March 18th, 2009 | 
Author: So it’s day 77 of the challenge and whilst I am resigned now to the fact I won’t reach my $100 a day from the European cruise blog by March 31st I am seeing small increases overall in income every day. This is partly due to the small increases in traffic every day but largely due to some ever improving CPC stats.. I would love to be able to see if this is due to advertisers doing placements or whether it some sort of trust issue from google.
I am speculating but it is something I notice with all my adsense sites, the CPC usually starts lower than what I would hope to expect for the niche but gradually improves as the site begins to age. It could be that smart pricing applies to all new sites and they have to earn the trust from google by converting regularly for the advertisers before they start giving you the better paying ads.. Anyway, I am now seeing above average CPC which is having a positive effect on my adsense income, I am now regularly hitting 20% of my target. Here are my latest AWstats for the blog, the slight downturn in traffic for the 13th and 14th was due to some server problems again..
The promotion keeps going and it is starting to show in the rankings for my main keywords.. Interestingly my main keyword phrase “European Cruises” is seeing my blog indexed around position 60 now in the US listings which is a big rise in rankings from below 300 a couple of weeks ago. It is still to low in the rankings to see any real traffic yet but at least it is going in the right direction and I am hopeful it will make the first page soon. However, in the UK listings it is still indexed between 350 and 400 for some reason.
I am also starting to get some link requests which is always a sure sign that other webmasters are starting to view my blog as a bit of an authority and I am not talking about the normal spammy type requests but genuine requests from relevant sites, one of which even offered money to place a context link in one of my articles back to their site.
I have been trying to keep up with your numbers as far as visits and am starting to fall behind. I am thinking this is probably due to the number of articles. How many do you have at this point (end of Feb and now – March 17th)? I have also noticed that my visits vary much more than what you have mentioned (some days 30 others 2).
Also do you have any generalities on predicting what is the max number of visitors you expect the site to get? In other words to you think that you can get 1k each day or 5k each day? Thanks for posting all this information it is quite inspiring.
I still only have around 80 articles which I have decided to concentrate on promoting before I add more. Your variance in traffic is not uncommon, however it seems a bit strange that it should drop so low on some days. I am hoping eventually I will see around 2000 visitors per day for this blog.
Hi Stephen,
I am loving your work, just a quick question how are you promting each article like link backs to other sites/forums or posting them on article sites and linking back?? – if so are you using the same article or posting a diffrent article which is relevant and then linking back??
Thanks for all you have done evan at 20% – that would be my goal for one site lol
Regards
Ricky
How many articles do you have in the blog and how many articles are you promoting to achieve this ammount of traffic?
“some server problems again”
Steve, were these problems related to your hosting company or to how your site is built? Serving 2,000 pages per day shouldn’t be a problem with any hosting account.
Would be glad to know what the real cause was.
Steve,
wanted to send you a mail to your support address on your contact page but it seems that the account is not set up. Got a 550 user unknown error.
Thanks for the reply! I know that credibility plays a big role in a site moving up in Google.
What are you putting in your ‘About’ section? Are you writing about your credentials on the subject?
The reason I ask is because you are approaching the topic of European cruises from a financial angle. How are you justifying that you are a credible source? Thanks again.
Hey Steve,
First off, thanks for sharing. Takes some courage to do this publicly. Who cares if you’re making the $100/day by your deadline? It’s obvious you’ll get there. What’s most refreshing (at least to me anyway) is you’re not touting some blackhat questionable tricks. Some initial research then consistent slow (heck 3 months online is like an eternity) and steady effort wins the race. Which is something that’s all too often forgotten in this our age of instant gratification.