I think it's time to start posting some results.

I'm testing two different systems at the same time.

ORGANIC SYSTEM

I followed MMM3 creating each post and page, but then decided to try my hand at a proper industry blog. My social media channels have been booming for a while now and I had all but created an industry blog out of our social media.  I sat down and did some keyword research using SEMrush on what people are typing in relation to core influencers in our genre with low competition. My wife is a professional writer for The Food Network so she's been coaching me on how to instruct writers to ghost write for me (I have a full time job on top of rehearsals so I have to work smarter.)

I picked artist X, chose the focus keyword for the article, designated how many words, designated paragraph by paragraph each concept that should be discussed, designated multimedia content to be used and then where the person should go find information for the article.  I then sent PMs to 20 people on fiverr asking around to find people with a passion for progressive music who could write for me.  I got a handful of responses and then started sending my assignments to different writers.  I paid between $5-$30 per article depending on how long I asked for.  I then experimenting with promoting the post on Facebook vs. a targeted ad.  For a post I wrote about the band Opeth the relevance was so high I was paying $.07 per click.

I've been building a social media following on all the major networks using 10 different automation tools over the past two years so at the moment I've found that organic traffic to the website is actually outperforming PPC.  Automatic Direct messages to twitter users who followed our account with the link to the squeeze page seem to be the best converting at the moment. I took John's advice and designed all my social media accounts to funnel traffic directly to the squeeze page.  Annotations and Description link on YouTube and squeeze page link on every social site.

ANALYTICS

I'm tracking this data using Piwik an open source analytics system I installed on my server. I've setup conversion goals and am tracking people going to the thank you page.  From this I'm able to see where all the traffic comes from, which blog post brought them to the site, what social network brought them (since we have pretty much all the social networks with followers.)

I'm also tracking things in Google Analytics.  I like to see the data in a couple of different ways to get a good feel for it.

PAID SYSTEM

Due to John's advice I split off my PPC site to a separate domain so I have two separate systems, the organic traffic system and the paid system.  I began by split testing an ad I targeted to Opeth fans 25-34 in US with 6 different images.  After about 100 clicks I found a winner, as always an unlikely candidate.  This mysterious photo with just keys and bass guitar in a weird artsy angle.  I got the cost per click down to about $.30 but the conversion rate hasn't been very good. When I geotargeted just New Yorkers with my ads they were very expensive and didn't bring a ton of leads.  The CPC when down a lot when I expanded the geography to national and international.  

After testing these things for about a month now I've begun the process of split testing my email squeeze page. I installed Optimizely into my wordpress site and began by creating 3 variations of the original h1 heading.  I don't have enough data yet but initial data has shown that all the variations were way better than my original headline so I'm excited to see how much I can enhance the conversion rate as I split test each element of the page piece by piece.

SOCIAL MEDIA

We currently have Facebook, Twitter, G+, Soundcloud, Instagram, Youtube, Pinterest, Blogger, Wordpress.com, Tumblr, Last.FM, Reverbnation, Bandcamp, Vimeo, Sonicbids, and Bandpages 

Lots of engagement on G+ : https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/.....t718/posts

Lots of engagement on Instagram: http://instagram.com/oneironaught718

Lots of followers on Twitter: Tweets by oneironaught718

MMM CONTENT

Link to Blog: https://oneironaught.com/

Link to Squeeze Page: https://oneironaught.com/free-music/

Link to Sales Page: https://oneironaught.com/enlist-today/

Link to Bundle Page: http://oneironaught.com/enlist.....ay-bundle/

MMM BLOG 

Link to popular blog post about the band Tool: https://oneironaught.com/9-ban.....like-tool/

Link to "It's all about you" rapport building blog post: 
https://oneironaught.com/requi.....-throwers/

Link to Here's a cool story about me for more rapport and a free download blog post:  
https://oneironaught.com/black.....y-wedding/

-Dave Mieloch (drums for Oneironaught)

I really dig this stuff.  I work in midtown manhattan as the digital marketing manager for a big data, analytics, and infrastructure technology partner. I'm doing this same sort of thing at work but in an enterprise b2b environment.  

Any feedback is welcome. Putting all my work on display here! Be gentle 🙂