$100K Site History - November 2005 First $1000

Still CoolI’d always known I could make a chunk of change with Coolest Gadgets but it was November 2005 that really confirmed this to me. Through out the month it was averaging around 1,000 visitors a day and 3,000 page views, it was also the first month that it earned over $1,000 of combined income.

The site was beginning to pick up links naturally now and it also benefited from a fluky bit of paid promotion that exceeded all expectations. Back in October I’d submitted CG to Cool Site of the Day, this cost me $27 (they are accepting free submissions at the moment) then at the beginning of the month I got an email saying CG would be cool site of the day on November 3rd. What this basically means is they will send a swarm of visitors my way who will vote how cool the site is.

This is were being active on forums can really pay off, I posted a request for votes on one of my forums Host Matrix and my friend Roman on Digital point started this thread which really took off and resulted in countless votes (especially when people realised you could vote more than once) and 183 posts.

By the end of the day CG had a cool score of 8.775 which at that time was the highest ever (yes I sadly checked every page in their archives), I won’t harp on too much more about CSOTD but for those interested I did do a full follow up post over on Digital Point.

As traffic generating investments go this was certainly the best by far for me, after the one day peak I have continued to receive traffic from them every since (probably from sad folk who look in the archives to compare scores and wonder why mine was so high 🙂 ).

The site also got a nice natural feature on Ask Men which sent an extra 1,250 visitors, how they found us I don’t know but the ball seemed to be rolling along nicely and picking up natural momentum.

As I said in the title this was the first month that income broke into 4 digits, this is how it broke down:

Google Adsense       630.30
Chitika 396.06
Affiliate Sales 35.00
Total 1061.36

November was the first full month that I’d be running Chitika ads (aff) and I was pretty impressed. They did dive in the future and then rekindled themselves a bit further in the future (more to follow on that one, but if you are ever offered the opportunity to use the RPU ads grab it with both hands).

As always if you have any questions or suggestions please let me know (Scott seems to be getting more comments than me so I need to change that 🙂 )

About Al Carlton

Al quit the 9 to 5 rat race in January of 2007, before then he was a software engineer and systems architect of financial system. Nowadays Al spends the days running his various businesses and experimenting with different ideas and opportunities.
Al can be found on twitter at AlCarlton.

Comments

  1. There are a bunch of sites that love to link to cool sites. My favourites at the moment are fark and i-am-bored.com as they send more visitors than even digg.

  2. Thank you for the tip with the free sign up for the Cool Site of the day page. Submitted Lastminute Auction there which turned out awesome.

  3. What do you use to track visitors and do you use the same trackers for every site? Also is it script based? Reason I ask is I use http://noscript.net/

    I often visit CSOTD but generally am turned off by how long the current “cool” site takes to load due to heavy traffic if there host is weak.

    With the 7K visitors that day did you get a slow down? I assume not since you got good votes and sad to say but I’ll vote less for a site that takes forever to load.

  4. Thanks for the tip mad4, I have used both of those in the past but not recently, I’ll have to check those out again now.

    No probs RGS, free is always good (as long as they don’t get too busy and stop accepting sites)

    Hi tecwzrd I must admit I never visit CSOTD unless one of my sites is featured or a mate asks for a vote. I’ve got enough to do without voting for a random site every day 🙂 CG is with a great host (A Small Orange), it would of been on a shared account back then which had a lot busier days than that (Digg front page with an extra 30K visitors or so). It’s now on a dedicated server which seems to hold up to anything thrown at it so far (well apart from crazy SQL queries I throw at it).

  5. It’s kind of hard to get on I-Am-Bored

  6. Thats so nice, to know about traffic resource 🙂 ! I wish i could also make with my http://dailyfunnypics.com , is it possible? umm leenks.com also a good resource for good traffic.

  7. Guys thanks i just read all your posts from the begining dont think i have ever saved 10 favorites in such a short time all the links out you have & here are full of great info Thanks

  8. This is a great site here. I just started my blog, http://www.DealCrunch.net and think the resources here will help me a lot.

  9. Your doing something right. Good work with Google Adsense!

  10. Awsome! I read your post at DP forums and came here to read the whole story.. Best of luck in the future and thanks for the Cool Site Of The Day tip!

  11. Thanks for all the positive comments and tips guys. I’ll check leenks.com out and see if I can add it to my traffic sources.

  12. There are some US national radio shows that monitor CSOD. If your site truly is cool, they will pick it up and make it their site of the day. One of my pages was picked up by Kim Kommando which netted over $6K in like 2 weeks on its own. Not bad for a $27 investment!

  13. Thanks for the Cool Site Of The Day tip! I love it.

    🙂

  14. Hello,,
    Nice article, but i dind’t fine HOW TO get traffice ?

    Thanks

    Best Regards,
    Eliena Andrews

  15. What a great blog! Tons of useful info. I only wish I had found it years ago.

    Not sure if you still monitor comments.? But I have a question about this post. You state 1k visits and 3k pageviews per day which equates to approx. 90,000 pageviews for the month. At $630 Google Adsense would equate to a $7 eCPM - which seems highly unlikely. Am I missing something?

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