WXTraffic.com is a free text banner exchange, I put this site together over a year ago, it’s using the walker software text exchange script as the backend, it’s the best script out there for running a text banner exchange, the script is $200, the site has a PR3, I think the design looks good but it’s pretty bad for search engines. I’m going to give the site a makeover to make it more search engine friendly.

The site has over 110 members at the moment, receives around 20 visitors a week.

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, the competition isn’t all that big, I think we can get it at about $0.30c per click, but since my highest offer I’ve had on this site was $300, I’m reluctant to spend much more than that to expand it.

I’m going to set a budget of $50 a week in marketing, I’m going to try some similar things that I’m going to be doing with myvisitioractivity.com and that’s to see if I can find some good links in forums and webmaster resource sites that I can buy, if not I’ll take this one to the PPC networks and pay by the click.

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.

Okay so one of the main things I’m going to be doing on TalkingDynamics are business experiments. An experiment will usually be in the form of us acquiring a website, re-doing the design, trying to improve the SEO, and then throwing more traffic at it via a few different means.

Overall it’s one big experiment to work out if we can improve on what we’ve got, and to make more money from it - either from ads on the site, selling a service on the site or from selling the site for a profit.

I’m going to start off with 2 sites to experiment with, these are two sites I’ve had kicking around on my server for over a year now, I’ve never promoted them or done much at all with them, kind of set them up and then forgot about them so I figure I might as well use them as an experiment…

First site is a hit counter, myvisitoractivity.com, and second site is a text banner exchange, wxtraffic.com. I have no idea of the value of the hit counter, but I know wxtraffic.com is worth at least $300 at the moment, because that’s the last offer I had for it.

I opted to keep it and use it as an experiment, see if I can build it up with more members and more traffic and sell it at auction for a higher amount.

Each experiment will have its own post with its own information, check out the myvisitoractivity.com experiment here, or wxtraffic.com experiment here.

If you’re interested in keeping up to date on what’s going to happen with these experiments of mine, subscribe to the feed!

According to popular belief and some research, these are the top 10 social bookmarking sites at the moment according to eBizMBA, they have a whole top 25 largest social bookmarking sites list for last month.

I honestly don’t know how Netscape is still around or even that popular; to me they died many, many years ago.

MyBlogLog in my opinion will continue to grow for a while yet and I wouldn’t be surprised if digg started to decline in the next 6 months. Or get bought out by Google for some reason.

Came across this today when typing in random URLs into text-link-ads link calculator, there’s a picture of Bill Gates when you enter the URL msn.com

http://www.text-link-ads.com/link_calculator.php

I came across this auction today on digital point, it’s a site that’s being auction off for $9,000 based on the site earning around $40 a day…

Problem is that the money is being made from Google Adsense ads, and the ads are against the Google TOS.

So many people are selling dodgy sites with dodgy advertising on it, making quick money and selling the sites before Google shut down their advertising revenue.

The guy says he can easily change the parts that are against the Google TOS, but if he does, then he’s not going to be making $40 a day anymore, his headings and text are for loans, a high paying keyword, if he removes it and puts in relevant content, file uploading, then he’ll drop to probably $5 a day. Maybe more, maybe less, regardless if Google catches on at anytime, they’ll shut the account down all together and ban the site.

Here’s my quick list of rules that have been broken

• May not direct user attention to the ads via arrows or other graphical gimmicks
• May not place misleading images alongside individual ads
• Excessive, repetitive, or irrelevant keywords in the content or code of web pages
• Deceptive or manipulative content or construction to improve your site’s search engine ranking, e.g., your site’s PageRank
• No Google ad may be placed on any non-content-based pages.

Those are from Google’s Adsense Program Policies.

There are further guidelines that Google recommends webmasters follow in order not to be de-indexed from Google, and this site clearly is outside those guidelines.

Is it really worth having your account shut down over $40 a day?