Chromand - Desiging, Developing, and Marketing for the Interwebs

With the month coming to a close soon, I figured it was time to write an update about the Adsense Challenge, Where I was seeing if I could get a site from scratch to earn $100 in it’s first month. we’ll at the end of day 20, My total earnings are….

$1.42

So, without sounding like a pessimist, it’s safe to say that I don’t think I’m going to meet the goal.  In retrospect, December was a really bad month to try this. The combination of finals week in the middle of the month, and the holidays right around the corner meant that I couldn’t put forth 100% effort at this project. But as a lot of wise men have said, you must learn from your mistakes. And you must move on. The knowledge and expierience I got from this was worth much more than $100 to me.  Here are a few of the things I have learned:

1. Driving Traffic: FretFeed has gotten more daily traffic than any other website I’ve attempted.  This challenge pushed me to look for new ways of building links and traffic, and I was met with some success.  Hopefully I can push the traffic numbers even higher as time goes on.
2. Ad Placement - The CTR rate on FretFeed was actually pretty good. I feel that while this site was not making money with Adsense, I learned a lot of lessons that could be applied elsewhere. and I say elsewhere because of lesson number 3…
3. Adsense isn’t for every site - Different sites and niches pay different amounts.  With FretFeed, I was on average making $0.08/click. Assuming a 2% CTR, that would mean making $0.16 per 1000 impressions.  That means to make $100 in a month, I would need 625,000 impressions in that month, or  approximatly 21,000 impressions per day. With users average 3 pageviews each, That means 7,000 uniques a day would equal $100/month. With that much traffic, you can make more money using different methods of monetization.

So What Now?

I’m going to look into other ways to monetize FretFeed.com, first trying affiliate offers, and trying a little PPC to drive traffic to them.  I may also try selling some advertising.  At some point in the future, I’d like to take the lessons I’ve learned here, and trying them on a different site, where Adsense would be more effective.

Traffic Stats

Since I did have some success driving more traffic, Let’s take a look at the top sources. These are the top 10 referrers From December 6th to December 20th:

Google Search               [231]

Reddit                           [50]

Google Image Search     [40]

GlennStovall.com          [23]

StumbleUpon                [16]

Ultimate-Guitar            [12]

Twitter                          [10]

AOL search                   [6]

Yahoo Search                [4]

IBreatheMusic               [3]

A few things jump out at me from this list; Firstly, people still use AOL? seriously? Secondly, I put some extra time and money into SEOing this site, and it has definitely paid off, as I got over 250 visitors from Google. I also see the importance of using images in Google Images, which helped drive some more traffic.  I also see that while I didn’t have a lot of time to put into forums, They can vary in success, with Ultimate Guitar and I Breathe Music both bringing in some people. We also see that Reddit is still bringing in some juice off of an article I submitted a while back, coming in at #2.