Startup Insights

My first three month milestones for the Google Adsense project were very simple.

1. Increase traffic to the core sites which were primarily the Alchemya domain and my personal blog. Status – achieved
2. Book the first dollar of Google Adsense revenue and then triple it every month. Status – almost done
3. Increase the number of Adsense impressions across all domains. Status – grew by 50% over first month
4. Close the first sale of Alchemy generated content for dollars. Status – done
5. Direct traffic to specific buy now pages for packaged content produced by our risk practice. Status – done
6. Learn as much as possible about online advertising and the content space as possible. Status – still learning

While some elements turned out as expected there were a number of interesting twists

1. It took a full month to get the basic themed blogs up and running. Within the field of finance there are a number of areas that I like and follow but the final decision was left to Google trends to see which key words and terms were really popular. When it came to finance, oil and gold prices beat risk management and Basel II hands down.
2. Traffic was proportional to the amount of time spent in producing content, using Google blog search to identify article and news to comment on and promoting already written content.
3. With some colorful vertical banners produced by our designer, it was easy to direct traffic to two key landing pages on the Alchemy website
4. March produced the first dollar of Adsense revenue. Once the initial click through rate came out at the end of month, it was obvious that the only way to meet the triple revenue target was to increase the traffic to the site, increase the dollars earned per click and the click through rate.
5. For the increased traffic we used April for blog directory and Rss feed submissions and nothing else. I put a reliable full time resource that took the complete portfolio of blogs and did nothing but submissions for a month.
6. For the higher dollars earned per click, we needed to increase the proportion of traffic coming from North America. Luckily the decision to post the finance courses on the corporate finance blog had paid off. By end of April 70% of the traffic for the free online corporate finance courses was coming directly through search engine referrals. And it was primarily non-desi traffic.
7. While I thought that the crude oil commentary blog would generate the most adsense dollars per month, it was the corporate finance courses that became the money makers.
8. As search got more relevant, traffic picked up, the click through rate started improving by itself. Not growth that will make you sit up and take notice but still a decent improvement.
9. Posting frequency on all blogs went up in April. That is where the four hour plan came into play.

Results

When we started this experiment we had one domain with two primary properties. The desi back to desh blog and the alchemy website. The primary tool for tracking traffic was the weblog analyzer that bundled bots, spiders, crawlers and visitors in one category. The combined traffic for the two properties was 50 unique visitors a day. Three months later this number now varies between 120 – 150 unique visitors a day across four key blogs and the primary alchemy website and its growing. The dollar revenues are still a joke but they are growing at the right rate and in the right direction and now it is only a question of feeding content and making connections on a daily basis.

If you looked at the weblog analyzer pre the effort the all inclusive visitor log was between 700-800 visitors a day but the bulk of this traffic was crawlers, spiders and bots. Three month later that number is up at 1400 all inclusive visitors a day but that is only on the core alchemy domain and excludes the traffic being generated on Learning Corporate Finance, startup insights, and Crude oil insights blogs

Next steps

In the first three months the hard part was getting going and putting the blogs, the themes, the content and the widgets up. In the next three months the harder part is going to be posting frequency and generating enough interesting content on a daily basis to keep visitors engaged and occupied. Like most ventures the first three month milestones were easy to achieve. All they have done is created room for this effort to go on for another three months. If we can maintain the same growth rate (traffic up by 50%, revenues up 3 times), at the end of the next three month phase we will have a story.