Comparing with past TAR blog posts in their first 30 days.
You can see in the source/medium report that the biggest sources of traffic was still TARs email to their list and “direct (none)”.
Direct (none) is a catch all that GA uses for all the traffic it can’t categorize. In our experience, it’s proportional (to some extent) with the rest of the traffic a post gets. So if you don’t do promotion, that traffic source also reduces. If you do promotion, more people hear about it and they get to the post in different ways, some of which Google can’t categorize for some reason and they put it in direct (none).
To see that in action, let’s compare our post’s first 30 days (again, it was published on March 21, so it’s really the first 3 weeks) with his last 3 recent posts in their first 30 days.
Recent post #1: The Business of Video Marketing
This was the last post before ours, published on March 1. It got 675 unique pageviews in its first 30 days (compared with our 13xx, so roughly half.)
Recent post #2: The The Power of Foley, Sound Design & 5 Great Examples
This was published July 17, 2016. Clearly a huge gap. This is something Tim Ryan, the TAR founder discussed with us when we first talked with him. Like many B2B agency founder/CEOs, he’s stretched thin. Without clear traffic and leads coming from content he would just abandon it for long stretches to focus on other pressing projects.
This is why we emphasize turning content marketing into a system where the business owner (or in larger companies, the content marketing manager) isn’t also the one in charge of writing all the content. This is an entire module in our premium training and the subject of this entire guide we’ve written on here.
After seeing the results of this challenge, and the potential to do this over and over again without an artificial time limit (and already getting some new leads, see below), Tim actually has plans on hiring his own content marketing manager (go Tim, go!).
Back to this post, it got 202 unique pageviews in its first 30 days:
Recept post #3 – Branded Entertainment on Instagram
This was published June 13, 2016 and got 173 unique pageviews in its first 30 days:
So his last 3 posts got 675, 202, and 173 unique pageviews in their first 30 days (average of 350).
Ours got about that many visitors from Facebook alone, largely driven by one Facebook group.
