It’s been about 12 days since I started this Case Study (check out Part 1 here), so I thought it was about time for an update. Unfortunately due to the holidays, I haven’t been able to spend as much time working on the site as I wanted to.
I really haven’t made many changes to the site itself at all, other than some small on-page SEO fixes. The main things that I have done are link building and social bookmarking. If you don’t have the time to do social bookmarking yourself (like me), I highly recommend Red_Virus’s $25 package. I have used Amit for several projects and he always does a great job. I’ve had a site get ranked just from these bookmarks alone.
Here’s what the traffic has looked like since I took over the site:
As you can see, the site has a good amount of Pageviews and a decently low Bounce Rate. So the people that get to the site seem to be sticking around and browsing for a bit. I just need to continue increasing the traffic. The good news is the trend is definitely upward for overall visitors.
As far as monetization, the affiliate banner I put on it has failed so far. It gets barely any clicks and it has not generated a single lead. I’ll have to test out different banners or offers to optimize this. For AdSense, it’s averaging about $0.75 – $1.00 a day right now. So at this rate, if I leave it alone, it will pay back the money I spent on it in about 2 years. Obviously that’s no good, so more optimization will follow!
The next step is to start an email list so that I can capture addresses and send them relevant articles and affiliate offers on an ongoing basis. That’s all I’ve got to report for now!
thats a great bounce rate, given that the majority of your traffic is organic.
interesting to see how this site plays out for you, will be following !
RedVirus is legit. I’ve used him several times.
Yo Todd, I’m interested in your current ad unit placement. Any way you can post up just a wireframe of how things are laid out so we can all get an idea of how things look without jeopardizing the niche?
That’s a good idea, I’ll do that in the next post!
Interesting case study! Looking forward to see more updates.
Also, thanks for the Red_Virus recommendation, i will give it a shot for some of my sites. 🙂