Myvisitoractivity.com is a free hit counter established over a year ago, the site has a PR3 and over 100 members. It’s getting next to no search traffic, it makes about $2 a month from Google Adwords and it’s in need of a redesign.

To start this experiment we need to work out our Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that we are going to measure our success by. I’ve come up with these.

KPIs

• Traffic
• Members
• Revenue

They are simple KPIs, but in this case that’s all I think we need, we need to increase our traffic, increase members and in turn we should be able to increase revenue since revenue is directly related to traffic.

I’ve put together a simple spreadsheet to give us an indication of where we’re at with our KPIs. The sheet shows a weekly breakdown over the last 2 months, and a weekly breakdown for the next 2 months, it also have a number difference and a percentage difference with a simple coloured background to give us a visual idea if we’re improving or not. Under all of that are some graphs, again, a visual indication if we’re improving or not.

Marketing wise I’ve checked out the standard PPC networks, Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN Adcenter, they all have a lot of competition for free hit counters, and checking the search results reveals the same too, lots of sites offer free hit counters, since this is a 1-2 month project I don’t think we’re going to get much value for money with PPC, and I don’t think we can compete with SEO in this short amount of time.

I’m going to put the site on a $25 a week budget, mostly because I don’t believe we can draw much profit in the short term, we could in the longer term but this is a short experiment, another reason is that spending around $25 a week over 2 months will add up close to $200. The more we spend on the site the more we need to make back and since I want to sell it at auction in a month or two I think I’m going to look elsewhere for advertising that might be able to produce a good return on investment (ROI).

My first experiment in advertising is going to consist of posting some ads on forums to try and buy ads on webmaster resources, or webmaster forums that could drive some traffic our way.

While I post these ads, I’ll work on touching up the design, there are a few problems with it, and I’ll make some improvements and go from there. Check the spreadsheet to see where we are at now, I’ll do an update next week on how we’re going with this experiment.