The number of visitors in a day record was smashed with 490 people visiting in one day.

The site is 12 months old.

I mentioned last month I was receiving 10-13 opt-ins per day - this has now increased to 18-27 per day due to one reason only: I changed the squeeze page from a single squeeze page with nothing but the opt-in form to an actual wordpress page, meaning all of the other site elements are available to the visitor too.

This goes against what most so-called marketers say about squeeze pages but it DOUBLED the amount of people signing up. I guess it looks less spammy and presenting them with more options is less aggressive and suspicious, enticing them to sign-up.

The squeeze page went from 20% conversion to 45% by this simple change.

Income is now $120/month for the content site in question.

Until next time.

Since my last update at the end of January traffic has been steady with a little noticeable growth but nothing drastic, and I have been adding articles to the site at a steady rate also, which no doubt accounts for the marginal growth.

The site hit a new all-day record for visitors scoring 398 visitors on the 9th March.

At this stage the site has 356 published articles, all designed and written around keywords within the specific niche I’m targeting.

It is making $100 per month from promoting a Clickbank product from use of an autoresponder and I’m receiving between 10-13 opt-ins per day to an e-mail course I designed to promote the product.

The only thing left for me to do now is wait it out and keep adding good content covering more key phrases. I estimate within 6 months Google will reward my site as it ages further and gains more trust in being a quality website and gives the kick it needs to take my traffic beyond 1,000 visitors per day.

The target I have for this site is 2,000 visitors per day within the next 16 months.

I’ll keep you posted.

When I last checked in traffic was climbing steadily up to 118 visitors per day, back at the end of November 2008. Since then traffic has increased with a new visitor record on January 26th of 353 visitors in a single day.

This site is growing quicker than I estimated and is on target to hit 500 visitors before the first half of 2009 is over.

I’m currently receiving around 10 opt-ins per day to an autoresponder I set up to sell a product from the Clickbank Marketplace, which I have sold 4 copies of so far earning myself $200. For every 50 opt-ins I receive a sale, on average.

Here’s how the traffic is looking 2 months from my last update (the graph shows from April, the birth of my site, up until January 30th:

That is all for now. I’m currently testing the autoresponder sequence to try and increase the conversions. I’ll report back once I have anything useful to share.

In my last post 2 months ago it had reached up to 60 visitors per day in 6 months.

Last month Google decided to allow more of my pages to be indexed (from 14) to almost the entire lot (288 pages indexed as of today).

Traffic has increased by over 60% in the 2 months since my last post. Traffic from Google is now over 100 visitors per day - between 115-120 unique visitors per day.

The number of articles on the site now stand at 300, therfore I have added 56 articles in the last 2 months, which is roughly 1 per day. It’s lower than my original target - I wanted 500 on before the end of this year, but it’s ok. It means I’ve got money for other things in life, which I’ll get to shortly.

Here’s a graph showing the growth of my site from April up until yesterday, November 29th:

Let’s just say I’m excited about the future of this site. I cannot wait for the next milestone in Google. I estimate it will be receiving over 500-1,000 visitors per day within 16 months.

I put the product I’m creating on in January 2008 which I’ll be selling for $47 - that will be the most interesting test. I have never sent visitors to a sales letter before from articles themselves, only Adwords. I feel conversion will be much higher.

I’ll make another post at the end of Febuary next year to update you on the traffic and actual sales volume and earnings. Then I’ll really know the potential of this new content site.

In other life news, the new job is going ok and I’ve secured a house to rent with a mate. I move in January 2nd.

I’m finally sticking to my original plan which was: Work a full-time job, build a side income on the Internet, move out of the parents place. Eventually I will reduce my full-time hours to part-time once my Internet income is enough. This should be before 2010.

Until next time…

Now I’d also like to update you on the status of my new website. The one I mentioned I would fill with quality articles and then sell my own information product from it further down the line. Well, the site’s 6 months old now and currently has on 244 articles. That figure will be 500 before this year is out - 500 short of my original target of 1,000 but I’m paying substantially more for the content due to the expertise of 1 particular writer to create one of the best sites in its niche, and it’s a premium I’m very happy to pay.

