Your Website Profit

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I’ve now had this blog up for over two months, and I can finally see some results. This post is an overview of what I’ve done, and the results I now see.

Content

I started this blog out with a 6 part beginner’s guide to creating a website for profit. I was thinking I’d leave it at that, and just promote the guide, but I soon understood that a blog does not work that way. So I started writing some more content, and am now at a total of nearly 40 posts published.

Only about 10-15 of the posts can be considered full fledged articles, the rest are just blog posts with a narrow scope and to the point style. Writing shorter posts has allowed me to post almost every day, without spending all day with just this project.

Traffic

My traffic for the whole first month was only about 300 unique visitors. It’s still nothing fabulous, but I currently have some 50 unique visitors daily, and about 50% of them read more than one page. Subscribers are currently at 10-20, according to Feedburner - that needs some improvement.

My site recently got an Alexa rank, which is still well over a million, due to the fact that it is calculated as a 3 month average. My weekly ranking is currently 231,350, so the 3 month average should go up, even if my traffic didn’t increase (though I’m sure it will ;).

SEO

A blog is quite easy to optimize for search engines. Before I changed the layout to have unique meta tags on each page Google did not seem to notice me at all, but after that small tweak I got on first page for ‘website profit’, ‘publish ads’, and a few longer search phrases.

As for other search engines, Yahoo! doesn’t seem to care about my site yet. It only has three of my pages listed, and I don’t rank for even long key phrases yet. On MSN, only my front page is indexed, but it ranks second for ‘website profit’, so I’m not entirely unsatisfied. Ask seems to know nothing about my site, but I haven’t done anything to help that, really.

Marketing

So, how have I marketed the site, then. I haven’t put any money into it, as my objective was to see if I can make some money for free, and then invest it later. I have used various methods of free marketing, though. Once I get some revenue, I will invest a percentage of it to paid marketing.

The single most clicked link that leads to my website is on Courtney Tuttle’s D-List page. So my thanks to Court for including me in the list. Making this blog do-follow has also gained me some visitors from other such lists, but Court’s seems to be the most visited. The downside is that I’ve had to remove some spammy comments, but it’s nothing I can’t handle.

The most effective method of link building I’ve used is article marketing. I’ve only written four articles for marketing, but they have gained me some links, and I think it may have been one of the main reasons for my success with Google. You can see my articles on Article Dashboard, if you are interested.

My Revenue

The streams of revenue I use for this site are BidVertiser ads, and sponsored reviews. I’m also offering direct advertisement, but I haven’t had any luck with that yet. I use some affiliate programs, and some links in my posts are affiliate links.

I have not reached the payment limit with BidVertiser yet; my current balance is at $3. I had AdSense on the blog first, but it only generated a few cents. My main reason for switching to BidVertiser was their lower payment limit. I might try AdSense again in the future, when my traffic increases.

I have written two sponsored posts to date at $5 each. I have joined many different providers, but my blog is too new to get accepted in PayPerPost or Review Me, and for Sponsored Reviews to work it seems that a blog should have PageRank, which I’m currently lacking. I have referred two publishers to BidVertiser, and if they ever make over $10, I will get paid for that, too.

So my grand total up to date is $13, for two months of blogging. I wasn’t expecting much more, though, since the first months of writing a blog or a website are investment for the future, which will pay later once traffic increases.

Plans for the Future

I’m definitely going to keep posting, and am currently considering my options on how to market the blog with the small budget I’ve managed to earn. I’m weighing the options of buying a cheap review or two from other blogs, and taking one of the starting ad packaged from Yahoo, Text-Link Ads, or some of the others.

One point to which I have given thought is whether to buy a domain name. I can see all the benefits for it, but I don’t think I will move this blog anywhere. I will rather start another blog or a website for a domain I buy, and leave this one here. I might change my mind later, but that’s my current plan.

This became quite a long post, much longer than I had planned, but it also helped me organize my thoughts on this blog. Please share your thoughts on this post, any advice will be greatly appreciated, as always.

by Sutocu | August 18, 2007