CC9 - Donna

[built]

Got my first month of my first website's analytics. Seems pathetic compared to people here but i'm learning. Using this thread to track my progress.

Would have bought an aged domain, but never had that knowledge when I started.

 

[c4yrslf12]

What are your sources (organic, referral, etc)? That'd be interesting to see on a month-to-month also. Good start.

 

[Romac]

Sooo.. what's the plan? How are you going to get to 50k pageviews a month? What's the significance of the number 50k, how'd you come up with that as a target?

 

[built]

What are your sources (organic, referral, etc)? That'd be interesting to see on a month-to-month also. Good start.

I had 4 organic searches. The rest was youtube and twitter.

Sooo.. what's the plan? How are you going to get to 50k pageviews a month? What's the significance of the number 50k, how'd you come up with that as a target?

Im following the pointblankseo link building course, and doing keyword research/writing content.

Im trying to follow CCarters traffic leaks.

More social media promotion.

The reason for 50k, no idea. Just seems like a good short term goal.

 

[emp]

50K is probably arbitrary..

@builttodominate
However, if your goal is 50K pageviews/ month.. how about taking a screenshot of the Pageviews metric (which is visible, but small) instead of Sessions?

::emp::

 

[built]

50K is probably arbitrary..

@builttodominate
However, if your goal is 50K pageviews/ month.. how about taking a screenshot of the Pageviews metric (which is visible, but small) instead of Sessions?

::emp::

I think the other metrics are important. I dont want 50k views with 70%+ bounce rate

 

[emp]

@builttodominate
well... I meant out the Pageviews in focus, not Sessions

::emp::

 

[Romac]

Either way .. lol

Looking forward to following along. +1 to stackcash's advice from the other thread. You're in good company here, work hard and "we're all gonna make it".

 

[built]

@builttodominate
well... I meant out the Pageviews in focus, not Sessions

::emp::

Lol. I thought you were testing me

Does anyone know why my adsense RPM is all over the place? Goes up 200$ then drops down to 0$

 

[stackcash]

Awesome thread. This is more along the lines of what you should be focusing on.

For now, don't worry about RPM so much. Get the fundamentals ingrained in your system. Make them as natural as breathing.

If I was you, I'd be asking questions about the metrics for the keywords you chose to target such as search volume, avg cpc, what kind of sites are ranking in the top 10 spots, etc. (tip: don't tell us your keywords, you'll be shooting yourself in the foot - just show us the data!). Keyword research is a fundamental cornerstone to your entire business. Make sure you spend a good amount of time on it.

I normally spend 3 to 5 days doing keyword research. I come up with a handful of "money" keywords that are super competitive and are my endgame in terms of organic rankings. I also come up with many, many keywords to use as the focal point for articles/content. Once I have those article keywords, I'll find 5 - 10 supporting keywords that are related / lsi / complementary to the main article keyword. These supporting keywords will be worked into my content and will increase the relevancy of each article - greatly increasing the chances of getting ranked for the article keyword, while reducing the amount of links I'll need to build to get there.

 

[built]

Awesome thread. This is more along the lines of what you should be focusing on.

For now, don't worry about RPM so much. Get the fundamentals ingrained in your system. Make them as natural as breathing.

If I was you, I'd be asking questions about the metrics for the keywords you chose to target such as search volume, avg cpc, what kind of sites are ranking in the top 10 spots, etc. (tip: don't tell us your keywords, you'll be shooting yourself in the foot - just show us the data!). Keyword research is a fundamental cornerstone to your entire business. Make sure you spend a good amount of time on it.

I normally spend 3 to 5 days doing keyword research. I come up with a handful of "money" keywords that are super competitive and are my endgame in terms of organic rankings. I also come up with many, many keywords to use as the focal point for articles/content. Once I have those article keywords, I'll find 5 - 10 supporting keywords that are related / lsi / complementary to the main article keyword. These supporting keywords will be worked into my content and will increase the relevancy of each article - greatly increasing the chances of getting ranked for the article keyword, while reducing the amount of links I'll need to build to get there.

That course you linked me to from backlinko.com is what I'm using as far as keyword research techniques I have actually learnt a lot from it today.

