CC9 -- Ms Green

[Satvrn]

Who am I?
I am a man of many names, been in the IM scene since 4 years now I think. Never tried to be too outgoing / ballsy on forums or on Facebook. You won't find me partying with escorts nor driving Lambos.

Paid traffic has been working very well for me, usually averaging about 80-100k a month in profits which is nice, but after some time you want something new. I don't want to optimize banners every day, I don't want to get into bidding wars with other affiliates, I do not want to have my shit ripped anymore. It just gets boring after a few years and I've lost my drive.

My true love and strength (I think) is thinking outside the box. I love to come up with a new idea, create a test and if that test is showing the results I've aimed for this is one of the greatest feelings I have.

Enough yadda yadda about me.


What is my niche for this experiment?
My site is an informative / entertainment project targeted towards males (30-50 yrs old) that want to improve their life: live a healthier life, live a happier life, gain social recognition, get more money. Those would be the main topics for my site.


What's the goal of this traffic leak experiment?
Create a site that gets shared. I want organic growing traffic that is not directly correlated to the paid traffic I'm sending to the project. I want to get to the point where I have a great CLV and snowballing traffic volume. People should share the page with their friends, use it as a homepage, read the newsletters and enrol in the custom services / guides / products I will create once the time is right. I do not want to be bound to one traffic source that controls my revenue.


How much time am I putting in to it?
I will personally put in 2 hours every day (1 day off per week). That is totally uninterrupted time where I'm very productive (thank you Pomodoro technique). I have two designers and two webdevelopers working fulltime for me and I plan to use them for this project as well. I already hired a content writer for the site but I'm not sure if it's the right fit.


What do the traffic levels look like now?
This is where I need to get my shit together asap. I'm running paid ads to the site via Facebook right now and those clicks show up as 'social' traffic in GA. I need to find a way to separate paid clicks and organic / social clicks. If somebody has a good idea, please leave a comment below!

I'll be updating different metrics along the way (visits, FB likes, optins and conversions broken down per source).


Personal goal?
I want you guys to hold me credible for this. I've become a lazy idiot. Money is rolling in, so might as well do shit tomorrow right? There's no real incentive for me right now and I hate this feeling. I've been slacking off far too much lately and I know that if I continue down on this path that I'll end up getting royally fucked. Also this project should be an asset which is stable. If shit hits the fan this project should at least generate 30k in profits a month using non-paid traffic.


What's the status of the project?
Not a single thing has been done in the last two weeks... at least nothing on the outside. Internally we created a custom questionnaire, a new .pdf giveaway and we are creating videos right now. A writer has been hired to get 2-3 high quality content pieces ready every week. The FB fanpage is growing and we're looking at roughly 250 likes now (22.4% up since last week).

The site runs on a premium Wordpress magazine template, has a professional logo and professional social media graphics.

With paid traffic the site generates about 180-250 USD profit a day (90-100% ROI).

I've got tons of ideas for this project. Lets see how many we can get to work!

Daily progress / to do's
​

I think it would be a good idea to include a simple todo list in this track to keep you guys updated without bumping the thread every day and to hold me accountable for slacking off. A minus (-) means that the task is still open / unfinished, a plus (+) means that the task has been completed.
I'll update the todo list daily. If you have any questions, feel free to shoot.

2/12/14
+ setup emails for project
+ prepared list of doc share sites
+ uploaded ebook to slideshare.com and scribd.com

3/12/14
+ create new oDesk account
+ create job opening for writer on oDesk
+ interview and hire writer (16 USD / hr - for 2-3 quality articles a week)
- youtube video creation: look for screen recorder + voiceover artist
+ questionnaire / survey coded to increase interaction and to drive traffic from paid sources to the site
- create questionnaire / survey subpage

+ content
- design
- html​

4/12/14
+ youtube video creation:

+ download Keynote
+ prepare slides
+ find voiceover artist​

- create questionnaire / survey subpage

- design
- html
- setup subdomain​

5/12/14
+ opening post @BuSo
+ tracking fix for paid / social traffic (Google Analytics)

