- We are going quite slowly but we ARE progressing – lotsa side projects.. will keep updating! #
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Twitter Updates for 2009-08-02
August 2nd, 2009EPN is Kicking Adsense’s Ass
August 1st, 2009We’ll skip the ‘why we haven’t been posting’ speech and just say freelance more than doubled what Glittersoul was making at the job she quit so we could do this net stuff… not bad!
So VALENTINE has not been getting the attention it richly deserves, but we do have 500+ Twitter followers who watch it and a small but steady trickle of organic SEO traffic. For the month of July that site earned a pukworthy 90 cents in PPC (Adsense), soo…. will need to work on that. Limited time limits your results so we’re not going to whine.. HOWEVER, EPN (Ebay Partner Network) has earned $45.16 for that same period so we are not doing totally horrible at least. The key here is to build on what we have going and expand as steadily as possible given our working schedule. We’ll see what incremental work committments can do and what we’ll try to do is give you an idea of what we are committing to that we will do daily.. we’ll try to utilize the old Vietnamese proverb about how does a tiger kill an elephant?
One bite every day.
We’ll see you next time!
Paid Traffic Is Fail
July 21st, 2009So far out of the 10k we paid for we’ve got 200 visits from our paid for traffic. So…. We are doing way better than that in our own efforts. We’ve had 1098 vistors since its been up (June 26th). We’ve only had 5 clicks and VALENTINE has made 89 cents. That parts not so great but it will get better. We’ve changed the ad layouts on the site and filtered a few of them (ads) and made various changes to the site design. We are getting a majority of our traffic via google thanks to being on the first page for one of our top keywords. Other than that most of our traffic comes from Twitter love.
We still have much more work to do in the promotion of VALENTINE and will bring you the results of that. We’re trying to re-organize ourselves to enhance our work performance due to the overload of work we have. We’d like to start putting up a lot more of our sites. If you guys have any thoughts, ideas or questions feel free to share/ask. Thanks for sticking with us through the boring parts and we will bring you more soon!
Swamped in Freelance Work but Moving Forward
July 11th, 2009Okay, you guys, we know we’re not exactly holding up to the “daily post” we wanted to do, but we want you to know we’re still banging away at VDay300. We’re doing a LOAD of freelance work and earning well from that so between freelance projects and working on the slowly succeeding AO VALENTINE it’s just about all we can do in a given 17 hour day to complete our work and eat a little food! 
It’s really rewarding to watch things improve and in the absence of any philosophical or tactical breakthroughs, we wanted to bring you some stats:
Eureka! We’ve made 19 cents. For July 1 – 7th we’ve had 2 clicks and 1236 page impressions. Not the best figures, but we all start out small. We’ve done a lot of content building and social networking for AO VALENTINE. Next we are going to write and submit articles for ‘article marketing’ to get back links and traffic. To help have more gains than dips.
Thanks for sticking with us through this rather boring phase. We will bring you more as soon as we can afford to. We have more than 100 freelance articles plus posting to VALENTINE to get done in the next
See you again…. when we can!
And 500 Years Later They Posted Again
July 5th, 2009We are indeed still alive! There are myriad reasons why we’ve not posted lately, but we doubt you guys are terribly interested in all that stuff so we’ll spare ya! 
Suffice it to say we’ve been working steadily & were a touch overloaded with freelance projects since we’ve got to pay bills and what not.
First, let’s hit the AO VALENTINE developments! Let’s cover some stats and then we’ll go over what the different techniques are resulting in for us so far… Current Analytics stats for VALENTINE (which started June 25th, 2009 with 0 visitors before jumping to a low for this month, the following day, of 10 visitors) are:
Absolute Unique Visitors: 344
Average Pageviews: 1.58
Time on Site: 00:01:38
Bounce Rate: 77.25%
New Visits: 77.48%
Not terrible, not awesome.. honestly, the bought traffic performs abysmally and is totally wrecking our stats: lesson learned! Maybe it could improve, we’ll see…
The bought traffic has sent 158 visitors, direct type-ins are at 144 (humanize for human eyes!), Twitter has sent us 77 and 44 visitors SOMEHOW found us via almighty Google which is utterly delightful!
