David Pitlyuk

Traffic

The truth comes out is an interest title for looking back at May, why did I pick that? I chose that title because it’s the first month that there was no huge traffic spikes, it was pretty much all raw traffic. This will allow us to see what the blog really does, which is great. By knowing true numbers, it will allow me to set realistic goals for how I want it to grow over the next few months.

This month I only had 10% of the unique visitors I had last month and about 14% of the number of pageviews. That means I had 2,086 uniques and 3,319 pageviews, compared to 20,000 uniques and 24,000 pageviews last month. It’s a huge traffic loss, but as I mentioned in last months review, over 15,000 of the unique visitors alone came from one traffic source. I’m actually fairly happy with the true numbers, it means I averaged about 68 unique visitors a day with 107 pageviews. I’d like to get this number up and over 100 uniques on average over the course of the next 1-2 months. Of course some huge traffic spike would skew that, so we’ll see how things go.

Last month my new vs. returning rate was only 4.8%, mainly due to spikes in traffic from single sources. This time, I got a true rating, 26% of my visitors are return visitors. I’m pretty impressed with that, and it means I have a decent number of loyal readers.

Monetization

In May, I removed the majority of advertising from the blog except for one AdSense unit, and instead was trying out AuctionAds. Mid-month, I checked my results with AuctionAds, and saw really high click-thru rates, but no revenue. By end of the month, I was still seeing the high CTR’s, and had only made about $2.50. I still believe AuctionAds can work well, but I need higher traffic to gauge whether or not it can be a good revenue source compared to other method.

AdSense impressions were very limited, and only pulled in $2.50 for the entire month. I’ve decided to put AdSense back into the posts for now, and I’ve already made more in by June 3rd then the entire month of May.

I want to reiterate that the place where my blog is right now, monetization is not a top concern. Building traffic and writing great content is the number one priority. As the blog grows, monetization will further grow into more of a concern…but worrying about how much money it is making when your blog is a recent launch is not a good way to make it grow.

RSS Subscribers

RSS subscribers stayed pretty steady in the 60-70 range. I did do a peak normal day on the last day of the month, getting 76 subscribers. This is hopefully a sneak peak into June where the numbers will hopefully at least slightly increase.

Another interesting thing to look at with RSS subscribers is the trendline for overall subscribers from the inception of the blog through the end of May. Using a linear trendline, we can see that the number of RSS subscribers is trending to go up over time:

Search Engine Goodness

Last month I saw a 260% increase in search engine traffic.  This month, even with having only 10% of last months traffic, I still saw a 14.5% growth in search engine traffic.  Here were the top 10 searched keywords:

1. e92 m3
2. total amount of liquid in dram sandals
3. kontera wordpress where
4. virginia mansions
5. infiniti g37
6. powercast ipo
7. 2008 infiniti g37 coupe
8. 2008 infiniti g37
9. redirect 301 “single file”
10. $10 plane ticket

It looks like a lot of my older content is getting the majority of search engine traffic…which makes sense.  Another interesting fact is that Google provides almost 93% of the search traffic:

Popular Pages/Content

Here was the most popular content in May:

1. David Pitlyuk (Homepage)
2. The 45 Best Technology Sector Corporate Web Designs: A-G
3. The 45 Best Tech Sector Corporate Web Designs: H-O
4. A Raunchy Dora The Explorer
5. 2008 Infiniti G37 Coupe
6. 2008 BMW M3 (E92) Production Pictures
7. Hot Import Nights 2007, Washington DC Pictures
8. How I’m Getting Paid To Drive A Dodge Viper For The Summer
9. Mansion Hunting In Northern Virginia Part 2
10. My Home Office…And Tagging You For Yours

A lot of the content is getting recycled from previous months, and still making the top 10.  This is mainly from search engine traffic.  I hope to see some newer content move up the list by next month.   It was nice to see the homepage rank #1 in terms of traffic, it goes to show that people are visiting and reading the latest…especially those that are not subscribed to my RSS feed.

Top Referrals

There are two main statistics we want to look at with top referrals.  First, which source referred traffic, and then which specific sites referred traffic.

Direct traffic is always nice because you know that readers are either specifically typing your name in, or they have your site bookmarked.  This is a nice split in terms of referring sources.  This is also a nice stat to see when the true numbers come out.

