I got e-mail this morning from SuicideGirls.com saying they miss me, and they'll give me a year membership for $29 bucks. That's a lot of naked, er, articles for twenty-nine bucks! Seriously though, I was actually into that site not for the articles, but the hair. Faithful readers know I love hair, and there was a whole lot of well-photographed, colorful hair on that site. If this software developer thing didn't pay so well, I'd totally cut hair for a living.
But what the e-mail got me to thinking is how that site does not rely on advertising to live. What a great position that is to be in. This is the month that annually reminds me how not steady online advertising can be, especially as a smaller publisher. Kids are back in school, traffic slides a bit, summer ad campaigns end, and it generally blows. If it weren't for CoasterBuzz Club, there would be no site. I started the club almost seven years ago to help out when DoubleClick dropped me like a bad habit and I had my own T-1 to pay for. I'd rather have a thousand paying visitors than a million non-paying visitors.
So the first ten days with the new site have been too weird to take a guess on the redesign's impact. Again, traffic usually tanks at the start of September, and ad spending does as well. Plus I've scaled back on pop-ups. And then, one of my ad providers was serving another providers ads for backup, which is not desirable because I do that on my end. The one I favor was getting less traffic, and when they get less traffic, they give me less high-paying stuff, so that was hurting me. And finally, until Google does a major re-index, as they periodically do, there's no telling what kind of SEO impact I'll see, and that could change traffic drastically. I just can't wait to get "edit" and "quote" out of my top keywords as seen by Google.
But I'm happy with the way the site is performing from a technical standpoint, and the use it's getting from the users who do show up. Everyone is hanging out 33% longer and doing more than they did a year ago. Now I just have to earn the visitors back who got bored with the site. It's not a huge percentage, but it's enough to be disappointed.
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