It’s hard to believe that we’re a little over half-way in our 30-day blogging challenge. And have we learned anything? Yes, Kaye, Daydreaming David, et al. were right. Apparently, David Cassidy is bloggable (and I still have to ask, “Seriously?”). But now for the real question: “Is content king?” If we write the content, will the search engines pick us up, and send people in our direction?

And the answer is a qualified yes. Our traffic has picked up substantially since we began our 30-day challenge, but it’s interesting to see where the traffic is coming from: 42% comes directly to us, 47% are referred to us from other sites, and 11% comes through the search engines.

I assume that the direct traffic is people who know us, whether because of having come across us in prior posts or already being in contact with us for some reason or other. After all, staingirlz.com is not yet widely known. The breakdown of the referred traffic is interesting: the bulk of our referrals are coming from daydreaming.blogspot.com (no surprise there if you have been following the David Cassidy posts and the comments).  I would hazard a guess that a good chunk of our direct and referral traffic is coming due to Kaye’s networking with other David Cassidy bloggers.

Surprisingly, we are also getting referrals from digg and facebook.  I have no clue as to the facebook referral.  We have not yet branched out there.  But digg stems from an article submitted to digg.com in September:  Socialist Propaganda and Death Panels for Granny, Oh My!  It got very little traffic back then, but seems to be bringing us more traffic since the beginning of our 30-day challenge.

And as for the search engines?  They are picking us up, but not in the same proportion that we receive traffic from other sources.  I have noticed, however, an uptick as time goes on.  During the two weeks preceding our blogging challenge, we only received 1 hit from the search engine.  During the first 15 days of our challenge, we received 45 visits via a search engine.  Still not fabulous, but a major increase and the trend appears to be a steady increment.  I had read elsewhere that it takes three to six months for search engine traffic to build up.

So what have we learned so far?  If you write it, they will come, albeit slowly.  We have been at this only 16 days, but I think that consistent posting does increase traffic somewhat.  Other approaches appear to be more effective.  Kaye’s social networking with like-minded people on  David Cassidy proved to be a very effective way of bringing traffic to our site.  And submission to other sites, such as digg also appears to drive traffic.  We will give you a final report at the end of 30 days. 

Well, I got the go-ahead from Staingirl Kaye. We may proceed with our 30-day challenge, but there is a caveat. If I’m going to make her write so much, she gets to write about David Cassidy. David Cassidy, seriously? If we are going to write about our favorite beefcakes, what about George Clooney, Brad Pitt, John Travolta or Bruce Willis before he shaved his head? And if it must be a crush from the sixties, how about Donny Osmond (And they called it puppy love), who at least has great dance moves on Dancing with the Stars? But hey, this was my idea, and unless I want to write 30 days straight, David Cassidy it is.   Well then, Kaye, you’re going to have to watch Donny Osmond dancing the tango on Dancing with the Stars.

We began this 30-day blogging challenge as an experiment. We wanted to see whether consistency in writing our great content (David Cassidy, seriously?) would lead to an increase in readership. The logic is that frequency in posting would get us noticed by the search engines, which would in turn lead to greater traffic. What do the experts have to say?

It’s a mixed bag. You have proponents and naysayers. Blogbloke referred to some chart from Technorati that showed more traffic on websites with more posts.   Several bloggers swear that writing good content often and consistently will lead to increased traffic. And then others say it’s all about the marketing.

Of course, I looked to my favorite blogging guru, Problogger. I had always read on his site that “Content is King”. So I figured he could set us straight on this topic. His take: good content is important to provide to your readers, but you still have to get readers on to your site. He actually says that “write it and they will come” is a secret to success shared by new bloggers who have yet to find success.  Ouch! I think I have given the fam more ammo for teasing me.

Well, we want to see for ourselves. For the next 29 days, we will post one blog every day. We will not join any directories or submit any articles anywhere. We will allow pingbacks and trackbacks because we always have. We will look at overall traffic and more specifically at traffic brought to staingirz.com via the search engines. We will even let you know which keywords brought the most traffic (David Cassidy?) We will report the results at the end of the 30 days.

And because we are in experimentation mode, after the 30 days we will experiment with different manners of marketing our blog. We’ll see how much our blogging traffic increases after we join directories, etc. If you have any ideas to help us in the marketing portion of our experiment, please let us know.

 Well, here’s to another 28 days of blogging, and learning way more than I ever wanted to about David Cassidy. And Kaye, I may have you listening to Puppy Love!