Here are the top referrals for websites (not search engines) that referred traffic to my blog:

1. Smashing Magazine
2. CollegeHumor
3. StumbleUpon
4. Digg
5. YoungGoGetter
6. My350Z
7. CSS Globe
8. TNmedia
9. del.ico.us
10. John Chow dot Com

The link from SmashingMagazine has been a great source for “trickle traffic”, bringing in a few uniques a day, but adding up over the course of a month.  I’ve noticed that I’ve been seeing more traffic (although never a lot) from del.ico.us…always cool to see readers are social bookmarking me.

I’m really looking forward to seeing what the next 3 monthly reports will look like.  My blog is starting to get more established, and building a bit of a name for itself.  I hope I continue to see that trend, and see the benefits from all of the hard work.

So there has been a pretty big debate whether or not to declare if a link is an affiliate one or not. You may have seen somebody do something like this:

I make $2,500 a month using Text Link Ads (aff) on my blog

If you don’t know already (aff) stands for “affiliate” aka that link will in some way benefit the author or owner of the site/blog. The above link will generate $25 for me if you sign up for Text Link Ads by clicking it. If a site did not want to disclose an affiliate link, it would just look like this:

I make $2,500 a month using Text Link Ads on my blog.

Obviously this above method is slightly more deceiving, as a reader you do not know that I benefit from the link unless you hover over and notice the “/?ref=68762″ at the end of the URL. That is my affiliate ID, which links my account to a signup.

Should a blogger have to reveal whether or not they are benefiting from a link? This is going to be one of those things where you can’t please everybody since it’s such a debatable topic. Speaking of debates, there is an interesting one going on regarding this very topic between two A-list bloggers. Rand Fishkin (SeoMoz) and Jeremy Schoemaker (ShoeMoney) are going back and forth on the subject, and will hopefully duke it out on Shoe’s radio show on Tuesday.

The history of the debate goes as follows…Jeremy made a post entitled “Full Disclosure: Assume The Position” where he pretty much stated that affiliate links should not be recognized, and that you should pretty much consider anything to be an advertisement:

“So basically my disclosure policy is you should assume I am getting paid for or will get paid for anything I ever mention.“

Rand made a post on SeoMoz directly responding to Jeremy explaining his opinion and why he did not agree. He entitled it “The Vast Ocean Between Shoemoney & SEOmoz and Why You Should Be Able To Trust Blog Links.” Rand explains a couple of scenarios that happen with Jeremy’s mindset, but more importantly this is the scenario he’s worried about:

• You write about a product/service and make no disclosure about any financial benefit you might receive
• Your readers see it and think - wow, Shoemoney really likes that company, I should check them out
• The reader has a favorable opinion and perhaps buys services
• Later, they discover through one channel or another, that you were compensated for your review
• They feel betrayed. Maybe the service is fine, but their trust is now lost - how can they take your advice at face value again in the future? How do they know you’ll be honest with them if something goes wrong with the company’s services? Why should they believe what you say?

More importantly, this is why it bugged him:

But, he’s going a step further and saying that no one, anywhere, on any blog, should have to disclose money they earn from writing about a company. It’s not the ethics of it that bug me, it’s the potential outcome for those who might take that advice.

So the latest post in respond was made by Jeremy, inviting his friend Rand to do his radio show tomorrow…we’ll see what happens.

John Chow has even made a post in regards to having to “aff” or not. His final opinion? He feels that it looks ugly (agreed) and even insults the readers intelligence (not so sure about that). My personal opinion is that certain things should have a disclosure that it is paid. That decision needs to be made in a fair and honest way by the blogger him/herself. I don’t necessarily think that every affiliate link needs to have an (aff), but if you are paid to do a review of a site, it should be known. If you are providing an affiliate link to something like TextLinkAds, and you are saying you are making x amount of money, your facts and statements should be true and honest. You should provide unbiased truth to your readers, and if you do that, whatever you decide to do is ok with me. But, just like driving…even if you are a good driver, you have to watch for the other drivers. Get to know your bloggers, and make sure you can/do trust their recommendations and content. It is at your discretion.

What do you think? Should all affiliate links where the blogger benefits be disclosed? Or not? If not, can you foresee this being abused?

