Here’s the latest update of my series of articles on growing a blog business.  Again, there are several purposes for writing these articles.  Firstly, I’d like to share with you what the business model and technical development looks like for building an advertisement supported information website.  I’d also like to share with you the results that are possible given a commitment of approximately 10-15 hours per week such that you can determine if this is the right business model for you.  Secondly, its an opportunity to log ‘lessons learned’ such that you the reader can benefit from the details of what I have done, what has worked, and what has not.  Finally, I appreciate the opportunity to have a journal for my personal records, such that I am able to continually refine my vision and set goals that are accountable to all the readers on the internet!  By posting these articles, I am demonstrating several of the 10 Steps to Success which I encourage you to read through. 

Summary of Website Additions (and Changes)

My last entry on the topic was approximately 1 month ago.  In early April, I had the pleasure of spending just over a week with my family in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.  This gave me the chance to focus on writing, but with no internet connection a bit less of an opportunity to spend time on website modifications.  Regardless, there’s still been a lot of progress both technically and intellectually.  Here’s a list of accomplishments for the month of April. 

Website Additions/Changes

• I’ve re-build my link page such that people can easily request a link to my site (read below if you’d like to request a link)
• I’ve deleted the ‘Tell a Friend’ feature
• I cleaned up my blog archives such that the right window search panel mirrored what was on the current date blog page (my WordPress template had a different control displayed on the right navigation window dependent on if the article was new or in the ‘archive’ section)

Ongoing Additions

• Added 11 new articles to the site
• Added 1 new podcasts (10 steps to success - listen here)
• Completed 1 new newsletter

Other Activity & Development

• Registered and posted two articles (How to Become a Life Coach and How to Become a Wellness Coach) with SelfGrowth.com and EzineArticles.com
• Met with a project manager on site design/SEO optimization
• Began monitoring site with Alexa
• Registered with and started mining links from LinkMarket

Details of Activity

1. Installing and Using LinkMachine - Here’s LinkMachine’s self description of their services. "Reciprocal link exchange management software that makes it easy to find and contact quality link partners, generate custom link pages that match your site, and keep track of reciprocal links. Link exchanges increase a site’s traffic and sales."

As I’ve mentioned in the past, I am not a programmer - technically literate, but no programmer.  I found LinkMachine to be a fantastic free service (with optional paid services).  Basically, you create a blank page, and their software manages your reciprocal links for you.  Someone can go to your site and request that they would like to make a link exchange if your content looks like a good match.  The tool verifies if they have or have not added a link to you on their website and gives you a status report.  After review, you have the option to accept or reject the request.  If you accept it, the software automatically updates your page with the information they provided - simple!  The premium (paid) services have a few more bells and whistles available, since my links page is small now, I have not yet enrolled, however I do see the benefits of doing this if there are a lot of links to manage.  So far I give LinkMachine a big thumbs up and would recommend it to anyone.  Its functional, easy to use if you are technically literate, and very powerful.  On top of all that - its free! 

If you’d like to see an example of it in action, check out my links page and if you have a coaching/personal development website, feel free to request a link and if your content is appropriate I’ll approve your link request.

2. Registered with LinkMarket - I also registered to use a free link exchange website.  Honestly there seem to be hundreds of these out there, so it was difficult to know which to sign up with.  Many are free, so after reviewing quite a few on the internet, it seemed to me that LinkMarket was about as large as any of the free services and I felt that would be a good starting point.  I do not know that this is a truth, however the website did disclose that it had over 97,000 link partners and over 3 million exchanged links.  I like that full disclosure and they sold me with those figures.

So far I’ve got some mixed results.  I have been able to secure a couple of link exchanges with life coaches and personal growth websites which is great - however the majority have not responded to my requests yet.  You are able to send out 5 requests per day for free.  My biggest concern is that pretty much all of the requests coming to me are in the area of male enhancement and medications - not exactly what I’d consider a quality link - and not the material I want to refer my readers to.  Needless to say, I’ve rejected those.

