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The 90 Day Blogging Challenge III:
Summer Blogbuster

In the year 2018, the team at Haley Marketing Group made the decision to embark on the 90-day blogging challenge for the third time.

Why?

The first two times that we encouraged our team to write 90 blog posts in 90 days, the results were extremely impressive.

When all was said and done after the initial blogging challenge and its sequel, it was easy to see a correlation between an increased number of quality articles and increases in traffic & conversions on our website. Oh, and we were bribed with another team party complete with food, games, and drinks if we accepted and accomplished our mission.

It wasn't just for fun.

Google's ranking algorithm is constantly changing and evolving. The algorithm is made up of a lot of variables that, when crawled by Google's spiders, determine how your website ranks for specific terms. While there are over 200 ranking factors that make up the algorithm, which remains a closely guarded secret, content remains very important to Google's rankings and that creates the need for material on your site that's not only fresh but also relevant.

The mission, should we choose to accept it:

In past years, the goal was to create 90 posts in 90 days but with a growing team, 90 seemed like a number that was much smaller than what we were capable of. This year, each team member was asked to write a total of three posts over the course of the summer. This broke down to a minimum of one post per person per month.

The Rules:

With more than 40 different authors writing posts for our website, we needed to set some standards while allowing everyone to maintain their unique voices. Our articles needed to:

  • Be relevant to the staffing industry in how they addressed pain points or introduced outside ideas
  • Call back to a Haley Marketing Group product or service
  • Have a call-to-action banner under the post to direct the reader to their next stop on the site
  • Be optimized with relevant keywords and phrases in the post
  • Use a relevant featured image to make it stand out more both on the Ask Haley Blog and when shared
  • Be categorized and tagged correctly to make them easier to find

As the challenge went on, we didn't change any of the rules but we kept on eye on the results as they happened month-by-month.

The Results:

In just three months, 44 team members published a grand total of 187 articles. That's an average of more than two posts per day, including weekends. What did all of those posts get us? A lot more views to both the blog and the website!

We took a look at these 90 days and compared them to the same period last year which featured the second installment of the 90 day blogging challenge and saw a 23.64% increase in blog pageviews for this year's challenge compared to last year's. Impressive as that may be, what's even better is that we saw a 41.86% increase in pageviews across our entire site!

Traffic from social media to the site jumped a massive 79.36% thanks to the sharing efforts of not only our team but by those reading the posts and finding the information valuable.

23.64% increase
Blog pageviews, summer 2017 vs summer 2018

 

41.86% increase
Website pageviews, summer 2017 vs summer 2018

 

79.36% increase
Pageviews from social, summer 2017 vs summer 2018

The Top 20 At the Box Office

We published a lot of posts over those 90 days and there's a good chance that one or two may have passed you by. We've collected our top 20 from the 90 Day Blogging Challenge by pageview.

Mission impossible? No way!

We did it and so can you.

The great thing about blog posts is that they won't self-destruct. Adding more content provides the search engines with more opportunity to index the valuable information that you are putting on your website.

We went slightly overboard with our blogging challenge but that shouldn't scare you off. Keeping your content both fresh and relevant remains one of the best ways to bring both new and returning visitors to your site and to keep them there. Strong calls to action within and after articles can direct users to the next steps that you would like to take them to take and ultimately to more conversions. Additionally, you can potentially attract even more readers by getting your team members to share content from across your website on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

For staffing and recruiting firms, more relevant content means a greater opportunity for your firm to be viewed as a real authority and thought leader in both the staffing industry and the industries that your firm serves. Combine your content with strategic conversion funnels and smart website design to maximize results.

Contact our team of Marketing Educators to learn more about the benefits of blogging and get started with your own strategy today!

Ready to get going but don't have the time to commit to doing it yourself?

We're going to need a bigger blog