Chromand - Desiging, Developing, and Marketing for the Interwebs

Now that the first week of the Adsense Challenge is almost over, I thought it would be a good time to take a look at my past goals, and set some new ones for week two.

Last Week’s Goals:

–Posting Lots Of Content : Got 5 articles up this week, which is over the minimum I set for myself. FretFeed has a total of 19 articles now, which is a pretty decent backlog.  I may have to cut back a bit for week 2, as it’s finals week and I’m going to be very busy.

–Using Google News Alerts & TwitBeep : Got this done too. It’s been really helpful.

–Tweak Adsense Placements & Colors: Is this ever really “done”? I’ve had a decent amount of traffic, averaging about 50 uniques per day, and about 200 pageviews, but almost no clicks, so there apparently is some more work to be done here.

–Add Adsense to RSS feads and add Subscribe by e-mail option - No. Feedburner keeps throwing errors everytime I try to add the e-mail option. I’ll have to get this figured out.

–Forum & Blog Postings - Somewhat. I built up the ‘Links’ Section of FretFeed with various blogs and forums I’ve been visiting. I’m going to both build this list up more, and post more at the current places.

With all of the work done, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the top 10 sources of traffic so far:

1. Google(organic)  [60]
2. Reddit                 [34]
3. StumbleUpon      [19]
4. DigitalPoint         [17]
5. Google Images    [12]
6. Twitter                 [6]
7. GlennStovall.com [5]
8. Ultimate-Guitar   [3]
9. Delicious             [2]
10. GuitarFlame.com [2]

One of the articles was at the top of the guitar reddit, so that sent a nice stream a traffic.  I also apparently did a good job on the SEO of the site, since Google has been sending in more traffic than anybody. That’s been steadily climbing, and will hopefully continue this trend.

So, with all of that, the site has made a whopping $0.14 in week one, which hasn’t exactly given me faith that I can complete the challenge. The thing is that most of yoru money is going to have to be made in the last week, meaning that If either I or Gio can have a site make $100 in the first month, it could probably pull at least $300-$400 in the second.

I’m going to stick it out though, as if nothing else its encouraged me to try new things, and so far it has been successful in getting a lot more traffic to the blog.

So, let’s look at the goals for week 2:

• –Increased Blog & Forum Posting: Both in the number of comments and posts being made, but also in the number of sites I’m targeting. I’ll be increasing the linkroll on fretfeed over the weekend hopefully. It’s as much a reference for me as it is the visitors
• –Link Exchanging, Guest Posting, and Connecting: This is going to be where I spent a bulk of my time in week 2.  I figure this will be the best way to get some really good link juice and traffic. I don’t know if the postings are just going to be guest articles or cross postings, I suppose that will vary on a blogger-to-blogger basis.
• –More Targeted Articles : I did some keyword research, and next week’s articles are going to have one of two main goals: 1) Drive more search traffic, as they are based on keywords with a good search volume/competition ratio , and 2) drive up the CPC on my site, as it’s been quite low so far. I’m going to have to try to push the CTC & CTR up if I want any shot at this challenge.

I’m going to try to get a few articles written over the weekend, So I can focus on school and other factors of the site during the week. However, if things don’t pick up any during week two, I think I am just going to have to find alternative ways to monetize the site.

Week 2 goal: 100 uniques/day.