eppie.net

Another week in the books for Better Parenting.  Lots of stuff went well this week, and a few things didn’t hit quite like I had hoped.

One of the big goals was to try to make the site more “sticky,” so I featured the RSS feed and setup an email newsletter opt-in.  I continued to focus on publishing good content with good images, which I think goes a long way with readers.  The site already had related posts and popular posts running, which also helps to keep readers on board and looking at more pages.  I may change the formatting of that to make it less cumbersome, however.

Anyway, here’s a quick overview of the week’s highlights (and lowlights):

• Continued publishing at least 1 article per day.  I think overall the article quality is good.  I’m still aiming for continued improvement.
• Search traffic continued to trickle in.  Still under 20 search visitors per day, so it’s a small portion of traffic, but it’s better than nothing.
• Commented on a few blogs with the Top Commentators plugin instaled, which added a bunch of links.  I try to add value with my comments but still feel a little shady about this approach.  As a result, I’ve been less aggressive with this tactic than originally planned.  It’s created a trickle of traffic, but the value here is clearly more for the link (and catching the attention of the blog owner), not for an average visitor of the site clicking through.
• Yahoo is now showing over 1,200 new links.  Not bad for 2 weeks.
• AdSense continued to provide a little income.  CTR is much too low.  The new 336 x 280 ad block at the bottom of the post is performing the best.
• I started serving CPA ads via OpenX, but no conversions yet.  I’m running Hooked on Phonics and TheCuteKid offers so far.  CTR has been better than adsense.  Conversions obviously haven’t.
• I was late in getting my newsletter subscription box in place, and that probably cost me a few subscribers.  I’m trying to make up for lost opportunity by driving additional traffic to the site now that it’s live (and promoting it with a giveaway).
• Giveaway went live today.  Later than it was supposed to, but I’m already getting a good response from it.  RSS subscribers and list submissions are growing nicely today… hopefully they stick around and don’t bail once the contest ends.
• I’ll be posting some pointers for running a giveaway in another post.
• Traffic was down.  Under 3,000 pageviews this week.  I expected some dropoff from people coming to the site to apply for the writing job I posted on March 1.  Still, decent traffic for week 2.

The Big Failure of the Week

Not everything goes according to plans.  I put $25 towards StumbleUpon Ads to send 500 visitors to my site.  I was hoping to make an article go viral… didn’t happen.  And the Stumblers didn’t do a lot of cruising through the site.  Still, I did get a few email subscribers from the traffic, so not all was lost.  It did affirm for me that I need to build the site the right way though — I don’t want flash-in-the-pan traffic.  I want to build community.  I want to give value.  People will keep coming back, promote the site for me, and contribute more if I give them a reason to.

I’m still happy with where things are going, even though this week wasn’t a huge success.

Week 3 Plans

This coming week I’m looking for increased search traffic, increased list signups, and a lot of content being published.  As I fill up more categories, I think I’ll be better positioned to pitch a blog network I admire for membership.  Leveraging the loyal readers of another blog may help increase loyalty (and community) on my own site.

I’m also going to get my “ground game” going this week.  I’m going to pitch the site to a bunch of ladies from church, and try to get them to be active readers (and hopefully contributors).  Loyalty begins this week!

One of my goals for this week was to start serving CPA ads in addition to adsense on Better Parenting.  There are dozens of CPA advertisers I have relationships with through Commission Junction that are a good fit for Better Parenting.  From that large group of advertisers are hundreds of possible ad options to use on the site.  That’s a total mess to try to manage manually.

To keep myself from going insane, I decided to implement OpenX to serve all of my ads.  It allows me to serve CPA, CPM, and CPC advertisements, so I’m already set for when traffic increases to the level of selling my own CPM ads.  Plus, it’s free!  I’ve only added a few advertisers so far, but I’m definitely enjoying the setup.

I’ll be posting again this evening with a follow-up on some of the things I’m doing to publicize the site.

