Forum Moderators: phranque
No $100 milestone, but I force myself to think traffic. A heart felt thanks to all who answered my ton off questions.
So, might I ask you good fellows, have many off you cracked what someone called the 500 barrier and if so
how long did it take
I am following a multiple domain approach ab initio, do you find it better to focus on 1 site, or work on several at the saome time?
Sometimes I find myself running round in circles, confused when things go wrong in many sites all at the same time :-)
I had a site that launched a bit before MSN. It was a "pick of the week", the first week that MSN launched...
500 uniques in 1st month , thats awesome, so was that from msn.com, i.e. msn USA?
I get the impression that MSN has much higher user rates in USA compared to elsewhere
Anyway, can I ask you what you would consider decent figures for a new website nowadays
Say
month 1 10,20,30, or 50uniques/day
month 2 30, 50, 70 uniques/day
month 3 100, 200/uniques/day
My 100 is spread over a few sites of wich the best is doing perhaps 35uniques/day so, i'm convinced they are underperforming a bit
My sites are ecommerce , so I suspect they grow organic traffic a lot slower than informational sites
The way to get big numbers when starting up is not through organic search, of course, which tends to be a very slow ramp-up, but through other types of exposure.
I was lucky to get two other kinds of exposure on that site very early on:
- MSN "site of the week" in it's category (remember when "site fo the week" listings were all the rage?)
- Magazine articles, in quick succession to the above (one led to the others).
Of course, it ultimately did no good, as at the time, there was no practical way to monetize the site! Plus, it was a community site which, despite the traffic and uniques (I think I had 10,000 registered members within 6 months) never reached critical mass. (See discussions elsewhere here on how hard it can be to get people to post in a new community. It's a binary switch - you either can't get them to talk, or you can't get them to shut up... :) )
The above DID lead to links-in - in spades. (At a time when they didn't mean anything to search-engine rankings.)
If there is any way to get news coverage, I am convinced that it is the single most useful think you can do for your site's ranking. News coverage begets more news coverage, often without your knowledge, as other writers crib off the copy. And that leads to people placing links - again, often without your knowledge.
I sold a different site that also got repeated news coverage that I think contributed to it's ranking. At the time of the sale, it was the #4-#5-ranked site for my city name. The only sites above it were official city sites, chamber of commerce, etc. (All of which linked to my site.) It ranked above our "world famous" zoo, which is the first thing that pops into people's heads when they think of my city.
(Don't go looking for it now, as in a strange twist of fate, a year after I sold it, the domain name was re-sold to Microsoft, which uses it for a completely different purpose.)
