3 Full Weeks into my New WordPress Website!
Over the past week – I have refrained from providing the same information every day, in regard to how I am growing my new WordPress Website! Like I mentioned last week, there are only so many ways you can write the same thing over and over! :-) Over the course of the last week, the site has become quite popular in not only stumbleupon visits, but Google and search as well!
Am I Meeting My own Goals?
If I review my website Goals for the first 30 days, I can see that in this time, I had some very basic goals to reach for this site.
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Total Quarterly Earnings: $30!
- 5 Unique and Compelling content posts per week!
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1 Unique Top 10 list every week!
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1 unique “How-To” 5 page (+/-) pdf every quarter!
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25 New RSS/Email Subscribers Every Month!
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25 Inbound referral links per month!
1 - Earnings on the site thus far have well exceeded my total quarterly goal of $30. To date, the site has earned a total of $182.40 . This is a combination of AdSense, and several other programs… but most significantly missing, is the eBay Partner Network from these earnings, as no eBay listings or links have been added yet!
2 - I wish I could say that I have adhered to my 5 posts per week goal, but I have slipped just a bit over the past week due to burnout and other projects I have been working on for others. I justified this slip to myself by looking at the traffic other posts have been bringing in, and wanting to leave them as featured articles during both Halloween and Election Week. In total, I published 12 unique posts, I have 6 posts waiting to be published, and I created 2 pages on the site. With the 12 live posts and 2 pages, I fell short by a few…
Visits – While this is not listed in my goals – it deserves mention! The first 21 days of the site have delivered the following visitors:
- 27,067 Visitors – Average of 1.85 pages per visit
- 12,658 from StumbleUpon (Average 1.4 pages per visit)
- 7,662 from Google (Average 2.6 pages per visit)
- 6,747 from other search engines, links, and type-in traffic(I did not average this)
- 2,221 Different search phrases have delivered the search visitors!
In my opinion, the visitor trends are VERY promising for this site, which is not even really monetized in the posts yet!
3 - I have 3 top 10 lists on the site and 2 waiting to be published! I chose to leave the existing top 10 list running through Halloween and Election week due to their draw of visitors!
4 - Not applicable yet…
5 - In the first 3 weeks of the site, it has gained 39 total subscribers. The number actually rises and falls by 1-2 every day and I attribute that to the Halloween and Election process. I do have a plan to increase that number over the next few weeks with the use of a small stripe ad or pop up on the site, encouraging readers to subscribe.
6 - Currently, Link Diagnosis shows only 23 inbound links to the site. I know the number is wrong… as I read more than 50 blog posts that linked to just one of the articles on the site from the last 2 weeks! Google Webmaster Tools shows a total of 69 inbound links to the site, and I feel very strongly that even that is low!I estimate roughly 160-170 inbound links spread across the web, based on my commenting and other posts that have linked to mine.
Overall, I would put a huge checkmark in the box for “So far, its a Success!”.
What will I Do in this Last Week of the First 30 Days?
Aside from my continued postings, commenting and getting listed in blog directories, I am going to do the follwing:
- Read through GWT to check for errors and correct them!
I have noticed a few duplicate descriptions and 404′s in Google Webmaster Tools, I will fix these. - Continue Posting “Hot” Types of Content!
Focusing on the upcoming Holidays of Thanksgiving and Christmas, I already have several posts written to take advantage of what people may be looking for! Using the Google Insight tool, this is much easier! - Continue to try and Get Guest Bloggers on the Site
The guest blogger program has still not delivered any results! I am the only person providing the content. I need to get this in front of more people… - Explore the Methods I will use to Monetize the Site in the second month!
At this point, BANS is not going onto this site. I am still exploring options with the ePN, (Through phpbay) Amazon (Through the new phpZon plugin) as well as PopShops. In all, I do not want to overload the site with ads, and simply let the content drive itself for the short term.
How has your Own New WordPress Website been Doing?
Previously Published Articles You May Like to Read:
- Using Popshops to add Full Product Pages to your WordPress Website
- Google Caffeine Update in Full Swing?
- Days 13 & 14 of my New WordPress Website
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I have been doing my part to "Build the Internet" since 1994, when I built my first website! Since then, I have built hundreds of niche websites for myself and many others, focused on design, applications, ecommerce, search optimization and internet marketing.
impressive stats. what’s the site address?
Hi Mark,
How are you promoting your site to get so many visitors so fast?
Randy
@ Hugo -
The site is diyreviews -dot- net
I try not to use the address in these posts, to avoid pissing off Googlegods by talking about stats!