So the first week for Better Parenting is officially in the books.  To start out, here’s what went well and what didn’t go quite as well as I had hoped:

Week 1 Wins

• Published at least 1 article every day (22 articles now published)
• Over 1,000 visitors for the week
• Over 3,500 pageviews for the week
• More than 3 pageviews per visitor (average)
• Alexa Ranking (3 month average) under 1 million (883,879)
• Alexa Ranking (1 month average) under 500,000 (329,187)
• Started getting search traffic
• 129 pages indexed by Google (up from 7 in the previous owner’s site)
• Over 100 new links indexed by Yahoo
• The site made some money via adsense
• Received visits from every state in the US plus 37 additional countries

Week 1 Losses

• Search provided only 6% of traffic (and a lot of those were direct navigation attempts)
• A large percentage of traffic came from writers interested in a paid writing position for the site, not a group that’s likely to be strong repeat visitors
• Roughly 2% of site visitors subscribed to RSS feed – I hoped this number would be 5% or higher.
• The adsense CTR was too low (the earnings per click were really strong though)

I didn’t go crazy promoting the site yet, since I’m still trying to build up a solid content base.  I want there to be clear value when people land on the site, and I want their to be enough additional content for the site to be sticky.

I think I’m close to that point, so this week I plan on doing a lot more promotion.  I just announced the launch of the site on my facebook feed, and encouraged friends to become contributors to the site.  I’d be thrilled if I could get another writer or two from this effort.  I’ll be sure to post how that goes as a follow-up.  Unfortunately, I’m not super active on Facebook, so I don’t know that it’s going to be a big winner.  It’s still worth doing.

Plans for Week 2

Below are the tactics I plan to implement this week.  I’ve included the goal they target in parentheses:

• Feature the RSS feed more prominently (build visitor loyalty)
• Add in an email subscription signup for a weekly newsletter plus special discount offers (build visitor loyalty)
• Publish at least 1 article per day, preferably 2 (increase pageviews, increase search traffic)
• Comment more on related blogs (increase traffic, build links)
• Add 3rd adsense block and experiment with placement (increase adsense CTR)
• Integrate CPA advertising (increase earnings)
• Announce some kind of contest on the site (linkbait, increase traffic)
• Ask for links from friends with compatible sites. (increase traffic, build links)

I think it’s fairly obvious that in launching a content site, search traffic is a pretty important component to success.  Ranking for terms organically means you get a steady stream of new visitors.  These visitors may become RSS subscribers, follow you on Twitter, or sign up for an email list.

In my launch of Better Parenting, I’m counting on search to drive visitors.  So I was a little nervous when, a full week after updating DNS to point to the new site, none of my new content was being idexed.  Today, I received a Google alert for my name from betterparenting.com.  Since I’m listed as the author of all posts I write, and my name appears in any comments I leave, this was a quick way to spot when the new site was starting to get indexed.

Right now, I’m tracking my rankings via my own rankings tracking package (I’ll probably make this open to the public within the next week or two).  I’m not in first position (or first page, for that matter) for anything that I’ve targeted yet, but I haven’t started building links to any internal pages, and very few of the site’s pages have even been indexed.

Still, we’re getting somewhere.  One of my site’s author’s, Tiffany, wrote an impressive article highlighting the challenges that some women have getting pregnant after they’ve already given birth to their first child.  It’s a phenomenon called secondary infertility, and the article is ranking on the 5th page of results for the broad search secondary infertility.

That’s not going to drive any traffic yet, but with some additional links and more of the main site indexed, that result should improve.  I’m also ranking for the term make your own baby food with an article about making your own baby food.  That’s on the 6th page of results.

The one real bright spot right now is the exact match term for the domain – better parenting.  The homepage of the site is ranking on the first page (7th position).

As the site develops, the rankings will improve — I’m just glad to know that I’m going to start to see a trickle of search traffic this week.

This is just a quick update to note how impressed I am with the response I received from the ProBlogger job board.  My job posting went live shortly after 9 AM today, and 14 hours later, I’ve received over 50 good applications for the position.  Sifting through all of these submissions is going to be daunting, to say the least.

One thing I find interesting, however, is that of the 50 submissions, only 2 or 3 people decided to post comments to existing articles on my site.  Those people are very smart.  That small act has really helped them to stand out above the other submissions.  It shows initiative and a willingness to engage via comments, which is an important part to how I want to build the site.

More to follow.