6/12/14
+ finish Keynote file for video creation
+ buy intro for video creation (Fiverr)
+ buy voiceover for intro video (Fiverr)
+ setup automatic backup to google drive (updraft plus wp-plugin)

7/12/14
day off

8/12/14
+ check quality of new content writer (update: bad content, back to interviewing new writers)
+ spread free ebook on document sharing sites (Fiverr)
- finish GA ecommerce tracking
+ write script for first video and send it to the voiceover guy
+ create YT account
+ finish voiceover for video
+ create video
+ upload to Youtube and optimize video

9/12/14
+ hiring new writer (will deliver first article in 2-3 days)
+ embedded YT video post that gets most views to gain more engagement @ YT
+ fix missing onpage optimization before emp notices that I don't have real titles, descriptions or tags yet
- setup comparison site that reviews different products (main source of monetization atm) to increase conversion rate
+ writing content for comparison site

10/12/14
- find out how to setup subdomains with Ajenti
+ setup the comparison / review site
+ reread Ccarters onpage thread
+ check content quality of new writer (update: first article looks great!)
+ install search-meter plugin
+ add Facebook page banner to sidebar (only a static picture and no real widget to cut down on plugins and site speed)
+ setup exit pop with optin form (more details in a separate post later) I used MailMunch (update 13/12/14: don't upgrade to the silver plan if you're interested in the analytics. The stats only show two graphs and the conversion rate.)

11/12/14
- write content for email follow up sequence
+ hire second writer (getting good content up is my main priority atm)
+ finally finished the questionnaire / survey / configuration thingy. This allows people to interact even more with the content. Hope that this small tool will be shared everywhere.
+ added GA tracking for Youtube traffic (video got over 200+ hits since upload, will post full video stats on 15/12/14)

12/12/14
couldn't get anything done as I moved into my new house (kickass office, will post pics soon to revive @thehobbster s thread)

13/12/14
+ posted new article
+ GA ecommerce tracking done according to my dev (not sure if it works, we'll see in a few days)
+ outsourcing content creation for email sequence (after 3 days I'm looking at 37 subscribers with the exit pop. Not that great but it's a start)
gotta take care of some offline biz today and tomorrow so I won't get much more done

14/12/14
offline biz / day off

15/12/14
- setup test media buying campaign and send traffic to the survey / questionnaire (primary goal: convert the CPA offer, secondary goal: getting opt ins). I could not promote the CPA product directly on legit sources, so I hope that the legit questionnaire will get approved on traditional online media.
+ right now I'm only collecting opt ins with exit popups. I'll try to add links to the opt in forms in the content and sidebar area as well.

16/12/14
+ create first piece of newsletter content
+ bought 2k 'legit' high retention Youtube views, 50 likes, 50 shares and 40 comments for the video. Lets see if we can rank it faster that way.
+ fixed the GA ecommerce tracking which was broken

17/12/14
+ helped optimizing the main offer I'm promoting atm
+ offline stuff: surprised my girl with the new home. Great success!

18/12/14
+ researching the main audience / demographic using Facebook
+ researching for shareable content to post on Facebook. I'll probably sign up for something like Hootsuite to automate the FB posting. What I noticed is that a lot of people go through older posts and like / share them.
+ 80% of CCarters market research paper done
+ complete the first CC9 homework
+ created a script that dynamically generates links in pdf files. Will use this to track the performance of the second ebook I'll promote with the questionnaire.
Note: had to stop the paid campaign for now as I had to redo the tracking once again

19/12/14
+ finish research paper
+ review paid campaign performance of this week

20/12/14
+ create 3 troll accounts in 2 forums, participate in discussions and create a troll thread with a link to my site

21/12/14
Day off. Spent most of the day reading CCarters stuff and a few marketing blogs.

22/12/14
+ plan new content according to CCarters teachings
+ research new forums to create a few accounts and start socialising with people

23/12/14
+ compile list of related blogs that allow comments

24/12/14
Day off. Christmas.

