I just wrapped up the sixth month of the $100,000 challenge. Traffic on NutritionSecrets.com has sharply gone up to 66,473—that’s a 62% increase from the previous month.
Most of the increase came from Facebook. In particular, it came from the post “What Happens to Your Body When You Quit Sugar,” which went viral. In addition to the Facebook traffic, search traffic has risen to 19,595—that’s a 45% increase over the previous month.
And although revenue is still at zero, there was a lot of progress made on that front. Let’s look at everything in detail…
Overall search traffic
The search traffic hasn’t gone up as much as I wanted, but it’s my fault. Mike hasn’t been focusing enough attention on building links because I’ve been trying to teach him how to write attractive headlines.
For the majority of the month, search traffic was pretty flat even though we published 30 articles in September.
To fix this, Mike will be focusing less on content creation and more on link building as the blog already has over 100 pieces of content, which is more than my personal blog has. And my personal blog is in a much narrower niche, receiving close to 60,000 search engine visitors a month.
Using Ahrefs, Mike will first find out who links to similar posts, and then he’ll use templates from this article to ask for links.
Social media traffic
One tactic that we started leveraging to increase our social media traffic is use Buzzsumo more heavily.
First, we type in keywords and phrases related to the articles we are writing:
Next, we click on the “View Sharers” button to see who is sharing the viral content on the social web:
Finally, we look up each of the users to see which website they own (some of them link to their websites in their Twitter profiles), and we send out each user an email that looks something like this:
Subject: have you seen this yet?
Hey [insert their name],
I noticed you shared [insert previous article they shared on Twitter], and I have to say, it’s an amazing article. I loved it so much that I decided to dig in, do a bit more research, and expand on the topic.
I’ve actually just published my findings here [insert link to your article].
If you find it useful, feel free to share it on your favorite social network.
Cheers,
[insert your name]
P.S. Thanks for sharing the original piece—it was eye-opening.
If you use the email template above, you’ll start noticing more social shares. You just have to be patient as it is hit-or-miss. It’s worked so well for NutrutionSecrets.com that in September the blog received 30,848 visitors a month from social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook.
Supplements
In October, we will be launching our fish oil supplement. Mike found a company willing to white-label their product, charging us only when we sell a bottle. That way we are not tying up our cash.
As you can see, they didn’t do the best job designing the bottle, but I can’t complain—after all, it was free.
All we have to do now is get the product on Amazon. The big holdup is getting a new account approved by Amazon. I am not leveraging my connections, so going through the standard channels can take weeks.
Once the product becomes available for sale on Amazon, I’ll share with you how I’m going to leverage the NutritionSecrets.com brand to grow the sales.
Conclusion
Overall, September was a fairly good month. Mike’s doing an excellent job producing content, but he needs to do more when it comes to building links.
He also needs to expand his social outreach efforts, which should help bring traction to the blog.
I hope that October picks up. I think search traffic will be up, but social media traffic may be down as we will be shifting our focus toward revenue generation.
In September, our only expense was for Aweber, which is $29 a month. It should, however, go up because an exit pop-up has been activated on the site, and more emails are being collected. This should help with long-term traffic as well.
What do you think—how are we doing so far?
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