decided how often you’re going to blog now?
You could use Revive Old Post to keep tweeting out your content. I may have a post on that… 😉
Thanks Claire! I haven’t worked out my strategy from now on yet. I’m planning to look at my stats for the 30 days and decide based on that, so far it looks like Sunday night is a good time to post, which surprised me. I wouldn’t have picked up that so fast without this challenge. Yes, I’ve used Revive Old Post on a previous blog, I just need to revive it! Thanks for the reminder though.
Congrats on completing the challenge. ^_^
I’ve enjoyed the few posts that I’ve read on your blog. Here are a few ideas for getting more shares for your posts on Twitter and on FB: JustRetweet(.com), CoPromote(.com), ViralContentBuzz(.com). I have many more, but these are good to start with.
Thank you and great tips Sara, I’ll check those out.
Well done 🙂
Who knew PLR was a thing?
I wrote a few posts in my challenge about re-cycling/repurposing and white labelling (http://itelementaryschool.com/no-brand/) in the IT industry but didn’t consider the same for my own content creation and marketing!
I will investigate further. Thank you.
Tony
Thanks Tony!
Congrats on the challenge! HB too! And yes, now I know something I didn’t know before. Great job!
Thanks Maxine!
Congratulations! That’s quite an undertaking, I’m very impressed.
And it’s great that it was worth it.
Sally
Thanks Sally! It was quite a lot of work, even with some PLR to help speed me up!