25/12/14
+ writing a 1500 word post for the site (that got great feedback)

26/12/14
+ buy FB shares and FB posts on other pages to boost popularity
Spent some more time with the family for Christmas.

27/12/14
+ plan more content for content writers that will resume work in a few days

28/12/14
+ complete writing 1.5k word article
day off

29/12/14
+ finish CC9 homework
+ research pics, format article, post article
+ setup promotion on FB for the article. I'll drop 100 USD on the promotion of the article. I want to generate some buzz.

2/01/15
+ promoted the latest article to a custom audience on FB. Turns out that 50% of the audience are hardcore vegans / vegetarians and hate the article... on the other hand there are people defending the article. 17% CTR on FB and 3 cent clicks: tons of shares, comments AND opt ins on my site.

3/01/15
+ interacting with the crowd on Facebook, we got a few discussions going on. Lots of traffic.
+ giving the content writers new tasks and a new direction. Will aim for 2 massive posts (2k+ words) per week.

----------------

13/01/15
+ finish setting up the questionnaire campaign
+ schedule and post new articles
+ setup more FB ads to expand FB audience and boost optins

14/01/15
+ research the best setup for sending out automated emails / autoresponder
+ setup newsletters in new mailing system
+ brainstorm more article ideas for the writers (using Ccarters compelling titles doc as a guideline)
+ increase interlinking of questionnaire / survey

15/01/15
- research paid apps that can be quickly coded and launched for iOs. Define features, setup meeting with developers, define deadline.
+ had to move the whole project to a new server as the old one had some issues
+ tested and implemented the standalone homebrew Mailmunch script (will share it soon if you guys are interested)

16/01/15
Flying out, (hopefully) closing a profitable business deal. Can't get any work done till Monday.

19/01/15
+ spent most of the time doing due-dilligence for the new business purchase
+ post and schedule new posts
+ rip pics of hot bikini models, watermark, post on FB to increase likes / reach (not sure if that's a good idea)
Note: low clickprices resulting in 500-600% ROI for the paid campaign so I'm looking at 1-1.5k in profit a day at the moment.

20/01/15
+ setup more accounts for traffic linking
+ setup more FB campaigns that promote the posts of the site

21/01/15
+ found new type of pictures that lead to tons of likes and shares
+ researching new ways to increase the growth of my FB page (now over 1k+!)

22/01/15
+ optimizing questionnaire / survey for mobile devices

23/01/15
+ setup campaign for mobile devices. goal: capture optins for newsletter
+ prepare fourth newsletter mailing with buy link
+ prepare survey for newsletter subscribers to get more insight of my audience

----------------

10/02/15
+ posting 6 blog comments with links to my site (3 have already been approved)
+ building credibility for my reddit account to post my introduction thread later on
+ played a bit with my armada of accounts I have on a popular question / answer site. Managed to place my link right below the question with ease. I think I can use this to place links on questions that get a lot of traffic.

11/02/15
+ commented on 5 relevant blogs, got 4 comments approved, one blog is linked to a big national newspaper. Got flamed by the author (contradictory views and he's butthurt now), ended up with only a few clicks (7 so far).

12/02/15
+ over the last two days I've experimented more on the q&a site and created a process on how to swoop into old questions, post answers while dropping links, upvoting to the top and staying under the radar at the same time. Already got 8 legit accounts up I can use, until next week I should have 20 in total. High volume questions have answers with up to 15 votes, so it'll be easy to rank them there. Now the only question is how to find high traffic questions but my developer is already at it.
+ got my aged and legit account canned on one of the biggest forums in my niche. Turns out their 'no link policy' means no fucking links allowed, not even to a .gov site I linked in a helpful comment. Fuck them. Next.
+ reddit is very small in my GEO but I created an account and posted in the subreddit of my GEO. Lets see if I can get the homework done under those shitty circumstances.

13/02/15
+ outline forum posting plan (what where when how) and get accounts ready. Introduction post in 3 forums.

14/02/15
day off

15/02/15
+ finished 15 accounts for the Q&A site (incl 3-5 posts each). no link dropping so far.

