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A Little Confession (or more about BJ's adventures in procrastination)
June 20, 2005
I have a little tiny confession to make. If you've been following along with my web publishing adventures, you'll have heard me mention that old site of mine, the one that I discovered earlier this year is one of Yahoo's darlings for some of its keywords.
(Old site is, of course, relatively speaking. My terminology sees an old site in the affiliate marketing world as "not a new site". But it's a site that I threw up a while ago and then completely neglected.)
So back around March (it might have been February ... I forget), I started noticing some activity on the adsense channel I had set up for this site. Not that much activity but a few cents. Curious, I checked my stats. And nearly fell off my chair, as it turned out I was coming up in the top ten results, and in some cases, the top three results, for certain search terms at Yahoo.
Of course, I'm not that lucky. These are not what you would call "frequently searched" keywords, but given their infrequency, they're actually quite competitive.
I kind of hustled then. No, really. I did. I had already been toying around with moving this site to a new server, so I decided I would do that, but then figured I might as well get the thing a nice new redesign while I was at it. Then I decided I might as well fool around with the adsense placement to see if anything would happen. I changed the Adsense from a two unit banner-ad type ad to a five unit skyscraper ad unit running down my left sidebar. My ads were already blended into the site so I left that unchanged.
Well, my adsense skyrocketed. (Again, this is relatively speaking. Very relatively speaking). Yahoo continued to send me a nice trickle of visitors and my Adsense CTR was very high.
So what did I do when my nice new template landed on my desktop? (Thanks, Teli)
Nothing. Well, okay, I did enjoy checking on my stats and Adsense for that site every day, but that was about it.
The kicker, though, was the fact that this site of mine was a little tiny site. 12 pages. I was sitting on 30 more original articles that were waiting to be put up, and it was easy to write more content, too. I was making between $1 and $2 a day, on 4 to 6 cent clicks (see why I never gave this site much thought?), and I only had 12 pages up.
How's that for procrastination? It was pretty obvious to me that the smart thing to do was to add more pages to that site, and do it quickly, while Yahoo still liked me.
Well, about three months later, I'm pleased to report that I am now on track. The site has been at its new home for a while, and this weekend I did nearly everything that was on my to-do list for this particular site. I've been starting to add new content and it is now on my "add a page or two or three daily" list of sites. Luckily, Yahoo still likes me (or rather, that site).
Three months. If there's one thing I do well, it's procrastinate.
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Posted by BJ at 11:31 PM in Taking Action | Permalink
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Comments
I don't think your the only one who does that well :P
Posted by: Jean-Rene | Jun 22, 2005 9:15:07 AM
It is an odd thing about human nature, but knowing that other people procrastinate too makes me feel better :)
Posted by: BJ | Jun 23, 2005 11:52:42 AM