As for the bolded bit, I had no idea about that. Thanks for the tips man. I'll definitely be doing that with future content.

Hoping to hit 10k twitter followers by the end of the week. Basically just doing the whole tweepi thing to grow my account.

Then I will put more emphasis on instagram. I have about 4k followers on there.

Thing I hate about instagram is that I have to post from my phone. Cant use buffer or any other app?

 

[Kevin]

Start lower on your pageviews goal. Is the goal to monetize 100% via ads? If so then pageviews makes sense as an objective, if not, then figure something else out.

You can't post on Instagram anywhere but Instagram unfortunately, but there is a lot you can do to speed up the workflow.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Does anyone know why my adsense RPM is all over the place? Goes up 200$ then drops down to 0$

Yes, because you don't have enough data (clicks, views) to find out what the true average is yet. So when you get one click, or a bit of CPM, the RPM bounces all over the place. When you get more traffic, it'll start to settle out and you'll get a real idea of what you're RPM's can be.

 

[built]

Todays plan of action:

Sign up for as few niche related forums, and just post genuine content. Solidifying a base to start "traffic leaking"

Create 5 unique motivational pictures for social media.

Post a youtube video describing my website and how it benefits the user(not too sure how this will go) Will try rank it for a "how to ...." keyword

Comment on 5 related niche blogs.

Then its back to studying some more/keyword research.

Current website speed. Its making me obsess

I'm not sure what else to do. I'm using the bwp minify plugin and I noticed that I still had some stylesheets from old plugins that I have since deactivated. I removed these stylesheets but the requests haven't changed.

I tried to purge my cloudflare cache.

Also I have this request which I'm really not sure what to do about. I tried to change my background settings but no luck.

http://**********************.com/wp-content/themes/sevenmag/images/backgrounds/.png

I mean its not even loading a file but the request time on that line^ is over 600ms

 

[badya122]

It could be that CloudFlare is causing high number of requests. I had tested CloudFlare in the beginning of CC9. It made my site slower and increased the number of requests. I was recommended WP Fastest Cache Plugin instead, and it does the job really well. I have my site running with 7 plugins (it's 5 too many ), compressed images, and with WP Fastest Cache on a VPS. So far, it's been running pretty fast, even though there are quite a few requests still:

So try to get rid of CloudFlare, use the cache plugin and get rid of everything you don't need.

 

[built]

It could be that CloudFlare is causing high number of requests. I had tested CloudFlare in the beginning of CC9. It made my site slower and increased the number of requests. I was recommended WP Fastest Cache Plugin instead, and it does the job really well. I have my site running with 7 plugins (it's 5 too many ), compressed images, and with WP Fastest Cache on a VPS. So far, it's been running pretty fast, even though there are quite a few requests still:


So try to get rid of CloudFlare, use the cache plugin and get rid of everything you don't need.

I cant install a cache plugin on my server for 'security' reasons. I'm using GoDaddy Im hoping when I have enough money I can move over somewhere else, they are terrible.

How do you only use 7 plugins? I have 20 active plugins lol , most of them are backend

 

[emp]

There is a list of requests in that tool (pingdom)

Look at that and see what you can ditch.

::emp::

 

[badya122]

Well, 7 plugins is still too many. But they are light weight, for example one of them is just a self written contact form. It is just easier to insert the code into my theme that way. Another plugin is for adding images for each of the "writers", as WordPress does not have this functionality, and without it the site looks incomplete. Another one is actually making the site faster than slower, as it loads comments from disqus only when the page is scrolled to the bottom. And the others are cache and XML generator, and search meter. Just realised I had 6

What could be causing slowness and a lot of requests is JavaScript. User tracking makes the site significantly slower. I have Piwik installed, and that alone added about 300ms to the loading time. Another one is email collecting via popup or a widget form, as it makes ajax request to process the forms. That was another 400ms that I got put on.