16/02/15
- researching more forums to post in
- preparing content I'll drop in 5 days in one of the forums. hope this shit will get a sticky there (high quality content, one link to my project, one link to one competitor).

 

[Calamari]

Hey man. How about this?

Make an exact copy of the page and noindex it. Then send your paid traffic to it. Now anyone that enters your site from Facebook through that url was paid traffic.

If the noindexed url starts getting shared it will muddy the waters. So maybe there's a better way, however.

 

[MoneyStalker]

If the noindexed url starts getting shared it will muddy the waters. So maybe there's a better way, however.

Hide that URL syntax using Htaccess, if you redirect them to a page Htaccess internally will reformulate your URL for example your ad is a link like this "http://example.com/advertisment" Htaccess will check that URL if anyone click on that ad he will be internally reditecting the "URL only" or in another word reformulate your syntax by editing it to "http://example.com/" so no one will know the URL, except someone who follows a redirect.

 

[Capital]

​

Paid traffic has been working very well for me, usually averaging about 80-100k a month in profits which is nice, but after some time you want something new. I don't want to optimize banners every day, I don't want to get into bidding wars with other affiliates, I do not want to have my shit ripped anymore. It just gets boring after a few years and I've lost my drive.

​

Wow, I wish I had your problems. lol

Question if you're willing: How do you monetize thus far? Vague answers are cool.

 

[Satvrn]

Hey man. How about this?

Make an exact copy of the page and noindex it. Then send your paid traffic to it. Now anyone that enters your site from Facebook through that url was paid traffic.

If the noindexed url starts getting shared it will muddy the waters. So maybe there's a better way, however.

Hide that URL syntax using Htaccess, if you redirect them to a page Htaccess internally will reformulate your URL for example your ad is a link like this "http://example.com/advertisment" Htaccess will check that URL if anyone click on that ad he will be internally reditecting the "URL only" or in another word reformulate your syntax by editing it to "http://example.com/" so no one will know the URL, except someone who follows a redirect.

Thanks for the input guys! I'm a total noob when it comes to htaccess so I've sent a message to one of the devs asking if he can implement it.

I've tried to edit the default GA groups and to categorize the traffic using the targeted site (couldn't find an option for referrer):

The link that is used for the paid campaigns contains &id=paid so I hope that GA can work with that to mark the traffic accordingly. No idea if that works, apparently it takes up to 24h for the changes to take effect.

Wow, I wish I had your problems. lol
Question if you're willing: How do you monetize thus far? Vague answers are cool.

Sure. Right now the monetization is done with a single CPS offer my buddy owns, so I get a very nice payout and have access to all the backend data. This is a huge advantage as I can use the customers data to track them down on Facebook. That lets me draw a clear picture of my converting audience. I will also be paid a percentage of every recurring sale that's been done.

The long term goal however is to monetize the traffic with my own digital products and to create brand new products based on the needs of my audience.

 

[Samwise89]

Paid traffic has been working very well for me, usually averaging about 80-100k a month in profits which is nice, but after some time you want something new.

Whoa! Very nice. No doubt you'll be very successful with this project then if you've achieved that with paid traffic.

I have two designers and two webdevelopers working fulltime for me and I plan to use them for this project as well. I already hired a content writer for the site but I'm not sure if it's the right fit.

Now I'm getting giddy. This is going to be amazing to see how all this comes together and how fast.

If shit hits the fan this project should at least generate 30k in profits a month using non-paid traffic.

If you can pull this off, there's nothing more that I'd love to see than a giant flip of the site and a celebration.

With paid traffic the site generates about 180-250 USD profit a day (90-100% ROI).

You must seriously be the PPC optimization king or something. I hope to learn a lot from reading your updates!

Good luck

 

[Capital]

Hey thanks for the response. That data on the backend must be solid gold. Probably cuts hours/days off of customer persona creating, testing, etc.

Good luck on your project!

I'm watching closely.

 

[Satvrn]

You must seriously be the PPC optimization king or something. I hope to learn a lot from reading your updates!