We’ve got a hell of a great group of followers on Twitter, we can say that much! These folks retweet for us, have given us graphics for Twitter and for the blog that VALENTINE is. They’ve spread the word and I believe one of them linked us from Facebook. We spend a lot of time on Twitter trying to interact in a very unbotlike fashion. It seems to be paying off because we are getting some valuable feedback and help which we never even imagined could happen. People can be truly awesome!
Lil tip for ya: SEO your categories! If you keep in mind the functionality of your site (ie, don’t overdo it with the keyword-optimized links, categories & articles) they can end up pulling in mucho traffic. Once we figure out exactly how many links we’ve got, we’ll report on that, as well.
For now, we wanted to give you some cool sites we’ve come across – so here they are!
Smashing Magazine has a pretty sparkling little list of Adsense Tools Tips and Resources that just might help you become the next power-blogger and guess what? It’s not from 3 million years ago! It’s from 2009
Did you know that there’s not only SEO 101 podcast, but also BlogTalkRadio? Yeah? Well, there is so get over it. I mean.. enjoy it! Yeah!
Finally, if you struggle with SEO, we found a really nice forum you might dig on WebProWorld‘s SEO 101 forum.
We’re hoping this’ll tide you over until we show up to let you know we’ve made huge money…. or maybe update you with more thrilling news!
PS – Just checked the links incoming via Analytics? Yup, link building is slowly, but surely starting to pay off! Even YouTube has sent a couple folks our way!
PPS – See you in another random amount of time which we will strive to keep around 24 hours!
Twitter Updates for 2009-07-02
July 2nd, 2009- We’re still alive! Hope you Twitterati are having a great day! #
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Will Paid Traffic Love VALENTINE?
July 1st, 2009Yup! We bought traffic… Weirdly enough, most of our traffic is still direct type-in visitors. We’ve gone into the triple digits daily which isn’t too bad. We’ve got over 100 followers on Twitter now and establishing some nice relationships with those folks. Even allowed us to get some exclusive content that’d be very difficult to get ahold of otherwise. I’m trying very hard to keep the tweets non-promotional which is very tempting. We don’t want to see a sharp decline in the amount of folks who are tolerating us yapping about our niche. We take their tolerance & trust seriously and we don’t want to annoy the living hell out of them like so many business-minded Twitter users seem to be doing. We’ve actually gotten people sending direct messages to THANK us for putting up AO VALENTINE!
It’s a good deal of work keeping up VALENTINE’s need for new content and that’s why we’ve not yet really gotten AO KINGDOM up as quick as we’ve wanted. I’ve got a pile of freelance work I’m going through to pay for things like the traffic we bought. $100 spent on traffic so far and we’ll let you know if it does any good. We’ve not tried this method but we’d like to get some repeat visitors out of it. Our commenting strategy seems to be paying off well and the rest of the visitors are coming in via Twitter. At the same time, dear sweet Google is tossing us visitors on a daily basis. Which is weird as all hell because we JUST started this site and it’s in an uber competitive niche. What’s happening is apparently people are coming in off of long, very specific keyword phrases. And since I’ve been checking those searches, I can tell that what they put into Google is actually ON the page they ended up on. That’s kind of a good feeling.
We’re working to keep the posts here on VDay quality, but sometimes it’s tough to figure out what we should talk about. Is there anything you guys wanted to know that’s not the url of the sites? (lol) We’ve got, besides the Adsense PPC, some EPN (Ebay Partner Network) auction listings and we’re considering adding Amazon since we’ve earned a bit from Amazon affiliate program in the past. Right now we’re ironing out the reason that we’re not getting, yanno, CLICKS on the Google Ads… a little disheartening to get 200 impressions and zero clicks. It’s understandable given the nature of most paid traffic so we’re not gonna cry or anything, but it’s not a thrill. And we like thrills, goddamit!
Anyways, this post is short and a lil limpy, but you know how it goes, right?