Update: Rand was a guest on Jeremy’s radio show, you can find the post and audio for it here.

I’ll bet you’ve never heard of the DHL Advancing Micro-Entrepreneurs Award Program. The program, a partnership between DHL and AEO (Association for Enterprise Opportunity) provides microgrants for low to moderate income entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs who are awarded a grant receive $1,000 cash on top of discounted DHL shipping services.

The program was started in 2005 by selecting three grantee organizations to select 30 entrepreneurs to be awarded with grants. The program was a huge success, and in 2006, the numbers were doubled. Six grantee organizations in different target communities were chosen to select 60 entrepreneurs to receive microgrants from DHL.

One of the microgrant winners was Derrick Miller of Chameleon Candle, a $29,000/year candle business based out of Miami, FL. The grant raised his profits by 400% because it allowed him to buy and ship in bulk (most of the products come out of Malaysia). This raised his per-candle profit from $1, to $4.

Resourceful Links:

• PDF file featuring business profiles from 2005 grant winners, and how it helped their businesses.
• DHL
• AEO - Association for Enterprise Opportunity
• AEO DHL Advancing Micro-Entrepreneurs Award Program project website. This site also lists the names of the organizations that chose the businesses in 2006, and may be able to point you in the right directions if you are interested for 2007.

John Chow spoke earlier this week about how big a difference it may be to get pages out of Google’s supplemental index.  The methodology included adding a ton of stuff to the robots.txt file, blocking crawlers from seeing pages like Wordpress’s archives and categories from seeing duplicate content.

There is a much easier/faster way!  There is a new plugin out there called the Duplicate Content Cure for Wordpress.  It simply automates adding this line to pages which have duplicate content on it:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,follow”>

This one line tells crawlers to skip over that page.   One of the pages it adds this to is the categories pages…but if you still want that indexed you can do so with just a simple switch to one of the variables in the plugin code.  Just change this:

$index_category_pages = false;
to
$index_category_pages = true;

You can do this by clicking “edit” on the plugin.

Installation takes two seconds, simply upload to your plugins folder and activate the plugin.

A big congratulations to the folks at Feedburner, as it has been confirmed that Google is scooping them up for $100 million. I think I could say this for most bloggers, but FeedBurner has actually been a service that we all like and enjoy using. FeedBurner has been the saving grace for RSS feeds, allowing site owners to better track, implement, and promote their site and RSS feeds.

So what changes can we expect with this new Google tool? Hopefully nothing too drastic! It sounds like most people are expecting them to implement AdSense into RSS feeds, I’d say that’s a fair assumption. I think this would be great, as long it’s not overbearing. It would allow sites who have a large chunk of visitors that view the site via RSS to make more money if their feeds aren’t monetized as efficiently as possible.

This will be something that I’ll definitely be watching closer for updates.

Update: An interesting fact to note…FeedBurner has 422,717 publishers signed up for its service.  This means Google is paying about $237/publisher.  That’s not too shabby, and I have a feeling they will be making much more overall per publisher.  Should be a great ROI in my opinion.

Here are some interesting links that have caught my eye recently. I find them normally through either my feeds that I am subscribed to, or if you post comments on my blog I may find things on your site.

How to Use MyBlogLog to Successfully Build Massive Blog or Website Traffic
Josh talks about using MyBlogLog to better promote your own blog or website. He takes you through all steps from setting up your account to doing actual promotion. Feel free to check out my own MyBlogLog profile, and don’t hesitate to add me.

CSS Float Theory: Things You Should Know
I absolutely hate dealing with floats in CSS when I’m doing any sort of designing. SmashingMagazine compiles a long list of resources for things you should know…a must read for any designer.

Write a Better Blog Series In One Sitting
I have written a couple of blog series like Mansion Hunting post and my top designs for corporate technology companies post. Both of these series have yet to be completed, but I’m sure they would have, had I just done the entire thing in one sitting and set them to post with a timestamp. Glen from LifeDev guest blogs on ProBlogger discussing the very subject of writing a series at one time.

Organic links and how to get them
We all know that getting organic links is one of the most important factors for growing your site/blog and maintaining the traffic. Al from Self Made Minds makes a great post discussing some of the steps you can do to generate more for yourself.

