With summer fast approaching the amount of deals being done for vehicles on Ebay continues to rise, I recently sold a vehicle and decided Ebay would be the easiest way to reach a large audience so listed the car and monitored the results. Typically I couldn’t resist turning it into a little experiment along the way though.

I decided to host a page on one of my domains all about the car with full details, the complete spec and quite a few extra pictures of it. Adsense was used on the page.

Listing the vehicle on Ebay I merely added a link in the middle of the auction page details to my hosted page offering more pictures, the auction ran it’s course and during the 10 days I had around 150-200 visitors click through to my hosted page each day.

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If you build your traffic to say at least 200 visitors per day for example which is a very achievable target for any new website then the next step would be to watch that grow rapidly if you spend time implementing strategy to make your website sticky, yes you may have read that term many many times but taking the time out to analyse your website and look at your numbers tells you whether your doing it correctly or not.

Firstly check your new versus repeat visitor numbers, growing your repeat visitor numbers not only helps waterproof you from any sudden ranking drops by Google, it also lets you grow rapidly using your existing user base.

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There are a number of reasons why adding a forum can be good for your site and also a number of reasons why it wouldn’t help, during the middle of last year I was looking for information on building an aviary and stumbled across Budgerigars with a for sale notice on it’s homepage, nice old article website with around 200 pages so I offered £250 and purchased the website.

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Doing some general housekeeping this week and having a browse through analytics (my website stats) brought something to my attention that I hadn’t been aware of. I had quite a solid level of traffic coming from Everyclick (1k per day), having a look through their website shows that 50% of all their income goes to charity, very nice but I still wanted to find out how the traffic was coming to my site from theirs and I don’t find analytics very good for checking URL’s, Everyclick show as referral rather than organic.

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I’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.
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I have had traffic from Stumbleupon before to my tattoo website and read a post by Jeremy trying to buy a stumbleupon and have not really given it that much attention until recently. I was creating a few mini sites and had one generic uk domain name that I didn’t know how to classify for mini site, there was no obvious choice for a topic to put on it.

After a few minutes I decided that I would do a reverse stumble as an experiment, I love experiments What I wanted to do was take a  funny cartoon or image that I found through stumbleupon that you see all the time and put them on a domain and then submit it back to be stumbled, back at ya!

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