Days 13 & 14 of my New WordPress Website

As the DIY Reviews site continues to gain momentum, it would be easy to sit back and rest on my hands, hoping the popularity would just grow naturally… unfortunately, the web does not work like that! I have stopped posting these updates on a daily basis, since much of what I am doing is just repetitive in nature, I mean… how many ways can I say “Write a new Post” and “Share your new Post with Social Networks” every day? Today, I need to continue following my goals and publish another Top 10 List to the site. The Top 10 Halloween Costume post was immediately picked up by search and social networks, and results in many visitors every day. In line with that, my next top 10 list, will focus on another Halloween treat… Party Drinks!

Weeks 1 & 2 Review

If you recall, during the week 1 stats, there were 383 unique visitors who looked at 3297 pages, or 5.18 pages per visit. At the end of week 2 last night, the site has now entertained 1543 visitors and 6917 pages, dropping the pages per visit to 3.15. Additionally, the site has started to come alive in serps a bit more, with more than 1043 search referred visitors in the first 2 weeks! MSN/Live is now starting to deliver some traffic, however, Yahoo is still sitting in the wings and not sending any, even though it does show it is being indexed by yahoo slurp.

In addition to visits picking up, the site has already exceeded my first quarter goal of $30 in earnings!

Total to date: $47.61

RSS Feed Subscribers

RSS Subscribers have flat lined at this point and I truly attribute that to my lack of experience in the aWeber system. If you recall, last week I mentioned that my articles were not being sent out to subscribers. I spent at least 2 hours setting up aWeber to the way I thought it was supposed to work and still, they are not being sent out! This week, I am going to switch back to my trusty feedburner account to manage the rss and find a way to use the feedburner email system to send subscribers to the pdf download page after they confirmed their subscription.

I won’t completely abandon the aweber system yet, but until I have gained more knowledge in it… I am going to walk away for a bit, and do some more reading. If you know of a WP plugin that will help me manage the subscribers, without putting a load on my own server (like mailing apps do) please post below so I can look it over.

Guest Author Program

I mentioned earlier this week that I had published a guest blogger program on the site. At this point, it has not shown any success and nobody has sent in any content to post on the site. I expect as the site gains more momentum, this will pick up in popularity and start to work. I am also guilty of not following through on posting the program to other websites that discuss the benefits of a program like this, which will be a goal of mine over the weekend. To date, I have only posted the info on 2 sites… so I have some catch-up work to do in that area.

My Weekly Goals on the DIY Reviews Site

  1. Write 1 top 10 post today.
  2. Continue writing 5 unique posts Each Week
  3. Remove aWeber and Convert Feed to Feedburner Today!
  4. Submit site to 10 more blog directories.
  5. Travel the Web and Promote the Guest Blogger Program on at least 20 sites.

How is your site coming along?

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About the Author, Mark Hansen

Mark Hansen has written 468 article(s) at the Niche Store Builder site.

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. 

Latest Readers Who Commented on This Article

16 Comments »

  • Thierryf1968 said:

    It would be interesting to know how many hours you have spent up to today (and day by day for the next weeks to come)… so we are able to see if it’s actually worth it in the short term

    Reply – Quote
    # 24 October 2008 at 12:27 pm
  • Thierryf1968 said:

    those earnings are impressive though after such a short period!

    Reply – Quote
    # 24 October 2008 at 12:28 pm
  • Mark (author) said:

    @ Thierry –

    I would estimate 40-50 hours into the template and back end structure of the site, but that template and theme is now used on 6 others, so it has to be discounted each time.

    Roughly, 8-10 hours each week, not counting the time I write these posts. (Sweat equity)

    M

    Reply – Quote
    # 24 October 2008 at 12:53 pm
  • Thierryf1968 said:

    thanks!

    is CJ your biggest earner on all your sites or just on that particular site?

    Also, did you have to get approval from CJ’s advertisers for this particular site or did you have their agreements before all of this? (while there was little content)

    Reply – Quote
    # 24 October 2008 at 1:03 pm
  • Mark (author) said:

    @ Thierry -

    Good question!!

    I had an older hybrid golf site that was deindexed as part of the Google deindexing of BANS sites, so I already had several programs I was signed on with. on this new site.

    In all ePN is still the highest earning account on the whole. On this site, I have linked to VERY little in the ePN, so its not showing much yet.