@ Randy –
The most popular posts have been the top-10 lists (2 for Halloween and 1 for how to vote). 100% of the visitors have come from organic search, or Stumble traffic.
Mark
Mark,
This is very encouraging news! After all, you have shared with us exactly what you are doing and we should be able to have similar success if we cover all the bases.
It has been so helpful to me to see how you set goals and held yourself accountable to them, which in turn is bringing profitability to your site. It is so easy to get sidetracked and never do half of the plan. I tend to go off on a dozen rabbit trails and neglect the more important tasks.
It is very motivating to see that your site is earning money without EPN. I’m glad to be able to learn about various ways of monetization besides EPN, Amazon, and Adsense, and CJ Banners,etc. which are the ones I am the most familiar with.
I have a suggestion. When you get to the end of this Word Press site tutorial, would you consider putting all of your information together and making a downloadable pdf available on this site?
Since you are already subscribed to Aweber, you might want to start an email sign up list here, too, like you did on the DIY site with a downloadable ebook.
One more thing, did you ever get a chance to look at my cpanel to see why I am having trouble with the Oct 2 redirect (index.htm) in .htaccess?
Thanks for all,
Julie
Mark,
Am I understand you correctly that you’re getting 1000 visitors a day from a brand new site? Or is this was pages and not visitors? Any way of knowing how much of that traffic is folks like us checking it out? The numbers just seem phenomenal and I’m not sure I’m following how you’re generating that. Thanks for your info.
@ Julie –
Once I get to day 30… I am actually going to start it all over n a new site, documenting it every step of the way as well. All of the original posts will be linked in one index post as well.
In regard to the htaccess issue – I did actually jump in and try to correct it 7-10 days ago… I didnt want to risk pulling the site down, so I stopped. I replied to your email saying as much, but I also found yesterday that someone (I assume in the AOL network, since 1 spam report gets you blacklisted) has marked my email as spam… and much of my sent mails and blog comments have ended up in spam folders! :-)
@ Beth –
Some days… 350-400 visits, other days, 5000 visits or more. Yes, the site is only 22-23 days old, but the post topics have been highly relevant to seasonal subjects, and picked up and spread.
For example, How to use a Voting Machine was very popular over the last week…. along with 14 other variants of the phrase. The week prior, 18-20 variations of DIY Halloween costume searches was popular… Over the coming weeks, I have posts aimed at How to Fry a Turkey, 10 Different DIY Turkey Stuffing Recipes, etc.. and will attempt to simply stay in front of the trends, or demands of the search public, by providing the content they are likely to be searching for.
Google Trends and Google Insights are great tools for this.
Mark
Excellent results Mark and tremendous earnings.
I also notice your using an ad rotator on this site what plugin are you using?
Could you also elaborate a bit more on how you use Stumbleupon to generate traffic?
Mark,
Congrats on practicing what you preach(for the most part-LOL) and showing us it can get results.
Jeff
@ Mike –
About 2 months ago, I started using Google Ad Manager, to manage ad space on sites. (You can see it on this site as well)
There is a pretty steep learning curve and ALOT of repetition to get your ads in place, but once you start using it… the utility functions of tracking, forecasting the possible earnings, etc are fantastic!! In addition, Google has it setup so if a competing ad in Google own network, pays higher than your EPC, they can automagically show that ad instead, on a page by page basis.
In regard to the Stumble traffic – I truly don’t have any one real thing I do differently from post to post. It seems that if the title is good enough to grab some attention, it will take off… other times, it won’t. On this site, I have posts that were stumbled 6 months ago, and for some reason, this week… they go crazy with traffic. No real rhyme or reason behind it, but something I will eventually dig deeper into.
@ Jeff –
I wish I could follow my own guidelines ALL the time! In 90% of the cases, I do… but there are some times that I dont. Its a result of having too much on my plate, and not enough time to get it all done. I have recently started removing many sites I have not been updating, just to preserve them for whatever the future may bring.
Another thing i have found is that even though I recommend one thing here today… I may have been doing it for several weeks or months on other sites. By the time the post goes up on this site… I may already be trying other things, that don’t reflect my current efforts.
Mark, I was curious as to where you got the pic of that cute little guy holding the plunger in your header. Did you pay a graphic artist to create it for you?
Also, is the DIY site your “big idea” site that you mentioned in earlier posts?
Thanks for all the great info you provide us!
@ John –
I use iStockPhoto.com for most of my images… as long as you look through the bargain bin, you can usually find some great deals!! Full icon sets for $1 many times…
As for the site being the big idea, no… that one is still in progress!! Just waiting on legal matters to be completed, which may still take another 3 months waiting on full trademarks etc.
Mark
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