The Top 12 Sites in the Marketing with Social Media Course

Below is a list of the top 12 sites by unique visitors, visits and page views (they are different) upon completion of the Marketing with Social Media MBA course taught by Bill Belew (that’s me writing about myself in the 3rd person).

The course focused on content/inbound/social media marketing and was taught at the graduate level in an accredited university in Silicon Valley. Here are the details:

• The students had different blogging rhythms – 1-3 times daily and wrote various lengths of posts – 200+ to 600+ words.
• All actively created internal and external links and fished, legitimately, for back links.
• The students guest posted twice each week at BillBelew.com and at a classmate’s site of their choice.
• The students also wrote evergreen/anchor/pillar posts weekly.
• Finally, some students actively worked their social networks if they had a presence.

For good or bad, take a look at the top 12 sites. I encourage you to let the students know what you think of their ongoing product.

	Visits	Uniques	Page Views
Soccer Roundup	1,764	1,260	4,732
UI Design	1,134	437	3,053
Arts and Crafts*	2,789	2,393	14,691
Saumya’s Kitchen	1,887	1,163	4,329
Techno Evolution Leads Revolution	1,594	1,308	3,083
Rph at Work	1,542	1,081	5,722
Info-Nepal	1,901	1,422	4,984
Migrated Mouse	1,455	1,147	2,477
Colors n Spirits	3,076	2,115	20,907
Social Media Buff	2,453	1,726	4,855
Jinie’s Kitchen	5,332	3,419	14,284
World of Dance	2,047	1,843	3,413
*the first month of data is missing
Course aggregate	43,599	28,376	122,680

Out of the 60 active students that finished the course, these top 12 (20%) students received:

66.5% of unique visits

61.9% of visitors

70.5% of page views. 

Where is Pareto when you need him? Indeed, 20% of the class clearly did generate the majority of the output.

Some of the questions I have at this point which I will address in future posts …

1. Does blogging pace make a difference? Multiple times/day of short posts vs one ‘meatier’ post daily? How about a combination to this approach?

2. Could the students generate organic traffic without relying on keyword research?

3. Does content have to be grammar perfect? For many of my students, English is their second and even 3rd or 4th language!

4. What about cheating and duplicate content? Does it work? Some of my students went that route and in a future post I will tell you how that worked, or didn’t work for them.

5. What is an average bounce rate? Time on site? Page view to unique visit ratio?

6. Do my instructions work in other languages? 2 of my students wrote in Chinese and one in Japanese.

7. What was the hardest part for these newbie bloggers?

8. How did they keep themselves motivated or not?

And and and …

9. What questions would you like to ask? What answers might I be able to dig out for you from this experiment?

I have a ton of data that I will share here in the coming months and at my home site – BillBelew.com and at NMX 2014. Will you be there? I will.

BTW, how’s your blog working for you?