The above image is a quick glance at a project I’ve been working on.  Hoping to roll it out before the end of the year…

The area immediately after a post is fairly prime real estate.  It’s where you can give a natural follow-up action for your visitors… and I gave them ALL of them.  The only problem was the one that I really want them to do right now was given the least emphasis.

So What Do You Want Visitors to DO?

I want people to comment on articles on the site.  And for those people who prefer not to comment, I want them to at least be able to read the additional contributions added by other readers.  That’s what rings true to the mission of Better Parenting – to crowdsource parenting advice.  You don’t need to have a PhD to contribute and improve the collective parenting skill of our readers.  So I eliminated some of the extra stuff at the bottom (popular posts, related posts), added more emphasis to the comment text, and made mention of the “Comments Count” contest that I’m running.  I’m going to do more with this too.  I should have additional changes rolled out tomorrow.

I’ve also made some other changes to the individual article pages:

• I increased the size of the main image and placed it directly above the headline.
• I increased the size of the headline and improved its styling by choosing a better font and color.
• I removed the large (and distracting) categorization box that was previously above the headline.
• I improved line spacing in the articles.

I did all of these things to increase the likelihood that someone will get to the bottom of the article — where the other changes should encourage them to comment.  It’s important to regularly remind yourself what you want people to do on your site, then do whatever you can to make it easier for them to do it.

I work in web development and internet marketing.  Not the sleazy, dirty, 8 mile-long page with 40 fake testimonials and yellow highlighted text internet marketing.  I’m talking internet marketing for legitimate companies.  So I should know better than to send out an email newsletter on Good Friday after lunch…  But I did it anyway.

Fridays are generally bad days for email.  Open rates tend to be lower.  People are either trying to finish their work so they can get out of the office for the weekend or they’re already busy planning / starting the weekend.  In the middle of the week, you’re more likely to catch people bored at work, looking for something (anything) to capture their interest.

Holidays are even worse.  People are traveling, fewer people are at work… they’re just not looking for something to catch their attention.

None of this is news to me, but I still sent out a newsletter this afternoon.  In part, it’s because of necessity… I launched a contest and I want to get the word out.  In part it’s because I was tired of putting it off any longer.  But no matter what the reasoning, I’m going to suffer from reduced open rates for this campaign.

It sucks that open rates will be down, but it feels good to have actually started sending the weekly newsletter.  Next week, I’m going to split-test timing and report on its impact on open rates with my list.  I’m not likely going to use Friday afternoon as one of my test segments, however.

• Surpassed goal of 10,000 pageviews (had nearly 11,000 views on 4,300 visits).
• List capture worked well with the Target giveaway, adding just shy of 100 names to the Parenting newsletter.  The first newsletter was sent today using MailChimp’s RSS to email.  I configured WordPress to hide a specific category (Parenting Tip of the Week), so it only appears in the RSS feed.  Since MailChimp pulls the RSS feed for publishing the newsletter, it includes this category.  I schedule the tip of the week to post right before MailChimp is scheduled to send the newsletter, and the tip appears at the top of the message exclusively for newsletter subscribers (and RSS feed readers).  I think it’s a pretty smart setup.  You can sign up for the newsletter here.
• Winning technological battles (RSS to email solution) is easy for me.  The harder part is traffic generation, etc.  Search traffic continues to improve and is providing a solid 20+ visitors per day.  I’m starting to rank for more competitive terms as well.  I hope at the end of this month to receive between 50 and 100 search visits daily.  I’ll have to plan topic titles more carefully this month to ensure that it happens (and continue link building).
• I hadn’t mentioned Twitter in past posts because I was in a holding pattern for weeks… since someone else had reserved the BetterParenting name on Twitter.  Thankfully, I was able to register BetterParents and make a trade with the other party.  I think this is a HUGE WIN!  If I had to use the name BetterParents, it would hurt my branding.  Making the switch was extremely important to me.  It took several weeks to complete, but I think Twitter will be very helpful in making some social connections with related sites.
• My stable of writers continues to grow.  A friend from high school who is a very talented writer started writing articles for the site.  My brother’s neighbor is also going to start writing – from brief encounters with her in the past she seems to be very bright and a great mother.  She also has relevant educational and professional experience.  Two great assets.
• I learned a lot from the Target giveaway.  It worked to increase traffic and build links, so I’m glad I ran it.  I wish I could have had Twitter up and running for a bonus opportunity, but I couldn’t get the name transfer worked out in time.  This month’s giveaway may get fewer entries, but I think it will do more for my site long-term.
• The giveaway for this month is structured more around loyalty and community.  That’s what I want to build, so I’m trying to reward it.  Every comment made on Better Parenting this month counts as an entry (so go comment already! – I publish daily, so there’s bound to be something you’ll find interesting).  Following @BetterParenting on Twitter gains bonus entries and retweeting about the contest also results in bonus entries.  Hopefully this will create a habit for people to check back with the site daily and to comment on new content.
• I just got an email from Bill Dwight from FamZoo – he’s going to be guest posting this week.  We initially discussed this guest posting opportunity in mid March, and Bill came through with a great post – it is AMAZING!  I feel so incredibly lucky to have run across Bill and can’t wait to publish his article.  I’m going to schedule it for Monday morning so it can get the best possible exposure.
• Ad revenue was down for the second half of the month.  I moved down the top 300 x 250 block in the sidebar to feature my RSS feed and newsletters, and its CTR suffered a bit.  I also started running more CPA ads, and they haven’t converted yet, so those are clicks I would have made something from with Google.  I’m going to keep running the CPA stuff for now and see if conversions pick up.  I’m really hoping to push up to 30,000 plus pageviews soon so that I can start to pursue CPM advertising.  I think it’s a better fit for the site.

