[Case Study] How An Event Planner Quadrupled His Blog Traffic Visitors, Started Building A Targeted Email List With Qualified Prospects and Revamped His Online Presence Within 3 Months
By DAWN-MARIE NESBITT
The Client
Prince Martinez is an event planner and blogger based in the US.
He has spent the past 3 years building a blog where his target audience are black gay men and helping them overcome the struggles that they experience and creating more inclusive spaces for them through his brunch events.
Website: themenwhobrunch.com
A Sneak Peak into His Results
Overall Prince and I worked together to revamp his online presence and increase his blog traffic, since every blogger’s dream is to get more visibility to their blog so they can get more people to know about them, turn them into prospects for their products and services and sell to them.
We worked from the 26th June for 3 months and he saw a 483.30% increase in pageviews to his blog. So before working with me, in the period March to June 2020 he only had 1102 pageviews.
After working with me, in the period June to September 2020 he increased that to 6428 pageviews.
Pageviews are the number of times people landed on his page and navigated his blog.
He also saw a 418.45% increase in new users to his blog. New users indicate the number of first time people to discover this blog.
Before working with me, in the period March to June 2020 he only had 206 new users. After working with me, in the period June to September 2020, he increased that to 1070.
He also acquired the skills of learning how to convert his traffic into qualified leads by delivering lead magnets that solved a very specific problem.
During the time he was able to add 21 new targeted leads to his email list and continues to tweak his messaging so that he works on improving his lead generation.
My Role
I am an online marketing and client attraction strategist. I offer premium 1:1 coaching programs where I help service businesses, coaches and consultants build their audience by learning how to get traffic on demand and convert that audience into targeted prospects who then go on to become paying clients over time.
I work with my clients over the course of 3-6 months, depending on how fast or slow the client wants to go.
During that time, I meet with my clients during 90-min coaching calls and help them improve their online presence by revamping their digital assets, providing strategies that teach them how to dig their own traffic wells so they get in front of a target audience, convert that traffic into prospects or leads and then turn those leads into paying clients.
I also offer email consultations, answer any questions and provide any additional support they may want from me.
My goal with my clients is to teach them the skills so they can have the confidence to implement and understand how to build a sustainable business on their own.
This case study will take you through the process that I use to help Prince achieve his business goals.
If you are interested in working with me, this will give you insight into how I work.
The Goal
When Prince came to me, his main goal was to have a website that provided useful and helpful content to his audience so that he could retain his visitors.
His second goal was to increase his blog traffic and hit 10k monthly pageviews to his blog.
Before Prince worked with me, he had a different blog which was hosted on WordPress.com. One of my recommendations was to redo his blog and host it on WordPress.org since this platform gave him so many additional options that were not available with WordPress.com, such as monetisation.
The Strategy
Kickoff Meeting
Before I start a coaching call with my clients, I have a kickoff meeting to discuss my digital marketing plan that I prepare for them.
My digital marketing plan lays out the steps that we are going to take over the 3-6 months to bring their business to a point where it is generating traffic and leads.
During this meeting, I also get to understand what the client has been doing before and why it wasn’t working for them.
For Prince, I understood that he had a blog for over 3 years and he could not get it past 1000 visitors. His growth was stunted and he was making no money.
He didn’t have any direction as to what to do, to get more people to see his blog and to hit his 10k per month views.
So my initial plan was to help his SEO (search engine optimisation) from Pinterest and Google to set him for the long term.
Whilst I worked with him over 3 months, my goal is to always help my clients build a strong foundation, so that they last years – essentially help them set up sustainable businesses.
Because it makes no sense helping a client create a business on a shaky foundation that would have cracks and then fall apart.
Once he started getting traffic from Pinterest and Google, I worked with him and taught him how to use lead conversion points throughout his blog to convert his traffic into leads.
I also taught him how to use landing pages to increase his conversion rate. If you understand traffic conversion, you’ll know that websites typically convert 2-5% of their visitors into leads, whilst landing pages perform a whole lot better, converting on average 20%+ of its visitors.
