It’s fathers day, and traffic levels to my sites have dipped significantly. I’ve observed this in the past on other national holidays, and on weekends in North American summer months.
Looking at CyberWyre logs: The five-day Monday-Friday average traffic levels of the week leading up to Father’s Day 2006 fell over 45% on the weekend. On other weekends in the month traffic levels only dipped 30% from their Monday-Friday average. Looking at January 2007, it can be seen that traffic levels only dipped an average of 9% on the weekend from their workday average.
Although traffic certainly is affected by factors other than public holidays and weather, from these results, I can clearly see that CyberWyre does experience significant traffic dips on the weekends in the Summer months, and even more so on national holidays.
A poll has been collecting votes from visitors to this site for a number of months now, recording their monthly income from blogging. It is not to my surprise that the majority of blogs are making less than $20 per month. From 2,411 votes collected, over 50% of these reported having a monthly income less than 20 dollars. Below are the results of the poll.
CyberWyre Poll Results
Reported Blog Earnings / Month
$0 - $20 (51%)
$1250 + (21%)
$20 - $120 (15%)
$120 - $450 (8%)
$450 - $850 (4%)
$850 - $1250 (2%)
If it is your goal to earn an income online from your website, then you’ve got to stop thinking about what you find interesting, and what the masses will find interesting. Traffic = Money. Maybe there’s 50 people out there who care to read about what you did today, but how can you attract 50,000 people to your website in one day? Everybody cares about love, everybody cares about sex, everybody cares about health. Perhaps your next site could be about better living, or the latest gossip in the Paris Hilton prison case. This site, CyberWyre, became a hit because everybody cares about money.
I have updated the Website Value Calculator tool and improved upon the accuracy of the estimated monthly income, and estimated website value. The output has also been cleaned up and it is now much easier to read.
Check it out, and please give feedback to the accuracy of its predictions to what you are currently seeing as a monthly income from your site.
As the TV show “Flip This House” is becoming a huge success, the thought of buying an established website or blog, improving upon it, driving traffic and forging advertising deals, and then selling it for a profit is becoming more popular. Websites and forums geared towards connecting buyers & sellers together such as Sedo are popping up, and blogs for sale can even be found on eBay.
So what determines a site’s worth? Well like any investment, you hope to recover your initial purchase price within a given amount of time, and then hopefully continue to make an income stream afterwards. In the real estate market, buying a property for an income stream such as a hotel, a gain of 10% annually is considered quite good — that is, you will recover your initial investment through income from the hotel after 10 years; A $1,000,000 hotel should hopefully give $100,000 annually in profit. As income from blogs is still considered to be more unstable than other investments, a full recovery of an initial investment after three years is a fair requirement.
Although I try to keep in decent shape, at the gym tonight I could really feel that I hadn’t been there enough recently. As I started to think back to all the times that I really was in shape, I started to notice a pattern; I would always exercise in bursts of four months at a time. Once I was in pretty decent shape, and didn’t feel the need to push as hard anymore, I would let myself coast down for a few months and then the cycle would repeat. This was no better than the person who goes on a crash diet every 3 weeks, but eats like a pig in between!
As I thought more, I started to notice this same pattern in other aspects of my life, including this site. As I looked at the traffic and income levels achieved by this site, they were at a peak when my post frequency was highest. When it reached these peaks, as you can clearly see from my Alexa rankings, it drifted downwards after each peak, until I began posting & actively promoting the site again.
It was a lesson we all learned as children: the slow steady turtle always wins the race…in the end. I am going to take this as a lesson learned for myself and keep all of my activities moving at a steady pace, whether it’s hitting the gym or writing useful articles for this site. This is also a perfect example of how blog post frequency can be directly related to traffic levels. This is a main drawback in blogs: there may be plenty of great content available on your site, but if you aren’t producing new fresh articles, your traffic will dwindle away.
When I saw traffic start to slip, I tried to encourage people to visit some of the great previous posts on this site by writing The Most Useful CyberWyre Posts back last October. This strategy certainly did work to temporarily restore traffic, although in the long run, nothing is better than fresh content.
The race is long. Just take it a steady one step at a time and you’ll do just fine.
Over the past few weeks, CyberWyre has been suffering from intermittent server issues. As some of you had mentioned, the Current Top Internet Searches page as well as the News Script were not functioning correctly. This was due to BlueHost, my hosting provider, moving my server from a PHP5 box to a PHP4.4 box without notifying me. Usually their support has been quite good however it took a number of emails and a phone call yesterday to get everything restored. I had previously recommended them for anyone looking to setup their own blog. At the moment I’m not so sure if I would recommend them anymore or not.
If I decide to move my server I will let you know what alternate host I find.
I’d just like to thank everyone who visited CyberWyre in 2006, who posted a comment, or wrote me an encouraging email. This past year truly was incredible — For me, I went from working a 9-to-5 day in, day out, to learning a valuable skill: how to earn an income from basically nothing at all through the Internet, and then finally reaching my goal of retuning to school to study without as heavy of a financial burden.
Thank you everyone, it truly has been a great year. Have a safe holiday season and I hope to hear from all of you in the New Year.
CyberWyre has been online for nearly 10 months now and has almost reached 100 blog entries. The problem with blogs is that good, useful articles quickly fall in the past and are forgotten about. Below, I have outlined some of the most useful articles on this site, and why you should read them.
Starting Your Blog
I wrote a series of articles a few months back that are a great read for the beginner looking to get started online. These tutorials will guide you through finding hosting for your website, installing WordPress, and most importantly, finding something interesting to write about!
Once your site is configured and you’ve chosen a topic to write about, you’ll need to maintain it. Maintenance involves managing comments, and comment spam, generating traffic so that you actually have visitors, and of course writing fresh and interesting content! Here are a few articles that will help you along the way..
These articles will probably be the most interesting to you once you have your site configured, online, and have a few articles written. They overview topics such as best ad location on your site, and inserting high paying keywords into your articles for higher ad payouts.
Other than blogging for profit, I have also done a significant amount of business on eBay. Below are some of the most useful articles on CyberWyre about maximizing your earnings from the online auction website.
I’d just like to thank everyone who visited CyberWyre in 2006, who posted a comment, or wrote me an encouraging email. This past year truly was incredible — For me, I went from working a 9-to-5 day in, day out, to learning a valuable skill: how to earn an income from basically nothing at all through the Internet, and then finally reaching my goal of retuning to school to study without as heavy of a financial burden.
Loading ...