Thankyou Everyone! – UtheGuru’s Second Month

March 8th, 2007

YIPPEE! Today marks the end of our second month in operation.

I write about topics to do with blogging, search engine optimization and improving readership of your site – and I use this site as a ‘testbed’ for many of the strategies I talk about.

I figure that there’s no use talking the talk if you don’t walk the walk. so, here’s a little update about UtheGuru, how we’ve been going over the last month, and where we are heading.

Our Second Month

I gave my regular readers a little update about progress of this blog about a month ago – just a rewind – At that stage, utheguru had the following stats:-

In this, our first month of operation, this blog has gone from nothing to around 350 unique visitors a day, has just hit the magic 1000 inlinks stage, and continues to grow extremely rapidly.

I’m glad to say that the trend has continued:-

• Recently, we reached 100 unique blogs linking to us in technorati.
• We now have 8000 sites / pages linking to us directly according to yahoo – an 8 fold increase in one month.
• New pages from this site regularly rate in the top ten searches on Google for my intended keywords / keyphrases.
• Google is crawling the site more regularly, and new pages tend to be listed within a day of posting, which is a great improvement.
• Over 90% of our content pages are in the ‘main index’ – previously many new pages dropped straight into supplementals – so this is a great improvement.
• Daily readership has doubled, and around 20% of our visitors are repeat offenders, which is heart warming.

Forum?

Some readers have recommended that I should add a user forum to this site. I’m liking the idea, as I reckon it would be a great way to hear more of your voices / questions on this site and get more reader participation.

Having said that, I’ve made the mistake of starting a forum too early on another of my sites, and I’d hate it to be there with no users. I’ll make a promise – when we reach 3000 unique visitors a day, I’ll launch a forum. We’re at about 1000 at present, so we’ll see how long that takes

No-Follow

WordPress comes with user comments no-followed by default. As you can probably gather from my post about no-follow, I’m not exactly a fan of it. As such, I’ve now implemented a policy similar to JLH’s Do-Follow Policy – All url’s in comments posted on this site will now carry link weight (for pagerank purposes) after 14 days – meaning you can increase pagerank for your favourite sites (and your own) by posting comments on this site.

The 14 day ‘probation’ is so that I have time to remove spammy comments that don’t add to the discussion.

Income

Well, it is an aim of mine to make income from this blog. This month has seen a noticeable increase in Adsense income – we’ve gone from two pinches of salt to three 😛 .

Adsense CTR seems to be much lower on ‘technical’ sites like this than other sites, but I’ve found that by writing some articles as beginner tutorials, I’ve been able to improve this.

And anyway – income at this stage is a minor consideration with this blog – I’m more interested during this early phase in building readership, gaining pagerank (through people linking to my site) and getting a good search engine presence. So far, those aims have met with success.

Over the next month, regular readers will notice that I’ll be starting to include a few more ‘off-topic’ posts – these will be things like discussions about technical gear and other things that are likely to build the readership, and bring in a wider demographic – whilst also hopefully improving the CTR.

I’ve also gained income from helping users of my theme ‘BlixKrieg’ and others with general customization and SEO advice – thanks to those folks for their support, and I’ll be announcing a new service shortly that will expand upon that theme.

Readers and Participation are Everything!

I continue to be grateful to those members that regularly email me and write comments in support of this site – it’s really great to see people getting interactive and writing down their points of view.

Thanks Folks! I appreciate you heaps, and look forward to giving another update soon 🙂

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