Say yes.
We’ll see you in about 24 but for now, keep it sleaze-free out there and: Humanize for Human Eyes, ya dig?
PS – The got SEO but when we’re doing the humanizing thang.. could we call that HEO = Human Eye Optimization?
Slow but Steady Growth of First AO
June 29th, 2009For the news bit of this post, we can tell you a few things about AO VALENTINE right now. It’s growing! We’ve gone from those first 10 visitors right off the bat to 18 visitors the next day, then another 10 yesterday. Considering nearly all of our promotion was from a brand new Twitter account, that’s not too bad at all, we figure! The other stats at this point are that we’ve got an average of 4 minutes and 42 seconds time spent on the site with 49% new visitors which isn’t terrible. What is kind of terrible is the 67% bounce rate. I think we can improve on the bounce rate, but we expect the percentage of new visitors to rise since this isn’t a site most people will check every single day (which is typical, few sites are that ‘newsworthy’). Time on page could go up or down, but we’d like it to hold at around 3-5 minutes just to prove people are actually reading at least some of the content some of the time.
Adsense is registering around 30 impressions per day at this point which we very clearly need to drive up and get some clicks happening, as well. We’ve already added some sites to the Adsense filters to keep freaking Bing.com from placing ads on our site. Bit of a scandal, don’t you think? Bing buying Google Adwords?? Kind of weird if you ask us, even though we understand why they’d feel the need to do that.
We’ve actually noticed people re-tweeting us on Twitter and we’ve got something of a small but loyal following due to the niche we’re in. It’s kind of amazing and we’ve already gotten e-mails from people who’ve visited VALENTINE. They seem to approve of what we’re doing so that’s very inspiring. Glittersoul created the graphic for the site using a GIMP tutorial from YouTube and it’s quite good for her first time attempting a logo of that particular complexity! In between my freelance writing projects we’ve working to build the site further and start in with SEO work. The SEO at this point is very basic stuff such as blog commenting, submitting the sitemaps must’ve helped because we are definitely showing up on Google and have gotten 2 visitors that way for longtail keyword phrase searches. We consider that something of a success in and of itself to even appear on Google’s searches this early in VALENTINE’s development.
The next thing we wanted to address was a set of questions that the ever faithful Sonny submitted via comments. These, by the way, are always a huge help because our goal on this site is to provide you readers with the information that you can use. Unfortunately, one of the things we’re not going to do is reveal the urls for the sites. Sonny is right, traffic to this blog and VALENTINE is low enough that right now we could probably separate the VDay visitors from the normal traffic, but our hope is that both sites continue to grow and if we release the AO addresses right now then the scale we’re dealing with separating out legitimate visitors from VDay promotional visitors would be more difficult to track. We understand that can be frustrating, but we hope that once we’ve achieved VDay300′s objective and we release all the url’s (along with our complete notes & commentary on the development of each site) it will make the wait worth it. Until then, try to consider this as book that’s not even finished being written – as if the author is showing you his ‘work in progress’ rather than even a first draft. Fair enough?
As a brief update on the first site that we sold for seed money before starting VDay300, it’s still earning money (actually more than when we had it since he tweaked it and has more experience with PPC sites). It’s set to earn quite a bit more, as well, once he does the things that I was just plain too lazy to do!
We wanted to show you guys some stats from the last month that we owned that site to give you an idea of what our week or two of promotion did after a few months of the site being up (which we assume ended the ‘smart pricing‘ phase Google puts Adsense accounts through). These Analytics stats are from March 29, 2009 through April 28, 2009 (the day before we started VDay and the auction for that site):
15,270 Visits
113,816 Pageviews
7.45 Pages/Visit
27.89% Bounce Rate
00:06:35 Avg. Time on Site
85.32% % New Visits
And the breakdown for traffic for this period is:
Search Engines: 13,272.00 (86.92%)
Direct Traffic: 1,051.00 (6.88%) — this is people typing in the domain and GOLD in our eyes
Referring Sites: 947.00 (6.20%)
Not bad, not terrific. The reason we’re delighted yet not really satisfied is because if we got THOSE STATS without touching the site at all for months on end, imagine what we could’ve had if we’d yanno, worked on it! See our point? Ugh.
