I’m pretty good at talking up DIY marketing and SEO, making website visibility sound accessible to everyone. That’s my job. But can I actually prove that it works?

Thankfully, yes!

When I set up my new freelance copywriting website back in spring 2006 it had no profile, no page rank, few visitors and was virtually invisible to search engines.

At first I was so busy working that I did very little online marketing, not getting my act together ’til late 2007. But a steady drip-feed of marketing initiatives – one small thing a day – ever since has had the desired effect. A year later:

• a quick search on Google shows my site returned 5th on page one of Google UK for searches on both ‘freelance copywriting’ and ‘freelance copywriter’
• my site has a respectable page rank of 4, as does this blog
• I’m getting about 1500 unique visitors a month, enough of whom convert to customers to keep me extremely busy and very happy.

Which is exactly what I was aiming for.

Update November 2009: 

Helpinthecity.com is number 2 on page 1 of Google for both ‘freelance copywriting’ and ‘freelance copywriter’, and has been for some time. Now and again I creep up to number one on page 1 of Google. The aim? To stay at number one!

Four months down the line, the results are dramatic with almost 1000 unique visitors so far to my site in month 5 (January 08). Worth sharing with those of you who fancy getting your marketing hands dirty!

Between January and July 2007 my professional copywriting and editing website, helpinthecity, averaged 144 unique visitors a month. Because I hadn’t paid any attention to SEO they almost all came from direct marketing campaigns to my prospect database of 225 local new media and marketing businesses. A very reasonable response rate of 64% but – in the scheme of things – very low visitor numbers.

In late August 2007 I began spending an hour a day on DIY SEO and basic online marketing. Since then I built and launched a WordPress blog, launched a marketing ebook and built and launched my new helpinthecity site, structured to be more SEO-friendly. Plus a huge range of marketing and SEO-related activites:

• regular website updates
• new directory and listing entries
• online press release distribution
• joining freelance and creative networks
• online advertising
• blog posts
• chasing quality inbound links
• fiddling with my html…

As you can see, there’s a steady increase in unique visitors month on month:

September 2007 – 210 unique visitors
Oct 450
Nov 675
Dec 790
January 2008 – 990

Visitors spend on average 239 seconds on the site. And I’m being rewarded with loads of exciting writing and editing projects. The total cost? Nothing but my own time. 

Never underestimate the power of steady eddie DIY marketing and hand knitted SEO!