The Blog For Entrepreneurs

Having started this blog about one month ago as an entrepreneur blog, we now have about 100 readers per day. As the blog is partly about helping entrepreneurs start an online business we thought it would be cool to give a progress report each month as a kind of diary of what we are doing, what we intend to do and the consequences of our successes and failures. So here is volume one!

We get the traffic in the following chunks; some organic traffic from Google (about 10%), some from comment traffic, where we have left comments (about 30%) and the other 60% is generated via Twitter where we have, as of writing 3500 followers. We have been adding about 100 followers per day on Twitter so it would be safe to assume that our Traffic will grow along with our followers.

Some of the downsides for organic traffic on the blog at the moment is that there are only 12 posts. We have one freelancer working on fifty articles, but as we have said previously, the freelance articles are not the best and we are finding that we spend as much time on editing these articles as we do writing them… so from a speed perspective this hasn’t really worked for us yet.

Linking is going nicely. We are using a linking system that we think will work quite well for us but we have only been using it for a week so we can’t judge its effectiveness yet, we will let you know what it is and how it is doing. The top tip from John Chow has been used to good effect, our top commentators link on his blog has given us 1000 ish links according to ‘link popularity’ and a little traffic.

Still not sure about the look and feel of the blog yet. I am unconvinced about the ‘MarketMaker Deals’ section and would value your input. Basically I have looked through the CJ deals with coupons and special offers which I think might be of interest, so far they haven’t been! There are some quite good deals there too. I really would appreciate feedback on this so please leave a comment (get some link love from the top commentators box too).

Bad news for us.. at least for the moment, is that we submitted too soon to ReviewMe, TTZ Media (cheers John , Text Link Ads and, believe it or not Google Adsense. All of these sites turned us down for now. I was particularly surprised at Adsense though and I am not quite sure what happened. I would say our blog is, certainly aesthetically, better than 70% of all blogs that are carrying adsense, maybe even more. I am unsure how a site that scrapes our content can be accepted for Adsense but the creators of the content aren’t…. Still you can’t battle Google can you? – So I haven’t bothered. I was never looking to Adsense as a big earner anyway and when we have good levels of traffic I am sure they will change their minds.

Goals

Goals for the site for the coming month are to double the traffic, complete the look and feel and add-in the newsletter box from aWeber to get our newsletter up and running.

As a bit of a link and traffic puller I have ordered a sexy looking WordPress theme from a designer buddy that we are going to give away. It will be a full to brimming of traffic pulling plugins and will be extremely sexy. The only problem I have is I will probably be using it myself!

The link pulling situation will be a small link to our blog in the footer. We can’t compete with all the ‘Let me tell you how I make $XXXXX from my blog’ type sites just yet so we had to look at something different. I did the math on the Magaling theme that I use and found 16600 links from that theme. You could argue that charging $5 for it would have brought in $80k but I doubt it would have been that widely used if was charged for. Also how much is 16600 backlinks worth?

If you are interested in seeing it first then sign up to the RSS so you don’t miss the post.I haven’t seen the theme yet, but have worked with the designer before and he is awesome. We are talking about doing one free theme a month for our subscribers.. we will see. Feedback from you on this would also be welcome.

Also, although Twitter is really bugging me with the amount of spam there is, we will be concentrating on increasing followers. At least 2-3% of people following us take note and click a tweet, this seems to be an average unless you are a celebrity blogger or just a celebrity – @aplusk

We also aim to prune the followers too. There would be a great bit of business in someone coming up with an app that allowed you to know if you have followed and unfollowed someone previously. The problem I find when using auto follow is I keep following those I have unfollowed. We are thinking of some solutions to this.

All in all it hasn’t been a bad start. We haven’t spent anything, except hosting money, yet and we already have a solid 100 uniques a day.. and that is not bad from a standing start.

The people we have read this month, just so you know:

John Chow’s Free eBook
Yaro Starak
Shoemoney’s 12 week course – the first two weeks…

All were good, free and well worth a read.

I bought one eBook for $27 which was a bundle of ebooks on the subject and frankly all of them, apart from one on flipping websites, were pretty average. I cannot remember the name of the site I got it from sadly, but he was offering $50 ‘if you didn’t find three things you could use’. In all honesty I did find three things… but he didn’t write them…

I look forward to updating you on the prgress of the blog next month and have made this post theme a category of its own as it may be an interesting series of successes and errors as the blog progresses.

Regards
David
@themarketmaker