This blog is being used to record problems and solutions from a particular nonprofit’s online digital journey. For now, it is being kept anonymous since authorship is not essential to its purpose.
Its first purpose is to serve the author. Here, I plan to record challenges I encounter in my efforts to market for a nonprofit. I’m recording them so I may look back at times and learn from my own lessons.
Secondarily, the content may be of use to others who face similar challenges and are interested in how I dealt with them.
Here’s a little background information.
My marketing journey started around the year 2014. At that time, the nonprofit organization that I work for had no digital marketing strategy, but I was in charge of the website. One day I was looking at our analytics and noticed that we had articles that brought in a lot of traffic from search engines. I suggested to my superiors that we create other articles to see if we could get more traffic. This began my first exposure to the concept of content marketing.
The process was slow for a while, since marketing was not my primary duty.
For the next couple of years we did this in a somewhat casual way. Around the year 2017, we got a little more serious in the process by doing keyword research. This marked a substantial breakthrough for us. Within one year we increased our traffic from 1,000 visitors a day to 4,000 visitors a day.
Between that time in this writing, we added a wide spectrum of digital marketing, including lead generation through Facebook ads and email marketing. I will gloss over that entire development and come to the present day (April 25, 2022) to when starting this journal was inspired.
After our initial Success with keyword research and increasing our website traffic, we ran into the many challenges with search engine marketing. Algorithm changes affected us, but we adjusted and always sprung back. But by late 2021, our traffic had seriously started to declined. The person I had hired to do our search engine marketing told me that we had run out of keywords. This seemed odd to me. But the bottom line was that we were still producing a lot of content though making no progress in inbound traffic.
This is when the idea of creating this online journal began. And here is the first entry.