Sonny asks if we’re doing site that are in more potential traffic with more potential competition in an effort to repeat the success of the seed money project. The short answer is “not really”. That’s because that first niche had huge search traffic and very little relevant competition. We based it on a popular longtail keyword (the domain name WAS that longtail search phrase) and although after the site went live the competition went from 50,000 Google results to over 1,000,000 we still did not try to pick up any other keywords or phrases. Oh, just checked and the site still ranks #1 on Google for it’s keyword phrase but now the competition is at 2.2 million because people are motherfucking morons about SEO and will stuff a popular phrase into all sorts of entirely unrelated sites in attempt to pull traffic. I’m sure that’s profitable if you don’t mind looking like a complete waste of precious global resources (assholes). Ahem.
No, now we are picking sites where we can deliver quality content to a wider range of longtail keyword phrases. The seed money site delivered quality content, but it also focused on that one phrase almost exclusively.
Now, I’ll wrap up the other questions quick since this post is already way too long.
Is $100/month acceptable as a VDay project AO? No, not at all. Maybe $50/day would be satisfactory, but not $100/month.
Given the earnings from freelance projects do we wish we’d kept the seed site? No, because it didn’t give us enough money to invest in anything and all of the money went for household bills but still didn’t cover all of the bills. The seed site’s sale allowed us to buy new domains, pay off the debt we owed to our friend for hosting the site for those 8 months and other things like that. Had we not sold the site we’d still be not making enough and not have enough to invest in anything unless I’d figured out freelance.
Visitors without PPC earnings – is that a bad sign? Yes, to some extent. But then again 1 in 42 people clicking an ad would be a pretty awesome ratio if it held as traffic grew (compared to the CTR‘s we’re used to seeing). Does it mean that the site is too good? Quite possibly! It’s not designed specifically to get clicks with an awesome ratio, it’s designed to attract SO MANY clicks that eventually people will click those ads. You’re absolutely right, Sonny, it’s important to try to leave some incentive to click the ads or otherwise interact with the site in a way that’s profitable to the person/people running said website. For us right now it’s about building a steady stream of traffic and then we’ll optimize the ads to get the best possible CTR from that steady traffic. It’d be hard to build a site that anyone will link to that is designed specifically to get clicks. Not that we think that’s what you’re saying, of course. The trouble is that if the site builder fails the visitor they may click the ads but they won’t remember the site so you’ll constantly have to rely on new visitors. We’d rather have it work the way that a magazine or TV show does… and to us that means that continual exposure to the ads will lead to a growing desire to eventually click. Over time, they may click progressively more ads because they’ve grown to trust the site. It’s a longterm strategy and it may not be the best but it’s the one we’re working with. We could definitely build sites that were designed to harvest clicks like crazy but those sites annoy us personally because if we’ve not been satisfied and feel the need to click an ad just to leave the site then we’re going to avoid it like the plague in the future AND we’re less likely to click ads on a site we feel (even vaguely) cheated by, if that makes sense? That’s not to judge a more aggressive sales style – a person’s gotta do what works for them. We just want longterm traffic so that if the PPC market ever bottoms out then we can sell other ads at rates that will still be profitable.
SO that wraps this insanely long post up! See ya’ll in 24 or so!
Twitter Updates for 2009-06-29
June 29th, 2009- How sad that Billy Mays has passed
We’d like to see some HAPPY news, people!! #
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The Value of Hand Promotion
June 28th, 2009Okay, AO VALENTINE is yet a seedling, but its growth is rather admirable! We had 10 uniques yesterday and now the total is 25 so we’re alright with that! We’ve gotten Adsense installed, as well as EPN to be able to display Ebay auctions related to VALENTINE’s niche. The average time on the site, according to Google Analytics is 5 minutes and 56 seconds. Since it’s a WordPress blog, there aren’t yet enough posts to really warrant people visiting extra pages, but they are apparently reading the Privacy Policy that we created before we ever posted Adsense ads. It’s crucial to have your Privacy Policy up if you’re using Adsense because Google flat-out requires it. What’s really shocking to us is that nearly half of the visitors have visited VALENTINE more than once. Fortunately, we’ve taken the time to post multiple updates so we’re hoping they’re not disappointed with their visits. We’re following the same philosophy of ‘post what you want to see yourself’ and we believe it’s working! No income earned just yet, but we will absolutely keep you updated on that front.