Here’s the marketing quote for LinkMarket:  "Link Market - Free Link Exchange, Link Swap and Link Trade Directory Have you ever tried to exchange links, swap links, or trade links? Was it hard? Use link market instead; - it is easy to use, free and very smart. It will save you hours of work. "

3. Began Monitoring with Alexa - The final step taken that I feel is notable is that I downloaded the Alexa toolbar and began looking at the information they present.  Alexa provides a site ranking tool to analyze your web traffic.  While they give a lot more details for your site when you are one of the top 100,000 on the web, I have been able at a minimum to see where my site ranks.  Its not a lot of data yet, but I will be interested to see how this improves over time. 

Learnings & Observations

Clearly as you can see, my focus for the past month has been on getting a better understanding of my traffic rankings as well as increasing the visibility and reach of my website.  Exchanging links seems to be one way to improve you site’s reach for a few reasons.  Popular websites may send visitors your way, and also the search engines seem to send more traffic your way when more quality resources link to you.  One of the nice things about posting articles in different directories is that this increases your breadth of readership and many also allow you to add a link.  When I analyze my reports, the vast majority of visitors are coming from organic Google searches, a goal of mine is to see that become a bit more diverse with traffic flowing from a number of sources.

My other key learnings came from a meeting with a website development  management team.  I had a lovely lunch with a project manager that used to work for AOL and a marketing manager from SAIC  to discuss i-grow.net, my business strategy, and traffic results.  While I was hoping they could answer a few technical questions on Search Engine Optimization, we ended up talking higher level.  Ultimately, there was a strong sense of confidence that my site could benefit from improving the design such that it is more search engine friendly, but regardless I’ve been on the right track developing content and business vision first.  I know I could improve the look and feel, and I may consider their services towards the later half of this year when I complete my e-book and need to come up with some technical solutions for this as well.

Traffic and Monetary Results

As I mentioned in my last blog entry, I am now relying on Google Analytics as my site reporting tool.  So far I really like it and I’ve only begun to use their reports to their full capacity.  Starting this month, I’ll be posting my Google PageRank and Alexa Results as another form of monitoring popularity.  Here are my results for the last 3 months - this gives a good indication of the progress of this website (recall I started with 7 unique visitors in January)

February

March

April

You see that the site visitors grew by ~40 from February to March and ~ 60 from March to April.  I am pleased with this trend.  For the first time I am able to get a sense of the speed of growth and right now it looks like the growth rate was approximately 150%.  So my target for May will be 150% of 60, or 90 more visitors.  If I get about 280 visitors this month, that would demonstrate if this is a steady growth rate or not in these early stages.  Here are the AdSense results:

March

April

Financially you can see from my Google AdSense results that I made just over $6 last month (please don’t make me calculate the hourly rate!).  While the revenue’s did not double from the previous month, you’ll see that the number of clicks went up from 7-13, and the page impressions (less accurate because I don’t know how many are mine), also went up significantly.  Each Google AdSense unit has a different payout rate, so I am very pleased with just about doubling the number of clicks - even if my total revenue did not go up quite as substantially.

As you see in the image above, I’ve installed the Alexa and Google Toolbars and my site’s Google Page Rank improved from 0 to 1 and my Alexa site traffic rank is at 6,613,695.  I am not sure how often that is updated, but I’ll keep track of it as a metric over time as well. 

Plan for the Future (Moving Forward)

I am pleased with my goals from last month.  I was able to meet all of them with the exception of the financial goal of making $14 in Google AdSense.  So that is a carry over to this coming month - I feel with the results so far that it is a realistic possibility.  Here are the rest of my goals. 

Monthly Goals

• Write out a detailed outline for my upcoming e-book
• Submit 2 articles to 3 relevant article directories
• To attain a total of 15 reciprocal links on my links page
• Re-write long term business vision and mission statements
• Test out e-book distribution technology (autoresponders)
• To earn $14 in Google Adsense revenues for the month of May

Long Term Goals

• Continue writing at a pace of 10 articles per month (2008 goal of 120 articles)
• Continue developing one podcast per month (2008 goal of 10 podcasts)
• Continue writing one newsletter per month
• Create a more user friendly archives page - filterable by category
• developing a free e-book to give out to people as an incentive for subscribing to my newsletter

Looking forward to providing another update in June!

"If you’ve found this site useful, please link to it so that others can benefit!"

Be Well

Related Articles:

• Growing a Blog Business - April 1, 2008
• Growing a Blog Business - Feb 18, 2008

Written by Doug Nau, The Wellness Coach, i-grow.net