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The Year of Promotion
January 03, 2008
Happy New Year, everyone! In the funny way things go, I spent yesterday feeling a bit overwhelmed at the wealth of things that I know, the content that I have, the scripts to upload, the sites to maintain ... and then I woke up today feeling ready to roar into the New Year.
This coming year, my focus will be on promoting my sites. Up until this past fall, I had never been particularly good at making promotion a priority. It seemed like I was always too busy building sites, adding pages, developing new ideas.
But back at the end of September and the beginning of October, I began making promotional work more of a priority. It started with an outsourcing deal (which, unfortunately, fell through) and then moved on to the serious study (and implementation) of a number of traffic generating strategies.
My approach is to focus on getting backlinks, for long-term traffic, rather than instant Web 2.0 traffic. So far, the small bit of promotional work that I've done has really paid off. I had my best affiliate month ever in December, and even had a couple of $300 days, plus a nice handful of $200 days. Most of this income came in the form of affiliate commissions from physical products - which fulfilled one of my goals for 2007. The rest came (in order of amount, from highest to lowest) from paid text ads, WidgetBucks, Chitika, Clickbank and finally, scraping the very bottom of the income barrel, Adsense.
Traffic-wise, I increased traffic on the sites I'd focused promotional efforts on - in one case, by as much as 5X, and in the other cases, about triple the traffic. Now that the holidays are over, traffic has fallen, but it's still higher than pre-holiday levels.
With more of a focus on promotion, I know that 2008 will be an even better year!
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Posted by BJ at 02:30 PM in Traffic | Permalink
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Comments
Happy new year Belle!
Your focus on marking current sites is exactly what I'm doing this year. Just a couple of new projects need finishing, then I'm dedicating the rest of the year to marketing what I have. More than convinced these last few months that going forward successfully is best done with what I already own rather than keep building new sites.
May 2008 be the best for us both!
Posted by: Peter | Jan 4, 2008 6:42:27 PM
Thanks, Peter. Yes, here's to a great year.
Mind you, I don't think I'll stop building more sites or adding more pages. But I'm definitely making my promotional efforts the first priority, followed by what I've always done (building!). I can't help but think it's the right move, because it worked well for me this last quarter.
Posted by: BJ | Jan 4, 2008 6:48:04 PM
