eppie.net

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)

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