O.K. before you keep reading I have to apologize, I hate case studies and examples of sites that don't show the sites involved. One of the things that I try to do to set us apart from a lot of blogs is to give specific ideas on how to do things, but in the case study below I can't. We are growing and have a lot of clientele that just won't let us share their info, or even mention them as a client. That is fine, I guess if I was a 100 million a year plus company with very intelligent competitors I wouldn't want our service providers giving away our secrets either.

With that said this will still be really cool to share and I will show you (doctored) screen shots from their analytics.

We helped a friend/client launch a blog in October and it has been some of the most successful blog marketing we have done to date in the realms of blog optimization and social media saturation to a brand new domain and website.

The blog is general and covers a lot of different topics mostly internet and advertising related, which helps. If you have a niche blog you can still have tremendous success in blog promotion, especially in terms of links and subscribers which is the most import aspect of a blogs success in my opinion.

The Stats: The blog is exactly 39 days old it has a total of 21 pages, it has received over 165,000 uniques, over 3,000 links and over 1,117 subscribers. The subscribers and the amount of branding we have seen (see below) are what we are most exited about.

We have had campaigns that generate more traffic and links then this blog (I am working on another case study where I will actually show you an example of an article that had over 150k visits in one day, and has had over 3k links just to the article), but what is different about this site is the vast amount of subscribers and the consistent traffic. Barely any of this traffic is from Digg, the blog is receiving thousands of visitors a day on a consistent basis. So it has been a combined effort on behalf of the posts instead of one home run submitted to Digg with one traffic spike and virtually no traffic a week later. The lowest day so far as been over 1,600 visitors and the highest has been 14,922 with several days over 10k.

Graph screen shot of the blogs entire life so far: vstats1-3

Page Views to some of the URL's: vstats2-3

Traffic Sources: (what is best about this is Direct Traffic to the domain, is over 14% which is over 24,000 visitors. Remember this blog is only 39 days, that is some sweet branding) vstats3-1

The majority of the initial traffic came from StumbleUpon, I think that is why the subscriber rate has been so good. We also get a tremendous amount of traffic from other hub sites picking up our stories and linking to them.

How to do it: I would credit a handful of things the the sites success.

1.) The site owner has fallen in love with marketing and has done a great job with generating outstanding content. He has engulfed himself in Social Media and in his competing blogs and really understands how to generate good content for his audience.

2.) We mapped out and understood our audience prior to launch. We actually had a good amount of posts ready before launch so that we wouldn't lose steam. After the first few pages being submitted to social sites we let the sites subscribers and community promote the rest of our content as it was created.

3.) The Domain is easy to remember, easy to spell and all that. By watching the direct traffic to the homepage and branded search terms in Google we are really seeing that a good domain can go a long way.

Again I apologize for not being able to give away more. I'm working on about 3 posts that all give away the farm with specific examples. Also remember this site/company did not exist before the last week in October, there wasn't a huge brand name to piggy back off of or any prior marketing or advertising to build off of. This was brand new, raw straight out of the gates marketing.