Adventures in Lifestyle Design from a Path Less Traveled
New Website Traffic Experiment – Week 12
I made a goal of writing at least 2 blog posts per week here, but clearly I failed at that this week. Oh well, I guess in the big scheme of things it’s not really that big of a deal. I just got caught up working on things. You know how it goes :)
There’s not much to report this week.
We’re not really even half way through the 6 months I planned on doing for this traffic experiment yet, but I am starting to get the feeling that these weekly reports are going to become fairly boring and repetitive. Do you get much value from these? Would it be better to only do them on a monthly basis? What are your thoughts on this?
No real changes here. This site is getting about 10 visitors per day. Not all that great, and I really don’t see this changing any time soon. How did jem008 at Affilorama do this? Maybe I just picked a bad niche?
However, some of the articles here are still getting republished, which is slowly building backlinks. From what I understand this is one of the biggest reasons for doing article marketing as advocated by Niche Profit Classroom’s 21-Day Plan (adapted by me to 60 days).
More of the same here as well. I’m not impressed with blog networks much these days even though traffic seems to have picked up (and by “picked up” I mean that I’m getting 5 visitors per day instead of 2).
Nothing new here either. I guess the big lesson here is that social media is a waste of time unless you get some kind of joy out of constantly being plugged into some kind of forum or social community where you can answer questions all day ad nauseum. But, either way, this doesn’t seem to be a time-efficient means of getting traffic.
Sure, I guess something could, in theory, go viral. But let’s be honest here. The kinds of things that go viral like Friday or FatBoyGetDown (click at your own risk) aren’t really the kind of thing that you can monetize. If you’re a niche marketer, then you’re going to be hard-pressed to make dog training thing (or whatever) go viral that actually converts to sales. Sure you might be able to make a stupid video of a talking dog, but do people that watch talking dogs want to train dogs? Unlikely.
This little guy seems to keep going up, nice and steadily. I have about 15 spun articles loaded up here. The rest of them are pretty much unusable thanks to my underwhelming outsourcing experience. I think I will have to do these myself. Looks like I need to dust off the Best Spinner and pound thee out next week.
Anyway, I’m happy with the way things seem to be unfolding for this site. I’m still not 100% convinced that this is due to more than article marketing.
Well, I hope you have a good weekend, everyone. It’s Friday :)
If you wouldn’t mind leaving a comment and telling me if you think it would be helpful to continue doing these weekly updates, I would appreciate that. I’m getting a feeling that it might get pretty boring from here on out with week after week of “nothing new this week” and so on. Do you like weekly updates? Should they be monthly? Do you just hate me in general, and want my blog to vanish into obscurity? Your opinion counts!
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I have been enjoying your weekly updates, but it must be a lot of work to put together the posts. From my point of view, it’s your commentary, rather than the stats, that I enjoy the most. I’d be happy with a monthly traffic report and weekly progress updates.
To be honest, I’m really keen to see the views of others in the comments as I’ve just started my own niche blog experiment.
I really like the weekly updates… a month is a long time to wait for an update! I like being able to compare my progress to yours – although I’m a month or so behind you, and not making as much progress :(. It’s good inspiration to see how your last website is taking off though!
I also agree that your commentary makes it fun to read.
I have this to add, the weekly posts are superb, they keep us all motivated and anticipate the progress you have made to date,the information that you share is extremely useful for those new to online marketing and those more experienced,there is no hype as with many other blogs and the lack of buy this buy that because i use it too is very refreshing to say the least, although more emails from you from time to time would be good,i look into the whole social media thing and there is more to it than meets the eye,so i will test a strategy and provide the results here in 14 days time ..if that would be cool with you :0)
cheers
David – UK
well you could maybe change the updates to fortnightly instead of weekly if there is really nothing to update or its a bit of work.. I am sure most people are looking forward to any of the updates you have even if there might be nothing “real” thats happening.
And I dont totally agree that those type of viral videos can’t be monetized.. just look at the Rebecca Black’s one – theres a link to a website itself! I have seen and heard that the best way to monetize these type of videos is through CPA offers(cell phone ringtone types offers) though I have not really tried them yet.
When I open my browser, four tabs load. One of them is dedicated to this blog. I have other options to consume the content, but there are 4 blogs that I want to read every time there is new content without having them get lost in a flood of other information.
Needless to say, I’m watching and I do appreciate the weekly update as tedious as it must be.
On a side note, when the experiment is over you could take the winning method and apply it to the other three. If they pick up drastically then it was the method that was lacking and not the niche. If they don’t pick up, then it was probably the niche.
I look forward to reading these posts more than anything else on my rss feed – it would suck if they were monthly. Maybe you could do a shorter post about the websites and come up with something else to discuss.
Also in your experiment – I’m confused as to why the last site is doing so much better than the first if they are both using article marketing. Does that mean that the combination of all the tactics carries the most weight? I’ve been wondering about this for a long time.
Reading your blog every week is one of the things on my task list. I like the way you record your progression, and it also inspires me a lot.
I enjoy these type of posts on many different blogs. It’s interesting to see how changes make a difference in traffic. Keep it up!
-Ravi Gupta
Hey Clayton – I’m going to go against the grain and say knock the actual reporting back to once a month, but keep the commentary/posting at once a week.
SEO IS a time consuming thing with a lot of ‘hurry up and wait’ – you are always in a hurry to build backlinks and then you have to wait for them to show :)
But your normal content is great and just as inspirational – just my 2c’s worth
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