Last Month, August, I challenged a client to produce three new web pages per day for their website. These pages may have included, how-to’s, product reviews, current events, new product introduction and any other form of content that is related to any product they carry. It would seem an easy task to take on, after-all, three new articles a day would take only 30 minutes to an hour, wouldn’t it? I was wrong.Here’s the truth, writing 3 articles a day can get dry, boring and sometimes frustrating. Or at least I was told by the writer assigned to write. After two weeks of this challenge, it became apparently clear to me, that this would not be an easy task as I had earlier assumed. I tried another approach, this time, I negotiated, for every two articles they created, I would create one page. I get paid on percentage of online sales and a specified amount per lead - so writing one article per day would be no problem. Well this didn’t go so well, the number of articles turned in for edits by the writer decreased, and so content moved at a snail pace for near 30 days. We did manage to produce a healthy number of new fresh content, but unfortunately still behind on the 90 due by September 20th.

Interestingly enough, this month - September, the clients website visits, in both return visitors and unique visitors had doubled. Every day this month, our visits have doubled from the month before, and the year before as well. In fact Google’s referral to the site, had increased from 1800 to near 4000 in September. The client had assumed it was due to my ad scheduling at Google and didn’t pay much attention, until we sat down for our monthly meeting and discussed expenses. To his surprise, I had dropped our Google adwords expense by near 1/2 but increased clicks, in addition, we had purchased Yahoo and ads from other sites.

How was this possible? I went to broader keywords, not phrases, but keywords. Lowered my bids just enough to show up on page 2. I then took our current high qualified keyword phrases and positioned them on the top 2 places for their search. That wasn’t enough of course, I also had to run a whole different campaign approach and started adding prices, phone numbers and other interesting things that none of my competitors were doing. It worked!

Of course, that didn’t explain the near triple visitor numbers on Google, until we read the stats page. Every article and new page we had published in the last month and the month before, were being found by Google. Terms my client thought were impossible search queries were trickling in 3-10 queries per day. Great job he says, picks up his phone and immediately calls his writer and fires him - he then takes out an ad in the paper for a new journalist.