Thanks for the kind words! Optimization is a big part and I would say that testing completely new ideas is just as important as optimizing your ads / banners.

Hey thanks for the response. That data on the backend must be solid gold. Probably cuts hours/days off of customer persona creating, testing, etc.

It sure is. Its a real creativity booster for me to just go out and see what kind of people order the product. People share so much shit on Facebook it's scary. You can come up with great new angles or audiences just by looking at their sites / pages liked and if you check their timeline you see how much bullshit they share (which could be used to traffic leak?).

The only issue is that it's time consuming to manually check every single profile. It would be great to have a script that automatically downloads the profile contents and puts it in a .csv or database so a script can automatically create 'the perfect customer' for you with avg age, common interests, common behaviours... hmmm...


Update on the tracking issue:
Seems to work now after editing the default channel groupings:

I had to use the utm_source variable which apparently is mandatory for defining acquisition channels. So utm_source=paid and the link of the ads have &utm_source=paid in their URLs. Should work now.

Next step:
Getting ecommerce tracking ready so I can show some revenue stats. I tried to go through the tracking code yesterday and didn't understand shit. I can't even understand CSS properly, so the ecommerce js tracking thingy scared me. Thank god for web developers!​

 

[badya122]

Wow man, those are some crazy profit figures! It will be real interesting to follow your case study, so that I that learn your monetisation ways and implement them in my case study. Thank you so much for sharing all this with us, it's going to be pure gold

 

[CCarter]

My Official Take:

This might be the most challenging project, just due to my own language barrier. Other then that, I've studied this niche in the past and almost started a project geared towards this, but scrapped it when I couldn't get moving after 6 months of registering the domain. SW popped up and took my focus.

The site is extremely clean, and you can tell detail and thought was put into it's creation. It has the official big brand look. Most images are very extremely good. Even though there is a lot of content/data, it doesn't feel cluttered. I'm actually sitting here browsing the site, just naturally, most people's site I can't wait to get off of, this one has a nice elegant feel. I'm going to guess that bounce rate is low, could be wrong cause if the social aspect of traffic, but organic should be low. This is going to be fun.

Traffic targets might be limited due to my own language, but shouldn't be an overall problem. This is a site that's one of those perfect traffic leaking opportunities, might make sense just to stay socially - but with organic growth instead of paid. I see some permission based marketing opportunities being lost, which can probably bring you back recurring traffic if we take advantage of it. For example, if you are getting 100K a month in visit, you should be able to at least get 1-2% of those visitors onto a mailing list and hit them up once a week to grow your own controlled audience, so you are less reliant on paid. Damn even re-targeting might work.

Sites' main category only appear to have 2 articles, at a glance cause of the blank space. Fooled me at first until I realized there were additional topics at the top with image. I assume the blank space is throwing off others if it threw me off. First article I click had two 404 errors for the outbound links, and 1 coming soon page. (We'll get into more details once on-site)

For the CPS offer - you should look into Custom Audience and create a profile accordingly just for that direct revenue source. Sounds like a side project now.

Edit: nevermind, looks like you might be doing that.

 

[Satvrn]

I see some permission based marketing opportunities being lost, which can probably bring you back recurring traffic if we take advantage of it. For example, if you are getting 100K a month in visit, you should be able to at least get 1-2% of those visitors onto a mailing list and hit them up once a week to grow your own controlled audience, so you are less reliant on paid. Damn even re-targeting might work.

Absolutely, a nice email list will be built using exit pops and promotion in the articles. I got tons of ideas for this but thought it would make more sense to get more content on the page.

Sites' main category only appear to have 2 articles, at a glance cause of the blank space. Fooled me at first until I realized there were additional topics at the top with image. I assume the blank space is throwing off others if it threw me off.

This is my main pain point right now. The two biggest and most shared articles are written by me, but it is extremely challenging to find a decent writer. Main focus right now is to find a good writer that can deliver 2-4 quality posts a week (1000+ words each) and to get some good content on the site.

