This post is part of a 30 Day Secret Experiment. Be sure to read the previous posts to follow my progress.
It’s funny how easy it is to get distracted. I woke up this morning to find that my refrigerator was no longer working properly. I learned this as I poured clumpy milk onto my morning cereal. Luckily, the freezer still works. I took everything out and scrapped the frost off the back vent hoping that would help, but things only seem moderately cooler now… perhaps I attracted this.
Today, I spent some time looking over my site’s metrics. If you’re running any type of advertising, it’s important to know your stats. They tell you things like how much you’re spending, how many subscribers you’re getting, and how much it’s costing you per subscriber.
The site made it’s first $.03 today! Of course, that was offset by the advertising I’ve purchased. Here’s my cost breakdown for the last two days:
SearchFeed: ad still not live
Findology: $1.29
Google Adwords: $3.99
ExactSearch: $36*
= $41.28
* That ExactSearch listing is actually an annual fee regardless of clickthroughs. I’m going to ignore it for the time being as I calculate my subscriber conversion fee (I’ll add it back in by the end of the month.) After 2 days, I have 9 subscribers to my mailing list. So ($41.28 – $36)/9 = about $.60/ subscription. That’s not bad.
Technically, if you’re calculating results, you probably want to throw in the cost of the domain (mine was $7/year), web hosting was part of a hosting account I have to manage other websites so it’s essentially free (the overall hosting plan split between a number of sites is $120/year), and my Aweber email account (again, basically free since I use it to manage other accounts, but about $20/month).
I also signed up for a free basic account with HitTail.com, which I love. HitTail lets you monitor what searches people are doing to get to your website and then provides you with free keyword suggestions!
The other analytics program I signed up for was Google’s analytics program, which is available through my Adwords account. The stats program is fairly comprehensive and lets me see things like where people are coming from, what links they’re clicking on, the top pages people are entering and exiting at, and my conversions -what percentage of people are signing up for my newsletter. It’s all extremely useful stuff.
I also negotiated some links from a couple pages with relative content – from a PageRank 5, 4 and 3 – with various keywords in the link text.
Finally, I listened to the 2 hour James Ray teleseminar hosted by Alex Mandossian and wrote an article on James’ 5 Qualities of Successful People.
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To quote a well known SEO, it is best to keep advertising off your site until you are getting 1000 visitors a day. If you are paying for 100% of your traffic it may be hard, but it really will make a difference. I have noticed that my returning visitors have dropped since I have increased the amount of advertising on my site. I’m considering pulling it all off, to get back to the pure content. Then once my traffic build back up I may slowly introduce some of it back in. (I’m getting around 200 visitors per day)
Sources of traffic spurts may include stumble upon, digg, and similar services. But they don’t convert well to ads clickers or return visitors generally.
If you generate quality content the traffic will follow.
Bradford Knowlton
http://x86Virtualization.com
Bradford – just to clarify, I’m paying primarily for traffic directly to my newsletter sign up page. There are a handful of keywords I’m bidding on to point people to specific articles, but most of it (and I’m paying maybe $2/day at most), is directed at building my mailing list. I’m getting most of the traffic to the main site through organic listings (about 40% comes from long tail google listings), article submissions, and link building.
On advertising – I don’t necessarily agree that you need to wait until 1000 visitors/day for advertising. My objective was to see how much I could generate in 30 days, starting from scratch, so advertising suits my purposes.
Right now, my objective isn’t necessarily repeat visitors, but building traffic to the site. And Adsense is making me enough money to pay for my daily ad budget, so it’s not so bad. I noticed that when Jennifer Laycock of SearchEngineGuide.com did her 30 day startup she also added Adsense immediately and made about $75 from it over the course of a month – so I guess it’s all in your objectives.
But yes, I agree that quality content matters – right now I’m balancing marketing the site (writing articles, link building, etc) with writing content for the site.