Projects

So far the project is going great in my estimation.  As of today we’ve had 2,405 unique visitors which obviously surpassed our initial goal of 2,000.  Adsense seems to have picked up today and our Adsense total is about $7.  Not much, but good for a site 8 days old.  I know you may think that with 2400 uniques $7 is pitiful and I agree.  Most of the visitors were from social sites like Stumbleupon and Digg and those visitors typically show a VERY low CTR, but they link up which makes it all worth it.

Google is beginning to index more of the site, still slowly.  So far we have 31 posts published.  15 from me and 16 from Andrew.   31 posts in 8 days averages out to 3.875 per day which is well above the 2.5 we need to hit our 150 posts total goal.  That includes me being sick yesterday and not doing anything.

Tomorrow I’ll be working on brainstorming for a good piece of linkbait so we can get some links.  Without an influx of links, we’ll be fighting till the end to get our Adsense earnings up.

That’s all for this update.  Please let me know if you’d like more or less info on this project.  I assume people like this series since my FeedBurner subscribers, but I’d like to hear it from you.  Obviously I’m trying to be transparent by giving out the URL and disclosing earnings and traffic.  If you’d like to see different stats, let me know in the comments!

Yesterday we managed to get out 7 posts on the project site. All were quality posts, nothing spammy. Today I’ve been busy but have added a little snippet listing the post author and post category. Just need to get the formatting worked out. Colors aren’t showing from the right CSS class and I’m not CSS expert!

Yesterday I added a stock photo from iStockPhoto and it looks pretty good. Definitely obvious that it’s stock though. Picture was only $1. We’ve decided that the header section to the right of the photo should highlight some of our posts.

Today I hope to get about 4 posts total finished. One is done already.

Yesterday Andrew’s post received about 200 uniques from Stumbleupon. Don’t know what the real reason is except he has a pretty good size following at Stumbleupon. A few more of those posts and we’ll easily hit our goal of 2,000 uniques.

No earnings from Adsense yet, but I don’t really expect Stumbleupon visitors to click ads. No traffic from Google yet either.

Andrew and I both posted some comments on blogs yesterday with the name showing as “Brandon – Call Center Consultant”. Hopefully some of the dofollow blogs will show our comments and lead Google back to our site with decent anchor text.

I’ve been thinking about buying some links but haven’t decided yet. The site design and development cost about $100 total so I don’t want this project to put us too far into the hole if it doesn’t make any money.

That’s enough for today, back to writing!

You can also view all of the posts from this project.