Here’s how the site has grew since Google let the domain back in to the index - don’t forget I bought a banned domain name and had to wait for Google to re-include it, which took around 5 weeks in total. So after reinclusion (which was in April) my site is around 5-6 months old. Now for the traffic graph of Google traffic (I don’t rate any other type!):

As you can see, it’s coming along nicely and starting to pick-up some reasonable traffic in it’s early development. There’s not really a lot else to say at this stage - all I plan to do for the foreseable future is add more content on a daily basis until I have 500 articles on by Christmas this year.

I’ll keep you posted.

I’m beginning to think not targeting keywords might actually be the best approach - to forget them entirely and throw out keyword research tools such as Wordtracker and Wordze. One things for certain and that is if you’re targeting big top tier keywords or even the least competitive keywords in your titles etc then Google will know right off the bat you’re attempting to manipulate their engine, which they may reward you with a long time-penalty or whatever else it is they do.

I guess what I’m trying to address here is whether or not it’s good practice to target small keywords because I’m building a few new sites and I’m still in the mind-frame of researching and building sites around words and phrases that people are actively searching for in the hope of gaining more natural free traffic.

I’m concerned this is an out-dated strategy and as website owners we can suffer for it but trying to determine this is difficult. I have read about a -950 penalty for over-optimization which some say using exact keywords in titles can trigger and Matt Cutts himself mentioned this subject in a video here which makes me wonder.. or worry.

I guess I’ll soon know, if one of my new sites ever gets re-included (I purchased a domain that was banned, put up good unique content and submitted a re-inclusion request on March 18th which I’m still waiting on).

Uhh - I’m beginning to wonder if I should have left this all behind and if returning back to it is a bad idea!

After analyzing the statistics of a 330 page content site I sold to a friend a few years ago it became clear that over 95% of his search traffic was coming from keywords that I didn’t even target - and believe me I targeted lots of small ones with that particular site - meaning purely on long-tail he was picking up over 6,500 keywords per month and over 1,000 visitors per day. All from 330 articles.

For my next project I will be developing a monster content site on a high-dollar subject combined with my own clickbank product.

I already have the product and have contracted free-lancers for roughly 20 articles per week and now that I’m able to invest in the project with money I’m earning from my job, there’s no reason this site won’t be crammed with over 1,000 articles before the year is out.

That is all for now. Wish me luck.

Here’s the results including the mainstream media-popular Hillary Clinton, Rudolph Giuliani, Barak Obama and then the lesser known Ron Paul, who which I’m sure more Americans will hear of over the coming weeks and months.

I’m sure with his upcoming appearance on Jay Leno (over 5 million viewers) and plenty of money being put in his kitty for radio and TV advertisements the trend graph below will become even more surprising in the near future.

Clearly Hillary is ahead purely on news media coverage popularity but as we can see from the search trends chart above Ron Paul is leading the pack in search popularity by a substantial margin. That’s a lot of interest in a lesser-known candidate.

Pretty interesting I thought.. now off to the bookies I go before Ron Paul gains more traction in the media and his odds are slashed even more than they are being already week upon week!

I even did optional overtime this evening until 7.30pm and walked away quite pleased with myself having learnt most of the ropes of what I’m doing and managed an almost error-free day.

I thought working was going to be another soul-crushing and depressing affair and approached with caution not knowing if I could stick it, but they’re all a good bunch and my supervisor isn’t a c*nt like my last boss, far from it in fact. I’m quite possibly the most miserable bastard there, but I’m already feeling myself being assimilated - it won’t be long before I’m as just as happy as everyone else!

After the hell of debt, bankruptcy and an uncertain future.. I’m now officially debt-free, earning a regular wage at a secure job and finally I’m able to realistically plan to move in to my own gaff early next year and I will officially have a life to call my own!

Fair enough I’m on minimum wage but the idea is to start a digital sideline on the Internet to subsidize my income and continue to do bits and bobs for my good friend Pilkster when I can spare a few hours here and there - and never will I consider replacing my full-time job for Internet gold again. This job’s too damn good to let go.

Who’d of thunk it!

I found it interesting that when I searched Google for hydrogen peroxide the Police here in the UK were advertising on Adwords basically asking for extremist Muslims who may be searching for hydrogen peroxide to snitch on their fellow plotters, or anyone in the hydrogen peroxide ‘industry’, I assume:

Now that’s a novel idea, eh. Given that I can’t stand the Police I’d say click the advert a few times for shits and giggles, but it’d only come out of our pockets as UK tax payers.