Week 2 Recap – Making the Site Sticky

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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!

Ad Serving with OpenX

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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.

Launching a New Website – Week 1 Recap

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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)

Starting to Rank for Terms

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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.

Where to Hire Blog Writers

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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.

Follow Along as I Launch BetterParenting.com

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This past month, I got lucky.  I picked up a pretty great domain name (BetterParenting.com) at a very reasonable price.  It’s not a category killer, but I think it’s a great name to develop on because:

  • 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.

Your dictionary dot com domain sucks

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Ok, so maybe your dictionary dot com domain doesn’t suck, but let’s be honest here.  There’s a REALLY good chance it does.

One of the things I find frustrating with the domain industry is the false notion that almost any short dictionary word is a premium or semi-premium domain name.  The reason I find it frustrating is because if you are interested in picking up a REAL premium name, you have to wade through all the crap that people mistakenly believe is amazing.

Take for example the following auctions I was recently in at NameJet and Snapnames.  Note that I did not win either of these names.

Passive.com – sold at NameJet on 10/22/2009
NJWebDesign.com – sold at Snapnames on 06/04/2009

To me, of these two names, I’d much rather own NJWebDesign.com — although at the right price, I’d be happy to own passive.com also.  To the domain community, passive.com, however, is the clear winner based on purchase price.

Passive.com sold for over $6,000.  NJWebDesign.com sold for a little over $600.

What makes a domain valuable?

NJWebDesign’s average potential customer is worth somewhere between $800 and $80,000 — depending on the level of web design service provided.  Web design companies pay over $10 per click to advertise for related terms.  This name could be used instantly to build a web design company from the ground up, extend the reach of an existing company, or create a directory that would charge web developers handsomely for a listing.  NJWebDesign — with business model included.

How about our dictionary domain?  What’s passive.com’s average customer worth?  Who knows?  Quite frankly, who knows why anyone types passive.com into their browser.  What on earth do they expect when they arrive at this domain?  Complete and total mystery.

And so it is with thousands of other domains with high valuations — they’re names that at first glance look brilliant, but upon further inspection, offer limited potential for development… and at some point in time there HAS to be a development payoff.  If there’s not, someone gets stuck holding a name that can’t justify its purchase price.

Rick Latona Committing Brand Suicide?

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I love branding.  No, wait – let me try that again.  I LOVE branding.  And I love it at all stages, whether we’re talking about coming up with a company name or creating a visual identity that projects a company’s essence and values.  Heck, I remember jingles and taglines dating back to my very early youth — I’m still “dewin’ it country cool.”

Given my love affair with branding, you shouldn’t be the least bit surprised to learn of my excitement in seeing that domain broker / auctioneer / mass-developer Rick Latona was considering creating a new umbrella brand for his suite of companies.  Greater still, Rick was soliciting the feedback of his blog’s readers regarding a potential rebranding… to Cyberspace.com???

First off, I hate the word cyberspace — it’s an outdated term. Honestly, I would feel a tinge of shame typing it into the address bar.  And by tinge of shame, I mean that no matter how hard I might try, I wouldn’t be able to bring myself to type it.  Perhaps it’s for fear that I would be transported back to, oh, I don’t know, 1995.  In 1995, I had hair that came down to my chin and pants that didn’t make it half way up my butt.  Not a good year for me.  I’m not going back.

Beyond being outdated, it’s one of those words that has always felt “off” to me.  Didn’t it always feel like cyberspace was a word we came up with to describe the internet to our grandparents?  I’m sure if you asked them to explain it, most of them would tell you that there’s real pages of information orbiting the earth, that somehow magically get pulled onto our screens when we push certain buttons.  It seems to connote a general lack of understanding about the internet.

The weird thing with a domain like cyberspace.com is it’s one of those domains that at first glance should be great.  It’s like a girl who’s what I like to call “distance hot.”  This is also known as “I lost my glasses hot.”  Fellas, we’ve all been there — you’re eyeing up a girl from across the room, and in your mind she’s already birthed 3 of your children.  By the time you get close enough to her to ask her if you can sire her offspring, you notice the mustache and lazy eye (not that there’s anything wrong with mustaches or lazy eyes).  Cyberspace.com is distance hot.  Cyberspace.com is a tranny (not that there’s anything wrong with trannies).

If you head over to Rick’s site and read the comments, lots of people are saying “killer domain, but not right for you.” I would challenge that it’s not a killer domain. To me, it’s a name with exceedingly minimal potential. If it’s not good for this, what would it be good for?  Seriously, this is a company that brokers domains and does web development.  What is more cyberspace-ish than that?  If you answered with something comparable to Second Life, deduct a million points for being a loser.  The correct answer is “nothing.”  As a result, this domain is good for nothing.

My advice to Rick (and anyone struggling to brand their company) — I think you should focus more on what your brand helps people accomplish (unless you can get a category-defining generic, like domains.com). Personally, I think “Alchemy” (the fabled process of transmuting a common, low-value substance into a substance of greater value) would be great, except that it’s probably over the head of an average person.  You don’t really want a brand that requires a history lesson to be understood.  “Monetize” would be a great brand, but I don’t know if the .com could be acquired.

The bottom line is this: Rick’s not really selling domains, or websites. He’s selling earnings. He’s selling a wealth-producing asset. He’s selling profit.  A “money tree,” if you will. If possible, the brand should drive to that point (while still being memorable).  Cyberspace just doesn’t do it.