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)