 

[MoneyStalker]

I see that Satvrn or Saturn post his schedule of steps which is the important thing to do, also it's the link that helps to understand what's going on, CC's post is abstract a bit here and on all other threads, hope he expose some practical steps other than saying theory, including that he avoid private matters.

And hope great success to all 9 CC's disciples I mean 12 lol!

 

[Satvrn]

(Note: I'm updating my OP with my daily progress and to do's.)

Quick update:
Fiverr is awesome. Got a nice intro and a nice voiceover for the intro video for just 10 bucks and it looks legit as fuck. Creating the video was a pain in the ass. I used Keynote to prepare the slides, recorded the screen with Quicktime and edited the files with Adobe Premier Pro (I love Adobe Creative Cloud). The whole process took a few hours and was very tiring, but now I know how to train people to create the videos for me. Spent 150 USD for the whole voiceover that was done by a friend of mine.

Uploaded the video to Youtube with all the relevant onpage optimization stuff you can do for Youtube. The goal right now is to tap into the organic traffic of Youtube and send them to my site (main goal: convert with the CPA offer, secondary goal: get them to download the free pdf book / get them to like the FB page).

I embedded the video in the post that gets paid traffic from FB. I want to increase the views of the video so Youtube will rank the video higher in it's SERPs. I've never done something like this before, but I got some help from a buddy of mine who knows a lot about video marketing. Let's see how many organic views I can get in a week from now. If this works, I'll hire some people to create more videos. I have a really good feeling about this.

Finding a writer is harder than I ever imagined. The first guy produced utter garbage in 5 hours which cost me about 100 USD. Got a new girl for 25 USD an hour and I hope she can produce some decent content for the project.

This is the main issue right now: creating good content

As CCarter said before, the site looks good but after all is very thin. There are 3 main articles that get read and shared quite a bit, but the rest are just filler articles that make the page look more legit. The focus for this week is to get at least 3 quality articles up there to increase the time spent on the page.

There's also the questionnaire / survey that has been lying around for a week. Need to get that up asap.

Lots of stuff to do, so lets get busy.

 

[CCarter]

MailMunch was a niche touch, just interacted with it. I might even steal it, was pretty nice setup.

 

[Satvrn]

Quick update 11 Dec 2014

Some stats:

First row is the 'money article' that gets all the paid traffic. 5 minute avg time on page is very decent, the other articles seem to get read as well. Bounce rate of the paid traffic is hight but well, it's pretty broad paid traffic, so I guess that is okay.

New vs returning visitors of the last 1.5 days. This leads me to believe that almost 20% of the broad paid traffic return to the site to check out other articles. I think I'm doing something right.


Website speed:

Now what the fuck is this? 8 seconds avg load time according to GA?

Not great, I know. The page is built with Wordpress and has like 4 plugins and social stuff that slows down the site. But I'm having some issues with the frantic speed optimization you guys do. Does it really matter if a page loads 2 seconds or 3 seconds? I remember back in my old days of buying popup traffic that speed was the key and that makes total sense. You need to interrupt the users browsing experience and shove the advertisement down his throat before he closes the page after half a second. But with informative / magazine style content projects? My guess is (assumptions are bad, I know) that if people are interested in a topic they'll wait 3 seconds on a page to load. Are there any studies that measure the impact of page speed and the traffics performance?

I'm not sure if I should continue with Wordpress or have one of the devs redo the entire page with Typo3 or Pico. That will take a few days that could be spent adding more kickass features or completing the free app that has been in the works for quite a while.


Finding good content producers is hard:
I think I've finally found the right fit for the content creation process. The writer charges 25 USD an hour and delivered her first article yesterday (cost me like 40 USD in total). The avg reading time of that article is at 4 minutes right now so I guess that the quality is alright and people are interested. Told her to write up a 2k word article for next week, lets see what she comes up with.


