Below are the monthly site statistics according to AWStats:
So there were 45,051 unique visitors in January 2008 which was a dramatic improvement from December 2007 which only brought 1,246 unique visitors. So the total traffic has grown 3600% this past month!
The average time spent on the site was 421 seconds. Damn 1 second less and we’d be right at an average of 420 seconds, so next month everyone has to try and spend 1 second less on this site per visit to achieve this goal. Just kidding!
The busiest day was January 12th which brought a total of 7218 visits. The slowest day was January 1st which only saw 112 visits. The monthly average was 1706.84 visits per day.
Below is my Alexa Graph:
I don’t understand the drop at the end of the graph. January 28th brought 1260 visits, January 29th brought 1108 visitors, January 30th brough 1076 visitors, and January 31st brought 1091 visitors. So how can a gradual reduction of 169 visitors across this 4 day period account for such a significant drop on the graph above?
Traffic Break Down
34.1 % - Direct Address/Bookmarks
63.9% - Search Engine (Stumbleupon, Google, Digg, MySpace, Yahoo!, AOL, MSN)*
1.8% - External Links (from a total of 2617 external links)
* The social networking sites StumbleUpon, Digg, and MySpace accounted for 95% of the search engine traffic.
SiteHoppin brought the most traffic to my site as a private blog with 105 distinct visitors. I will have to hook him up sometime soon.
Below are the keyphrases that brought the most people to my site:
Site Earnings
Contextual Ads - Clicks from Google Adsense, Rubicon Project, Kontera - $174.62
Affiliates Ads - Product/Service Sales Commissions, Credit Cards Signups, Email Captures, Form Signups, etc - $248.41
Total Revenue = $423.03
This is not enough to make a living, not enough to pay the mortgage, but it is enough for a monthly car payment. If you consider the time spent on the site being average of 2 hours a day for 31 days, that’s a total of 61 hours of work, so it’s like getting paid $6.93 an hour which is not great. But you need to examine the potential growth of the site as a whole. Last month I made around $40 on the site, total so this month alone I have increased the revenue tenfold. People say that this income is passive, however building, maintaining, and promoting a site like this takes alot of time!
I recently found out that I can make much more money with much less work setting up arbitrage sites and running affiliate ads on MySpace and Facebook. These blog sites are just not very time/effort efficient for generating revenue.
Contest Winners
James from Henderson, Nevada is the winner of the Dual Spectrum Bubbleponics™ Complete Kit worth $179.95 and a selection of marijuana seeds from Amsterdam Marijuana Seeds from the link contest.
Rachel (I am waiting for her to reply to her email) is the winner of SanDisk Sansa® e200R Rhapsody Series MP3 Player worth $100 from Amazon from the comments contest.
Phillip van Coller of South Africa recently launched a new site, the affiliate lounge which clear explains good solutions to making money online utilizing affiliate programs and social networking sites.
The affiliate lounge offers everything you need to start making money using affiliate programs. This includes a FREE HOSTING service which offers 5 GB of free space, no forced adds, and 200 GB of bandwidth. It’s hard to believe that this would be free. However, he later mentioned to his readers that this company had poor service and did force ads on their site. What do you expect for free? Philip was very honest and upfront about his experiences with them and warned people once he knew about the poor service with this company.
He also offers a FREE KEYWORD RESEARCH TOOL which can be used for SEO marketing and site promotion.
He talks about promoting your site on social networks such as Digg and StumbleUpon. He says that StumbleUpon is better for generating traffic than Digg which agree with 100%, but he also says that they won’t bring 40,000 users to your site in a day, however my GPS post was Stumbled by the guy who runs SeedsForWealth and for some reason, it did actually bring 42,000 people to my site in day. I still want to know the trick that he used to do this so effectively. I would suggest joining the StumbleUpon group over at BlogCatalog and posting a message asking them to stumble any interesting new posts that you may have and it will be sure to improve your the attention StumbleUpon posting attracts.
He also discusses other SEO tactics, how to promote your site on social networks, and different ideas for making the most of your affiliate programs. I think that he has some great ideas and has lots of potential for being the next John Chow.
Today I received a $100 Best Buy Gift Card from an online promotion and I have decided to spread the wealth to one of my readers. So I have used this $100 gift card to purchase a SanDisk Sansa® e200R Rhapsody Series MP3 Player and I am going to give it away on January 31st to a random reader for participating on this site.
To enter the contest:
Write a comment under one of the posts on this site. This comment has to be on-topic, useful, and contribute to the site. Any inappropriate or off-topic posts will be deleted and won’t be counted in this contest.
Be sure to include your email address with the comment so that we contact you if you are the winner. Your website URI is optional, but an email address is required.
How we will pick the winner:
On January 31st, we will draw a number between one and the total number of comments. If that number comment is appropriate and contains an email address then that person will be picked as the winner. It’s that easy!
About the SanDisk Sansa e200R Rhapsody
The Sansa® e200R Rhapsody is a flash based music player capable of playing music, photo, and even video clips. This device holds 4 GB of music which is ~1000 MP3 songs (64 hours of music) or ~2000 WMA songs (128 hours of music) and has a microSD cardslot which allows you to increase the song capacity.
There is a large 1.8” TFT color screen for playing music video clips or displaying the songs album cover. This device will support most image and video formats (gif, jpg, avi, mpeg, real). It has a digital FM tuner, on-the-fly FM recording, and voice recording capabilities. It has a rechargeable Lithium Ion battery that lasts for up to 20 hours.