 

[built]

Well, 7 plugins is still too many. But they are light weight, for example one of them is just a self written contact form. It is just easier to insert the code into my theme that way. Another plugin is for adding images for each of the "writers", as WordPress does not have this functionality, and without it the site looks incomplete. Another one is actually making the site faster than slower, as it loads comments from disqus only when the page is scrolled to the bottom. And the others are cache and XML generator, and search meter. Just realised I had 6

What could be causing slowness and a lot of requests is JavaScript. User tracking makes the site significantly slower. I have Piwik installed, and that alone added about 300ms to the loading time. Another one is email collecting via popup or a widget form, as it makes ajax request to process the forms. That was another 400ms that I got put on.

Im going to try this. Also need to lower my server response time.

Here is the list of my plugins lol:

Askimet
Better WordPress Minify
CloudFlare
Contact Form 7
Google XML Sitemaps
GZip Ninja Speed Compression
Insert Post Ads
iQ Block Country
Lazy Load
Monarch Plugin
OptinLinks
Regenerate Thumbnails
Search Meter
Simple URLs
Wordfence Security
WordPress SEO Premium
WP-Optimize
WP Smush.it
WP User Avatar

 

[badya122]

Here are the ones that you should delete:

Askimet (don't need this, you can have Disqus conditional load when the page is scrolled. Disqus has moderation included)
Better WordPress Minify (Don't need this. WP Fastest Cache does that)
CloudFlare (If you are not a paid customer, don't expect fast performance is what I learned)
GZip Ninja Speed Compression (WP Fastest Cache does this too)
Insert Post Ads (Don't need this right now, as you are just building your audience? You decide. You can place ad code in text widget anyway)
iQ Block Country (Who do you want to block from your site? Aren't you building traffic here?)
Monarch Plugin (Social buttons and boxes eat the most of site's loading time)
OptinLinks (Try mailmunch. It will do a pop up form by just placing the JS in your footer, before </body> tag. But that will probably make no difference. Just get rid of the plugin for cleanness sake)
Regenerate Thumbnails (You only need to run it once, with new theme/wp installation)
Simple URLs (This one has not been updated in 2 years, so probably a good idea to get rid of it just because of that too. You can set up your link format in Settings -> General -> Permalinks. Use custom links with the following: site.com/%category%/%postname% or just site.com/%postname% there. No need for a plugin)
Wordfence Security (I think your server should be secured enough by HostGator)
WordPress SEO Premium ( ... )
WP-Optimize (Do you often need to clean your database or do a lot of manual sql queries? If yes, keep it, otherwise you don't need it)
WP Smush.it (This one is useless. Downlaod JPEGmini from torrents, or use tinyjpg.com or tinypng.com for image compression) Smush.it uses Yahoo old service, which limits image size to like 500kb or 1mb.)

That will leave you with just 5 plugins.

Now, I am not a pro or someone in position to be giving advices left and right. I just shared my experience with my site and hope you find it useful

 

[built]

^thanks for that man, I will make all the changes and we shall see what happens

As for the country blocker, I block everyone from getting into my backend (nomsayin)

Super Urls is just to cloak my aff links

 

[emp]

Holy Plugin, Batman!

As for the rest of the requests.. take a screenshot from pingdom (the list is right there) and post it.

::emp::

 

[built]

Holy Plugin, Batman!

As for the rest of the requests.. take a screenshot from pingdom (the list is right there) and post it.

::emp::

Decided to do a little competition research. My comp. page speed

got some work to do ^ beats me on time and performance

Decided to upgrade my hosting. Now I need to figure out how I can transfer my site

 

[stackcash]

Use a plugin like BackupBuddy or WP-Migrate to backup your WP and database files. Then go to your domain registrar and point the domain to your new host's nameservers. Setup wordpress on the new host. Install the same backup plugin. Upload the backup you made...and viola....your site is transferred.

Decided to upgrade my hosting. Now I need to figure out how I can transfer my site

 

[built]

Use a plugin like BackupBuddy or WP-Migrate to backup your WP and database files. Then go to your domain registrar and point the domain to your new host's nameservers. Setup wordpress on the new host. Install the same backup plugin. Upload the backup you made...and viola....your site is transferred.

I spoke to my hosting company they said I need to sFTP? is that the same as what you just described?

That being said, feels like christmas