Glittersoul and I have been doing freelance writing to help earn more money for VDay300. Working together we’re able to complete the projects much quicker so we should start being able ot re-invest in the site after the basic household expenses for the month have been covered.
For VALENTINE, Glittersoul got our sitemaps uploaded to Google, Yahoo, Bing and she also added us to DMOZ. Yeah, we know – good luck getting into DMOZ within the decade, right? Ugh.
The title of this post suggests something we’d like to address and that’s the utility of promoting your site when you can’t yet get incoming links. We usually shy away from submitting to directories since we’ve never gotten any traffic of real value (ie, visitors who come back) from there. We could spend time socially bookmarking or submitting articles but we don’t have that many social bookmarking accounts and we’re doing way too much writing to feel like creating any quality articles.
Our alternative? Twitter! So far Twitter has netted us a whopping 9 visitors, but our follower count is over 60 thus far. Since VALENTINE’s niche includes tons of information, we can tweet fairly steadily without over doing it. There are some updates from time to time related to the niche and that helps us be able to give ‘fresh content’ without getting annoying. We think that one of the more important things to keeping tweets effective is to not be robotic about them. There’s no point in turning your site’s Twitter account into the tweetable version of those old annoying MySpace addbots. Remember those damned things? Yeah, fuck that chittle.
Another technique we’re utilizing is blog posting. We do not care if the links are follow or not. What we want is people to know the domain name. If they let us have a link, we go ahead and include it but if not we will mention the site. Important note: do not be a assbeetle about mentioning your site in blog comments. Not only will you end up annoying the comment moderators, you’re going to peeve the people who take the time to read the comments, also. If you can’t come up with more than 2 sentences of something genuinely relevant to say then just be quiet and move on to the next site. Few things are as UNclassy as seeing tons of comments from the same moronic site promoter saying things like “You really make a great point here I think the same thing” or “On my blog (insert address) I went into some things about what you posted about”. You know what lame is already so just avoid that and make your comments something the moderator will decide to keep despite you having mentioned your site. Make them want to visit simply because you made a comment worth a damn! Few people end up doing that – except here on VDay300.com, of course!
But that’s cause we’re lucky that you guys are intelligent enough to have found our haystack needle of a blog in the first place!
Which reminds me… Ya know what today is? Yup! It’s our second month anniversary! Hard to believe for those of you who first saw us starting out in a thread over on Digital Point, I bet! We started out with vastly high hopes and a serious determination to succeed with this project (you can see the first post by clicking on the link at the top of the sidebar on the righthand side of the page).
Have we earned as much from PPC as we’d hoped to? Absolutely not. We thought we’d have maybe $5.00/day average during our best week by now from maybe three established AO’s. That’s $5.00/day in total from all the sites put together. Maybe we’d have had $40 in total PPC earnings by this point.
We’re quite far beneath that. We have a single AO (VALENTINE) that’s live and getting traffic. We have AO KINGDOM waiting in the wings, but not yet advertised anywhere. We’ve made exactly 0 cents in PPC earnings. Oops! Sucks, dunnit?
Then again, if you count the hundreds we’ve earned from freelance writing (which we hadn’t even vaguely considered when VDay went live) or the hundreds we’ve earned from EPN, the picture isn’t quite so bleak. We’re not ‘satisfied’ but we’re pleased with what we do have – we just want to accomplish more!
You guys have made posting here each day completely worth it with your feedback both publicly and privately. Thanks for helping make this blog a fun way to record the progress of our little venture.
We’re out for another 24 or so!