They can be connected to the Rhapsody music subscription service for $12.99 a month. This monthly fee allows you to have unlimited access to millions of songs without paying per song, however when your subscription runs out you won’t be able to play any of the songs that you have downloaded until you renew. This player comes preloaded with around 1000 songs, but they all expire in 21 days and require you to renew your subscription with Rhapsody before you can play them again - this is their way of getting you hooked to the service and ensure that you will subscribe - not a bad sales tactic!
One accessory that you can’t live without is the Griffin iTrip charger and FM modulator. With this device you can recharge the player in your car and listen to the player through your car’s FM stereo all with a single connection, it runs around $79.99 so it’s almost as expensive as the Sansa player itself which is $99.99.
A really curious thing happened to me a few years ago after I bought coffee from a local cafe. I handed the cashier a $20 bill and she gave me a few bills back in change. I noticed that one of the $1 bills with “WheresGeorge.com” stamped all over it.
I immediately thought that this was a brilliant marketing idea. Just imagine how many people would see this stamped bill as it changed hands countless times from person-to-person. One stamped bill has the potential of being circulated to thousands of different people all over the world during it’s lifetime.
This concept was not new to me. Back in middle school my friends and I were into playing jokes on one another involving prank phone calls. We would do things such as call all the doctors and dentists in the phone book and leave messages on their answering machine or with their answering service and give them a friends name and phone number. The next day they would get calls from tons of dentists and doctors - all day long. We later came up with the idea of writing a girls name and a male friends phone number “Jenny xxx-xxx-xxxx” on dollar bills with a heart next to it. In the upcoming weeks, months, and years he would get countless calls from callers asking to speak to Jenny. It was hysterical!
I know I had run across one of the estimated 103 million bills stamped with WheresGeorge.com before, but this time I was really curious. I had initially thought that this might be a political site about George Bush, but it turned out to be a site that tracks bills as they float across the country and beyond.
I was far more concerned with whether or not this viral form of guerilla marketing a website’s URL on currency is legal or not — because if it is, I’m all over it!
Is this Legal?
Hank Eskin, the WheresGeorge.com brainchild pictured above, says people tell him all the time that defacing dollar bills is illegal. But he claims it is not, as long as the money is still spendable.
The treasury’s website states that it’s illegal to deface or damage money to the point of it’s being unusable so that painting the whole thing with black paint would be illegal (but painting only one side could be argued to be legal).
Claudia Dickens, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, agreed with Eskin, as quoted in The New York Times she said, “According to the laws as they stand now, the practice is not illegal.
”Whoever mutilates, cuts, disfigures, perforates, unites or cements together, or does any other thing to any bank bill, draft, note, or other evidence of debt issued by any national banking association, Federal Reserve Bank, or Federal Reserve System, with intent to render such item(s) unfit to be reissued, shall be fined not more than $100 or imprisoned not more than six months, or both.”
Now it’s also illegal to alter a bill/coin in such a way as to change it’s face or collector’s value (such as tearing corners off a $20 and taping them to a $1, a very cheap and yet sometimes quite successfull way of counterfeiting, or to change a common coin to look like a rarer one) but these fall under fraud statutes and isn’t really what’s being discussed here
anyways.
As long as the dollar can still be used as a dollar (even if it’s in pieces, the bank can still replace it for a whole one and send that one to be destroyed) and there’s no fraud intended, it’s legal.
Stop Selling the Stamps
Yet the Secret Service reportedly hassled Hank Eskin to stop selling the WheresGeorge.com stamps that are still being sold by other people, saying that was using money for free advertising.
And Jim Mackin, an agent assigned to public affairs in the Washington office of the Secret Service, told the St. Louis Dispatch in 2002 that: “We would discourage anyone from participating in such a scheme.”
Mackin said that violators who are caught are told to cease and desist - and usually do to avoid legal action.
Making Money with Money
All of this back and forth between the Secret Service and these websites has not stopped WheresGeorge.com and all its imitators and followers from tracking currency as bills make their way across the globe.
Seeing as though I’m more obsessed lately with how much money bloggers and webmasters are making, I tried to track down Eskin’s income from WheresGeorge.com, since I noticed he’s running Google Adsense ads on the site.
What I did find were WheresGeorge.com’s advertising rates, which give information about the site’s pageviews and how much they charge in terms of CPM — or cost per thousand impressions.
Putting these numbers into a Google spreadsheet. I was able to discover that WheresGeorge.com could be pulling in anywhere from $7,600 (the presold WheresGeorge.com advertising space not listed as immediately available) up to $43,320 per month — the revenue generated if all available slots were sold.
Not bad for Eskin, who says WheresGeorge.com is mainly a fun habit, and that he’s not selling anything. And while the income generated by the site has been said to cover the cost of servers and other hosting expenses, I’d bet you anything that WheresGeorge.com’s money is covering a whole lot more than this now, years later.
Good for Eskin for coming up with a fascinating and ingenius approach to free website marketing.
Check out the video below for the firsthand story behind the government’s reaction to his website.
This concept is like having a business card that is guaranteed to get passed around from person-to-person until it falls apart. People can throw out business cards, but they will NEVER throw out money, regardless if it’s a $1 bill or a $100 bill it will definitely be circulated to hundreds if not thousands of people all over the world.
So if you want an awesome idea to promote your website for FREE then follow this approach, use money to make money and put your money to work for you! Stamp your site’s URL on dollar bills, spend the money like you would normally, and watch your “direct link/bookmark” traffic increase.
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