    M

    Reply – Quote
    # 24 October 2008 at 2:22 pm
  • Dan said:

    Hey Mark,

    Nice work on the earnings! Looks like Adsense can still bring it in, good to know. I like the broad subject that can be anything, party drinks is a good one. Are you using FeedBurner FeedSmith 2.2, another one is Subscribe To Comments 2.1.2, if that what you are looking, found both of them on JT Pratts site.

    Dan

    Reply – Quote
    # 24 October 2008 at 4:51 pm
  • Mark (author) said:

    @ Dan –

    I had a “Stupid A$$” moment when I went back into aWeber and found that even though I set the feed to send… I didn’t tell it WHEN to send. 5 minutes later… it is working right!!

    Sometimes, its in the fine details…

    I have the subscribe to comments on this site, its a GREAT plugin for sites that average 15-20 comments per post. I used it on the Jeremy Schoemakers site “Once”… he gets 200 comments per post… I still get emails on that post also! LOL

    I do use feedburner feedsmith even on this site. I was just trying to get into aWeber more.

    Also … for Feedburner users, Google feed reader is no longer working right with feedburner, which is why you saw the 350 drop in my reader count overnight! Supposedly, they are working on it.

    M

    Reply – Quote
    # 24 October 2008 at 5:04 pm
  • Walter Minton said:

    Hey Mark,
    I would like to build a new site but I’m confused now. I can’t find how you started this DIY site or if I should use that first theme I bought from you. I would like to spend my time writing and not so much programing. I’m in information overload. Need a plan to get wordpress-Bans sites going.

    Walt

    Reply – Quote
    # 26 October 2008 at 11:29 am
  • Mark (author) said:

    Hi Walt -

    Believe me… I feel your same pains!

    I am planning on pulling ALL of this together this week, so it will become much more clear.

    The DIY site is actually just a wordpress site… with my own custom theme. ANY theme will work for it, but you will notice I do not have bans on the site… I am holding off for a short bit due to issues between Google and BANS, they just dont get along!

    M

    Reply – Quote
    # 26 October 2008 at 11:35 am
  • thierryf1968 said:

    Hi
    From your last comment wouldn’t you recommend BANS any longer?

    only associated with or within wordpress?

    but what about just using phpbay and bans, or phpbay on its own?

    Reply – Quote
    # 26 October 2008 at 1:06 pm
  • Mark (author) said:

    @ Thierry –

    I still BANS is OK, but not on its own for sure.

    I am literally, blocking googlebot from BANS pages on my sites, new and old, by adding the noindex meta tag to the BANS ONLY header page.

    Keep in mind… I do not have any more bans only sites I maintain, and those I have kept up, most have the blog on the root and bans in a folder. On the ones with bans on the root, I have redirected all home pages to the blog.

    Mark

    Reply – Quote
    # 26 October 2008 at 1:29 pm
  • roger said:

    “Keep in mind… I do not have any more bans only sites I maintain, and those I have kept up, most have the blog on the root and bans in a folder. On the ones with bans on the root, I have redirected all home pages to the blog.”

    So you recommend wordpress blog and put store in a folder, Mark.

    Reply – Quote
    # 26 October 2008 at 3:09 pm
  • Mark (author) said:

    @ Roger –

    I do… Wordpress is a much better platform to build an entire site off of. If you want to see some examples of WP sites using bans in a folder, shoot me an email direct… I will send some over.

    Check out this post, and you will see where I have been going on all this.

    Mark

    Reply – Quote
    # 26 October 2008 at 7:41 pm
  • glenn - virgina tech sports store said:

    Mark or anyone, related question. What is the best WP plugin for simply adding Google Ads to the top of pages or posts (similar to some of Marks blogs)?

    thanks.

    Reply – Quote
    # 27 October 2008 at 7:24 pm
  • Mark (author) said:

    @ Glenn –

    I prefer to use a small include file to do it, for the purpose of flexibility…. but there is also plugins that do the same.

    There is a ctually a pretty good list of them here.

    Mark

    Reply – Quote
    # 27 October 2008 at 8:29 pm
  • Scary Halloween » Blog Archive » Days 13 & 14 of my New WordPress Website said:

    [...] Mark wrote an interesting post today onDays 13 & 14 of my New WordPress WebsiteHere’s a quick excerptThe Top 10 Halloween Costume post was immediately picked up by search and social networks, and results in many visitors every day. In line with that, my next top 10 list, will focus on another Halloween treat… Party Drinks! (more…) … [...]

    Reply – Quote
    # 24 October 2008 at 1:19 pm

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