A Small Change Brings Unexpected Results

On Monday I talked about my plans to port the content from this blog over to a self-hosted Wordpress site. I’ve been spending a lot of time getting to know Wordpress better because most (if not all) of my blogging clients use it. Although I hadn’t really expected it, I’ve found that it’s really growing on me.

This past weekend I decided to test out my very limited skills and redo my website (probably not the best idea since to use your website to experiment, but I’m known for making very spur of the moment decisions).

About a year ago, I hired a graphic designer to build a website for me using Wordpress. It was a very basic static site with a blog attached. I never got anyone commenting on the blog (to be fair, I didn’t really do much to promote it either). I was growing tired of the site's appearance, but after paying for summer school for four I couldn’t really afford to pay someone to do it over again right now, so I took a deep breath and just changed the whole thing myself.

Then a funny thing happened. I started getting comments on the blog posts even though I only had two (now three) posts up. Then yesterday, seemingly out of no where, a local mid-size company called me up saying they had found my blog doing a Google search and then set up an over-phone-meeting for today to discuss a possible three month trial project to start.

Considering my very rudimentary experience, I was surprised. I’ve been working on a couple of large ebook projects lately so I haven’t been marketing as much as I should (I know, bad girl!). Was it the change in my new site’s appearance or content? I don’t know. But it hammers home the importance of monitoring your marketing efforts so that you know what works and what doesn’t so that you can spend more time on methods that work.

Have you ever changed something about your business, or the way you promoted it, that resulted in an unexpected positive result?