January 27th, 2009 | 
Author: Well, after doing some tests using the fantastic “who sees ads” plugin for wordpress I can now continue with the original $100 challenge again.. For those who don’t know what the plugin does, it basically helps control when and who you show your ads to on your blog. It is reasonably simple to setup and I think it is just what I need for this challenge.
Yesterday my number of visitors for the day hit 120 and 54 of those were unique visitors. Every day I am seeing rises in traffic of around 5%, so still a long way to go but I have been adding more content and done more promoting over the past couple of days so I should see some benefit from that soon.
Good to hear the challenge will be continuing!
Hey,
Just a note, if you continue at a 5% per day increase you will hit 2000 by the end of march. I don’t know if its possible, but that is the math. Good luck and thanks for doing this challenge.
tom
Hey,
I have been following you 100 bucks challenge for some days now and i must say you are doing a great job. Thanks for all the free education we are getting.
Also, I would like to ask a question. I started a site which was going good, gaining serps in google, and made it to the second page in around a month with a bit of advertising and started getting around 25-50 uvs a day but then i decided to shift to wordpress from the static structure to handle the articles better but i lost the ranking and the visitors with wordpress. It was no where in the first 100 results on google for the same keyword. I had all the right plugins installed, All in One SEO and others but it didnt seem to work. I tried getting the serp back, writing more posts, revisiting all the seo techniques i could look for but it didn’t work.
So, i shifted back to the static structure hoping the ranking would return, but it didnt.
What you think might be the problem now? The site is still nowhere in the first hundred. What do you suggest I do to get the serp back?
Hi John, the problem is that when you convert an existing site your site’s urls will probably change unless you make a big effort to keep the blog’s url structure the same which is a difficult task I would imagine. However because your URL structure disappears then so it will out of google’s serps.
Your wordpress blog would have eventually got indexed again but I always advise people not to convert existing sites to wordpress for this reason.
I am speculating that all this shifting and changing URL structures and content is probably confusing the hell out of googles spiders and is making it very difficult to index your pages again for this reason. I suggest you stick with either a wordpress blog or static site and eventually you should start to see some indexing. Do yourself a favour and get a google webmaster tools account and upload a sitemap, this should help with keeping google informed.
Thanks a million. I am working on your advice (uploading a sitemap right now).
And loving your race against time. I’ve already bookmarked this blog. Best of luck. I really hope you make it because then it gives hope to all of us that 100 a day in three months is not impossible.
Steve,
Great job all around! This is a great thing that you are doing.
Not sure how this plugin is supposed to work, but I have had your site bookmarked as a home page tab in Firefox since early on in the challenge. I am seeing Google ads, even though I thought that I read they would only show up when someone found your site through a search?
I also noticed that you removed the date from all places except the “categories” page. Was that on purpose?
Are you going to show summaries only on the category pages after you get more articles posted?
Thanks,
Bob