Setting up a new funnel:
I'm not a pro when it comes to email marketing but it would be dumb not to collect email addresses of customers and warm them up a bit. I've setup a simple optin form when people want to leave the site (check out https://www.mailmunch.co/ - really smooth plugin). So far I've only collected 10 leads in half a day but I'll prepare a series of mailings and drop a CPA link after a week or so. I'll be busy moving to a new house on the weekend, so I'll focus on increasing the optin rate next week.


I hate Christmas:
Also, fuck Q4. This is why I dislike relying on paid traffic. Click prices are up 35-40% nowadays and will increase towards Christmas. Profit margins came down drastically.

 

[CCarter]

Don't switch CMS, your is fine.

You might be having mobile traffic increase the avg loading time. I'll look into exactly why you only have a 78/100 score.

 

[Capital]

lol with this dude's cash flow he'll be at the finish line months before the rest even start to gain traction.

Dat capital doe....

 

[shinjiru]

I need to find a way to separate paid clicks and organic / social clicks

Use the Google Analytics campaign tracking builder and set the tag medium to organic

 

[Satvrn]

lol with this dude's cash flow he'll be at the finish line months before the rest even start to gain traction.

Dat capital doe....

I am not sure if that's true. Yes, I may have more budget than other people, but I think that's just a tiny part of the equation. I see that other people have the 'do or die' mentality and great drive and I think that is the main key to success. History is full of examples where big companies are getting their asses kicked by tiny underdogs that have the right mindset.

Update 18/12/14
I still hate Q4. ROI of the paid campaign for this project came down to 16% and is still falling. Last few days were (small) losses. I still keep running the paid campaign as it gets me a few likes and hopefully a few recurring visitors.

I'm almost at 500 likes for my FB page (keep in mind that those are more or less highly targeted likes) and 85 optins for the newsletter (nothing has been sent out yet, but the first batch of the content is already done).

The media buy I wanted to get up and running got delayed due to technical issues and all the stress I had when moving into the new place. It's still on my list and I have to get it up NOW as it's a managed buy which means that I won't be able to optimize much if I start it next week.

The content writers are good, working on 2-3 quality pieces each week (so 4-6 new posts a week). The first posts that they've written are getting read and also shared a little by the readers which makes me happy to see.

The video is doing 'meh'. Got like 20 viewers from the YT search and like 1-2 clicks to my main page a day. I bought a few high retention views, comments and votes to help me rank the video. Average view length of the video is like 50% which is not too bad for a 10 minute Keynote presentation. If the video ranks up and gets more hits from the YT serps, I'll have a few more videos produced. I think I can get a quality video up for 300-350 USD each (5-8 minutes long).

Also GA ecommerce tracking seems to work after fixing a few issues. Still have not enough data to show you guys anything cool, but I'm happy that it works.

 

[Satvrn]

Update 22/12/14

Paid campaign:
Stopped the paid campaign as CPCs increased even more. Here's the ROI of the last 7 days:

48%
82%
5%
-52%
-100%
-100%
-25%​

Doesn't make any sense to continue running traffic for 45-50c per click to the page when it's not backing out. Everything will be back to normal after the 2nd week in January, so I'm not worrying too much about the dropping performance.

Trolling forums:
I've created 2 accounts in a forum somewhat related to my niche and started posting. I'm looking at 25+ and 10+ posts with my accounts and they look pretty legit. I created a thread with a controversial topic and dropped a link to my site at the bottom (my initial post did not have any links to make it look very legit. When somebody asked me for the link of the article I was referring to I included it).
The topic started a nice discussion with 20 legit replies and 400+ hits. The discussion is still going on after 2 days now.

Referral traffic stats:

First and fourth row is a link in a blog comment on a related blog I dropped. The avg time on site is pretty high for traffic coming from that link. The second row is BuSo, the third row is from the forum trolling I did two days ago. I thought that the traffic from the troll OP in that forum was of higher quality, so far it looks like I've been wrong.

I'll create a few more troll forum accs to see if I can get some quality traffic from there.

Content:
After reading Ccarters stance on content (CC9 classified info, sorry guys ) I've been brainstorming / researching new ideas and shooting it to the writers (which do a great job, the email sequence is almost done). I got a 100 optins using the exit popup script (Munch plugin for WP) so far.