Once the lead conversion points and landing pages were in place, we went on to discuss the types of products and services he could offer and other ways that he could monetise his blog to start making money.
The Website
With the digital marketing strategy outlined, it was time to build the right framework and that involved getting rid of his old website which was built using WordPress.com and using WordPress.org instead.
WordPress.org is the preferred website builder for bloggers, because it allows you to expand your website by giving you ownership to customise it the way you want it with design and plugins, plus you can add any type of content to it and monetise it in the way you want.
So Prince moved his domain themenwhobrunch.com from his old WordPress.com blog and restarted a new one on WordPress.org.
When Prince and I met, he said that he didn’t know what menus, sub menus and pages to add to his blog to help him retain his visitors.
We discussed the problems that his target audience have and what type of content they would be interested in, then created menus and pages that focused on the specific areas that his target audience would be interested in.
One of the biggest problems with content creators is they focus on creating content that is not relevant to their target audience.
With Prince, I made sure to help him create content that his target audience was searching for in the search engine which would help him get found.
The Traffic
If you’re not getting clients in your business, then visibility could be an issue in that no one really knows about you.
One of the ways that I get clients to my business consistently, is through the people who find me on Google.
These people are the best people to work with, because when I speak to them on discovery calls, I don’t have to convince them to work with me, because they already know a lot about me through my content.
Therefore the same strategies that I used to get targeted traffic to my website for clients who were looking for help in their business, are the same strategies that I helped Prince master for his own business.
As a blogger, the best type of traffic you can have is search traffic.
That’s because this type of traffic will last years. For example, some of the blog posts that I wrote in 2018, still bring me clients just because these clients are finding my content through Google and my content is pre-framing them to work with me.
Knowing this, I recommended that Prince use both Pinterest and Google as traffic sources.
Before working with me, Prince was using Instagram as a traffic source and whilst Instagram is great, unless you have hundreds of thousands of followers, you will not get a lot of traffic that can be generated automatically.
By using the search engine, I helped Prince set up his website so that he will have consistent, sustainable traffic for years and all automated, because Google and Pinterest will be doing the work for him.
The Content
Part of any audience-building and lead generation strategy is the content that you create. Before Prince worked with me, he had no direction on what type of content to create to attract readers.
His content strategy, involved talking to other black gay men online and understanding what their challenges were and then writing pieces of content that addressed those challenges.
This method is ok, but it’s not very effective for the blogger who wants to drive consistent traffic to their blog.
That’s because his content was not optimised for the search engine.
When someone optimises their content for the search engine, they typically consider what factors they should address on their website so that it has the potential to rank on Google.
That’s great for Google but when it comes to the people that matter – the website and blog visitors – your content should specifically target what they are searching for.
I therefore spent a couple weeks with Prince teaching him the importance of writing content around key words that his target audience are searching for in Google as well as on Pinterest.
I helped him find key words that were very low competition; so not many other bloggers were targeting them as well as keywords that were being searched for often.
The result of his efforts were that his blog started appearing in Google for these search terms, giving him a boost in traffic.
Here is what his Google Search Console data looked like during the three months of working with me.
As you can see, he started having an upward increase in impression and clicks to his blog. This is as a result of creating content around what people on the internet are searching for, so he can be found in the search engine.
Not only are the keywords important but we also worked on crafting appropriate headlines and titles to make sure that they were appealing and attract people to click to visit his blog post.
The Opt-In
One of the reasons that many service businesses, coaches and consultants do not have clients consistently is because they’re not encouraging their visitors to make commitments with them.
In order to make sales from your visitors, you should not only deliver valuable content to them that demonstrates your authority, but also get them to provide their name and email to you, or test a sample of your service.
A visitor can test a sample of your service when you offer them a sample in exchange for their contact details.
You really want to get their contact details, so you can follow up with them through email.
Another way you can follow up, is by installing tracking pixels on your website. This was one of the very first things I ensured that Prince do, to make sure that he was using pixels to collect data of who his visitors were.
