August 2006 – Coolest Gadgets First Birthday
What did CG get for it’s first birthday, a $200 Adsense day which was very cool back then 
. The first year of many sites can be a real slog and drag, I find it takes at least 6 months for a site to pick up momentum and search engine traffic and in the early days it can be a lot of hard work for very little return but if you stick at it and learn from your mistakes the rewards will come. I documented how traffic and revenue grew over the first year in the first post of this series but I’ll include the Adsense graph again as I quite like it .
Traffic and revenue continued to grow in August (I’ll document those in a bit) but the other major addition to CG was a gadget forum. To give the forum a flying start I kicked it off with a posting competition, prizes for which were all kindly donated from sites we’d previously promoted (a friendly email asking for prizes in return for a bit of promotion can work wonders).
I couldn’t of hoped for a better forum launch, we got over a 1,000 new members in the space of a week but the launch of the forum was it’s one and only high point. Nowadays it’s pretty dead, I hope to revitalise it soon but for now it’s a bit of a posters graveyard, so lookout for a later post on “How to successfully launch a forum and then really cock it up”.
Traffic
We hit over half a million page views for the first time in August, this was helped by a Digg front page for the iTheater video glasses and again Gizmodo were very generous in their links sending us over 6,000 visitors and wished us a Happy Birthday (I might of told them about that ).
| Visitors: | 238,616 | (195,960) |
| Page Views: | 536,057 | (450,726) |
The figures in brackets are for the previous month, July 2006.
Revenue
Income continued to grow in line with traffic (I’ve not calculated that it just looks about right), and was now at about 50% of my 9-5 wage, this meant I could save a fair a bit towards my leaving the 9 – 5 master plan and also afford to buy flights and hotels to visit CES.
| August 2006 | ||
|---|---|---|
| Google Adsense | 4747.13 | (3,730.10) |
| Chitika | 201.57 | (176.01) |
| Commision Junction | 238.03 | (296.97) |
| Total | 5,186.73 | (4,203.53) |
.
Conclusion
It was cool birthday. The forum looked to be flying, traffic and revenue was on the up, what more could I want? Well to continue into September would of been nice!
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OMG all that in one year. Thats awsome.
I found that having a directory improves traffic too.
I am looking foreword to your post about how to build a successful forum because I really need some help with mine
I wonder what CG would get for 5th bday or ever 10th
Thanks for your post
This is awesome all that in one year but very true also. I started my site http://www.TechHairBall.com just a quick reference sheet for myself and never thought that I will make any money of it so for first 2 months I did not put any Adsense on it but as the traffic increased I had adsense also and now the site makes couple of hundred per month. Not a whole lot but considering more than 20,000 page hits in a month in just 4 months of time is a good picture. I will keep improving that.
Another interesting and insightful post, i look forward to the ‘How to successfuly launch a form and then cock it up’ post! LOL
That one made me laugh too! I am looking forwards to seeing that one.
It looks like you have the Adsense total missing Al for the current month.
That sharp increase around May 25 is truly impressive. I bet that was crazy waking up each day just seeing it rise and rise like that. Well done!
Thanks Matthew, fixed now, I should really find a way to automate tables like that
May 2006 was certainly the start of some exciting times in terms of Adsense. The last couple of months have also been pretty cool, I even managed to tick off another Adsense goal yesterday
I am guessing it’s the $500 day or $12000 month.
I managed to tick off a goal by getting 2 posts in 2 weeks linked from Gizmodo! The first was best as it was one of the last posts of the day and stayed there longer. It’s nice to start seeing traction and seeing more sites link in now.
Thanks for all the tips and encouragment!
Yup it was the first, I’m well on target for the 12K month but it’s a bit too early to be thinking about that one.
Congrats on your 2 links, if you write quality content and/or find unique products you can get organic links pretty easily in the gadget niche.
Yip, graphs are always cool. You know what they say about pictures…
And, I always like my own positive graphs as well. Sometimes I forget that I had one a certain post, and responding to comments on it just get me excited when I see it.
Oh boy, what a geek…
Congrats on your achievement, I’m glad for you
Thats more than the average salary! Great to see some real google adsense stats other than the made up ones you see on DP.