Organic Facebook page reach:
What a fucking joke. A post on the Facebook page with around 500 likes got around 40 organic impressions after 24h. Makes me question the importance of Facebook likes for your page...

 

[CCarter]

The troll account was just suppose to be created, no trolling was suppose to start. Also the troll account was never suppose to interact with your brand at any level.

 

[Satvrn]

The troll account was just suppose to be created, no trolling was suppose to start. Also the troll account was never suppose to interact with your brand at any level.

I know, that's why the forum is only 'somewhat' related and not directly in my niche.

 

[Satvrn]

Short update:
I'm glad that Christmas and NYE are finally over, back to the grind.

Content stats:

I don't know why the bounce rates are so high. I mean it's obvious for the hard sell and paid traffic (#1) but #2 is read a lot without any outgoing links in the article and it's still 90%. Any clue? The article got liked 30 times and has been shared over 25 times.

This is the first project I'm monitoring with GA so I have no idea what a good bounce rate is btw. I think the avg time on page is great overall, but the bounce rate is insane.

Traffic stats:

Nothing groundbreaking but fun to see how greatly the quality of the traffic differs. The youtube vid is only getting a handful of clicks every day, but it's slowly climbing for the main keyword and is sitting at #11 in the YT SERPs.

Referral stats:

Nothing fancy here. Looks like that traffic from controversial forum posts interacts well with the site. The controversial article and the forums this has been posted in are not really relevant to the main topic of the site but people coming over those links seem to spend quite a bit of time on the site.

Paid traffic:
Paid traffic is doing fine after Christmas. CPCs dropped, conversions went up, ROI is at 173% atm. Profits will be 100% reinvested into new content and more post promotion.

Mailmunch:
Bleh, plugin stopped working around Christmas, I couldn't log into my MM account anymore, resetting password did not work. Support replied yesterday that they'll reset the password but I'm done with it. One of my devs will code a lightweight version of the script that will run on the server.

This shows you that relying on third party services / products is dangerous. I only lost like 50 optins but I don't want anything to brake down when I'm getting a few hundred optins a day. I will share the script with my BuSo bros once it's done.

Edit: the Munchmail support email was sent from a no-reply email address and their contact form is not working anymore. fml.

Update: Munchmail replied back and reactivated my account, everything works fine again. I'll still get the standalone version coded so I can sleep tight at night.

Misc:
So yeah, I'm happy that we're through with all the Christmas and NYE bullshit so I can focus again on stuff that is really important. I need more articles that kick ass (content writers are at it) and I need more accounts at various traffic platforms that I can use to leak traffic from (signing up new accounts, interacting with the community and letting them age).

CC9 homework is challenging for somebody who never really did any homework in his entire life but it expands my horizon. I already got tons of new ideas after completing all of the assignments.

 

[Calamari]

If bounce rate is a concern internal links should help lower it. But if time on page is good I wouldn't sweat it. They're getting what they want from the page.

As long as you're converting at an acceptable clip the metrics don't matter. Tools like metrics are just there to help you figure out what people want so you can test the traffic and convert it.

 

[Satvrn]

Trolling update:
Published an health article a few days ago, scraped the Facebook IDs of people interacting with health / vegetarian / vegan pages, created a custom audience and promoted the article about the health benefits of eating high quality meat.

The 29.11 USD spent on traffic resulted in:

• 400+ clicks to my website
• 50+ likes
• 50+ shares
• 40+ comments
• 30+ newsletter opt ins
• 5+ tweets
• 2 sales (about $100 rev)

CTR was through the roof. Started with 17%, now it's down to 12% which is still great.
It's still going on. People are divided into two groups battling each other. It's great to watch. The likes I've gained through this seem to love my brand, going through old posts liking, sharing and commenting. I stopped the promotion right now to see if it spreads organically.

I used this program to scrape the IDs / emails of users to create a laser targeted audience on FB (looks like shit but works). It's really easy to get your content in front of the right audience.