In Prince’s case, because he was in the early stages of starting his blog, he did not yet have a blueprint for the service or product he was going to offer.
Therefore I worked with him on creating several lead magnets, to help him identify who in his audience is interested in his sample service, so they could get a taste of what it’s like to be in his world.
When you visit Prince’s website you will notice that he makes an offer to his visitors immediately.
This is one way to capture a visitor’s contact details before they begin to navigate the website.
It also let’s the user know that they are in the right place, since he calls out his target audience here with the words “black gay men”.
The Email Sequence
As I mentioned before, Prince was in the early stages of his blog and did not have a product or service designed for his audience.
However part of this coaching program, involved helping him create an email sequence that will build a relationship with his leads.
Prince already had very high open rates and click through rates.
He was able to get a 40%+ open rate on his emails and 20%+ click-through rate on his email content.
That’s really good because the typical open rate is 10% and click through rate is 5% or less.
So I wasn’t too concerned about his email content. The fact that he achieved those numbers indicates that he was already doing something right, so I simply advised him to continue as he was.
Building Momentum
Prince now has the blueprint for getting more targeted traffic to his blog. During the time he worked with me, he was able to grow this blog by 483%.
Knowing what he knows now, all he has to do is continue using the strategies that I taught him. I did mention that with organic growth, it typically takes 6 months to a year of consistency to see any big impact and whilst he was able to accomplish a lot within the 3 months that we worked together, he is on his way to achieving more growth.
How Prince Transformed His Business
I remember when I first started working with Prince, I told him that the work he was doing before, was not scratching the surface and that he should prepare himself for a lot more work – he needed to step outside of his comfort zone!
Prince was very skeptical of my comments but he now looks back and realises that I meant what I said. LOL.
The first transformation that Prince got was a shift in mindset. Prince would compare himself to other bloggers and influencers and I had to remind him that he shouldn’t compare his chapter one to someone else’s chapter 20 – he would get there, in time.
His blog transformation was also amazing. The way his previous blog was designed, fell a lot shorter than how it is now.
I feel that he has given his blog a huge makeover and the effect of that would be better navigation and retention of his visitors.
He also grew his blog visitors and increased his traffic, which allows him to convert more people into leads. He now knows how to get more people to accept his offers and build an email list with the right people.
The skills and strategies he has learnt will allow him to generate traffic to his blog which is what most bloggers aim for.
What’s Next for Prince?
Create a product to sell to his leads and start offering coaching services for black gay men who struggle with coming out and fitting into society.
Want Similar Results in Your Business?
I loved working with Prince. He is an absolute dream client.
He says:
“Thanks. I looked back at my old blog and wonder, “What the hell was I doing?” lol … Again, thank you so much. I really want to become a full-time blogger and you’ve been helping me alot to prepare for that goal.”
Interested in creating your own online marketing strategy where I give you direction on what to do, where to start, what steps to take and in what order; so you’re not wasting time or money on the wrong things that are keeping you stagnant?
Let’s work together for 24 weeks and I will help you get an avalanche of website visitors, generate targeted prospects so you can build a healthy email list and make real money selling your services.
Book a free 30-minute Client Attraction strategy session here.
Who Is This For?
I work with service providers, coaches and consultants who have been in business for a few years but don’t know how to put all the pieces of their online marketing together to make it work for them.
You may also want to escape the corporate 9-5 and monetise your expertise but want guidance so that you’re not wasting time or money.
Essentially let me help you get started doing the right things!
You should already have an offer and you’re ready to invest in your business. Please budget $2400 to $5500 for my coaching program.
Who Is This Not For?
If you are not ready to invest in yourself, you don’t know who you want to serve, you don’t have an offer and you’re not coachable.
Book your free 30-minute Client Attraction Strategy Session here.
8-Step Marketing Blueprint
If you want to attract ideal prospects, make more client sales and keep your client pipeline filled you need to know how to build a sustainable and profitable online business. Grab the FREE 8-Step Marketing Blueprint that helps you get fast growth ideas for your service, coaching or consulting business.