Why I avoid blog link exchanges
Martin and I are both in agreeance that one should not accept the majority of link exchanges that you get asked to do.

WonderPizza - Pizza Vending Machine
It’s not everyday that you see a vending machine that makes pizzas! Do you think this business model can survive?

Letting go (of feeds)
I need to follow the same route! Ryan quickly talks about how RSS feeds can get out of control!

Make Money Online with Prosper
Brandon goes in-depth and explains how you can make 10+% interest using Prosper to invest your money. I’ve been a member of Prosper for a long time now, but haven’t invested any money. I plan on giving it another look sometime in the near future.

If you’re interested in having your post featured, be an active part of my blog and stay on my radar.

Protect your online purchases by using credit cards. Visa cards offer great buyer protection and have low interest rates, an important factor when choosing a credit card or looking at credit card services. Low interest credit cards will save you money on your payments in the long term.

I’ve decided that I really need to learn more about SEO in general. I’d say that I have a lot of general knowledge, but not much in hard facts. Time to step up, and really try to increase my knowledge in the field, and more importantly utilize what I learn to my advantage.

Other than continuing to read posts from other blogs about it, I’m starting off from the beginning by reading SEOmoz’s “Beginner’s Guide To Search Engine Optimization“. There is also a lot to learn just based on this guide that explains where Google weighs its factors for search ranking. You can see what can cause a negative effect, or where to put the most effort for the best results.

I’ll let you know my thoughts once I finish reading the guide.  In the meantime, if you have any book or link recommendations for things that have drastically helped you, please share.

Who says bloggers have no media power? Yesterday Engadget single handedly made Apple’s stock price lose $4 billion in market capitalization with just one post. Their story claimed that an internal e-mail to company employees at Apple stated that there would be another delay on the Leopard OS as well as on the much hyped iPhone.

“This one doesn’t bode well for Mac fans and the iPhone-hopeful: we have it on authority that as of today, the iPhone launch is being pushed back from June to… October (!), and Leopard is again seeing a delay, this time being pushed all the way back to January,”

What does news like this do to the stock price?

Apple’s stock dropped from $107.89 to $103.42 in just 6 minutes time. It was later on reported that the story was false, and the stock came back up after about 20 minutes, but it still ended up at a loss ($1.25 billion) by the end of the day. The stock is up today so far.

Engadget stated that the tipster sounded legit, and definitely came from Apple’s internal system. Apple is now on the lookout for an employee that sent out the e-mail.

This just goes to show the power of the media. Here’s to accurate reporting!

Earlier this month I mentioned that I was going to try and experiment with AuctionAds. So far the results are interesting. My blog doesn’t generate that many impressions, so I’m probably not getting the full effect. I have generated $0 in revenue, but I have noticed that the click through rates are extremely high.

As of this morning I’ve been averaging a 2.76% CTR throughout the site. I setup two different campaigns:

• Post Targeted: These are ads specifically placed and targeted into a post. For example on my post on how I got a Dodge Viper for free, I placed AuctionAds in there that search for the keyword “1994 Dodge Viper”. The ads have been showing various 94 Dodge Vipers for sale.
• Site Targeted: These have been ads that I put below each post that search for the value “make money”. They are more generic to the site itself.

I was surprised to find that the site targeted ads were performing almost as good as the post targeted ads. I’m getting 2.59% on site targeted and 2.95% on post targeted. I have seen a lot higher days on post targeted though where I was seeing as high 6-8+% CTR which are ridiculously high.

While I have not generated any revenue yet, it doesn’t mean I won’t make any money on those users that have clicked. AuctionAds sets a cookie where if a user signs up for eBay or bids and wins anything within 30 days, I will get paid out for it. So we’ll see over time if any revenue is generated.

I still believe that AuctionAds can best perform on a blog or site that is very niche targeted towards specific products.

If you consider running AuctionAds on your site, please think about using my referral, and help a fellow blogger out.

Wordpress 2.2 was just released for download! Check out their latest blog post for complete information and what was updated. They mention that over 200 bugs were fixed, and there have been a few big updates to the interface and feature set. The biggest one is support for Wordpress Widgets by default. Also speed optimizations were put in place, which helps me especially because everything feels a little heavy.

I plan on updating soon!