  On a related note, I can’t stop thinking about th Chevy Traverse, and I’ve never clicked on any of their ads… I just see them all over the place.  CPM works for major brands.

  OpenX Marketplace brought in some extra cash, which is worth noting.  You can set a CPM floor, and if advertisers will bid above it, it preempts your other ads.  It’s nice to score a few extra dollars, even if I’m not ready to go CPM for the whole site.

I still need to work harder on my “ground game.”  I know a lot of people locally who could benefit from the site, but I keep hesitating to push it because I want it to be perfect before sending people I know to it.  Quite frankly, it’s a terrible excuse and I need to man up.

If Content is King, Social is Queen

This month will continue to be about good content and making relationships online.  I would love to join the Extraordinary Life Network this month, or at least guest post on some of their sites.  I’ve been following the RSS feeds of their sites for a while, and I’m very impressed with where they’re going.  I origianlly found the network through member site Engaged Marriage (via a guest post on Pro Blogger).  Engaged Marriage is an impressive site that was launched within the last year.  Growth curve is impressive (and totally merited – he publishes good stuff).  I see big things for them because they’re building strong communities.  Although my site is different from theirs in that it has less personal focus (multi-author vs. individual tends to do that), I think we stand for a lot of the same things.

On a side note, I’m probably going to move off of WordPress and on to a custom Zend Framework solution by the end of the month.  I’m building an application that’s geared toward running a multi-author site and has my workflow in mind.  It will be nice having the additional flexibility of a custom solution.  Still, that’s low priority, since the tech stuff won’t make or break me – it’s content and relationships that yield a winner online.

Get More by Giving More

I’ve been sitting on a post about Dad blogs I like for a couple of weeks now, but it’s going to go live this week.  I’m also going to do a few other roundup articles and link out more liberally.  You get love by giving love, and I’m going to put that principle into practice this month.  This is another thing I’ve been meaning to do, but I didn’t want to jump the gun – linking out before I had established my site.  That’s selfish.  I’m going to publish this post (and others like it) because I think they’re worth sharing to my readers and the people I’m linking to deserve the support.

Goals for this month

• 30,000 pageviews
• At least 1 guest post per week on another related blog
• Minimum 250 RSS subscribers (currently at 111)
• At least 200 good comments this month on my blog (contest should help)
• 50 search visitors per day (by the end of the month)
• 300+ Twitter followers (by the end of the month)
• Membership in ELN?

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.

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)

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.

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.

• It’s a decent exact-match keyword name
  “Better Parenting” isn’t a huge volume term, but it gets a fair amount of search traffic.
• It’s an old name
  1998 registration history, transferred without dropping
• It’s PR4 — though I would have preferred a stronger link profile, it does have some decent links (several Yahoo Directory links)
• It has built-in brand clout
  When you hear “Better Parenting” you instantly think credibility.  It sounds like it’s a legit magazine, right?

Granted, the parenting niche is pretty saturated, but I think there’s enough room in the market to build Better Parenting into a serious authority site.  A site that’s both information and entertaining.  One that engages its audience and builds a strong community.  One that consumes LOTS of page views.

Launch Goals

I’ve targeted Monday, 3/1 as my launch date.  Technically, the site’s already live, but I’m planning on adding a lot of additional content this weekend and won’t begin promoting the site in earnest until Monday.  My goal for the month of March is 10,000 page views.  I want to break 30,000 in April. Honestly, I want to break 30k in March and 100k in April, but I’m trying to temper expectations.

I don’t really know if I’m expecting too much from the site initially or if my expectations are too low.  I won’t really have a good feel until the first content I rolled out gets indexed.  I’m having a hard time anticipating how effective the site will be at picking up search traffic.

At any rate, I’m going to post step-by-step what I’m doing to try to turn Better Parenting into a big winner.  We’ll see together if I succeed or fail.  Game on.