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In September 2006 I made my first website. We will call it Website A.
After two years of work, practice, trial, error, wasted time, stupid mistakes, study, practice, experimentation, and even doing a few things right, my little Website A was getting 2,500 – 3,500 unique visitors a month.
In November 2008, in a rush, I found a keyword I liked and made a little website. We will call it Website B.
Website B was a backburner site. I threw it together, eventually tweaked the theme, added some content when I could, did a bit of basic SEO, and then went back to my other projects. For the next 6 months I had barely any time to work on it. I updated it occasionally and did some basic off-site SEO here and there.
As of June 2009, Website B is getting 3,500 visitors.
Website A = Two years and lots of work to get up to 3,500 visitors per month.
Website B = Thrown together in a rush, put on the backburner, very little time spent on it, and seven months to get it up to 3,500 unique visitors per month.
(Website A, by the way is now getting 12,000 to 13,000 unique visitors per month.)
This is a little demonstration, for me, of the value of experience in Internet Marketing. I wrote about this in a post entitled Twenty-Two Months.
If you ever feel discouraged that you haven’t become an overnight zillionaire like so many sales pages seem to promise you, remember this: Experience and practice is valuable and will pay off if you persist.
I continue to study and practice and hope that the speed of my website’s growth will continue to improve as I gain more experience and know-how, just as it did during those first two years on Website A.
I hope some people can find some encouragement in this!
Anna Williams is a blogger,
webmaster, photographer, and poet. She has lived and traveled in four continents, and
currently lives in a forest, in the Pacific Northwest. Visit her personal
blog, view photos,
or read poetry.
Anna offers website
development and related services.
This is my experience as well: the first time is the hardest.
My first “blog” website is actually holding up fairly well at the moment, with about one post per month average, and roughly 2500 hits per month. I consider that pretty good since I spend almost no time there.
Whatever I do after Website In A Weekend will take off much faster I am sure.
Dave Doolin´s last post ..Google PageRank- What does it tell you
@Dave – That is not bad. It’s a good plug for the valuable of plain-old-fashioned unique and quality content.
Anna, this reminds me of the (approximate) Woody Allen quote: “90% of success is just showing up.”
I have several backburner sites up right now, and although they get only a little traffic, they are getting domain age, which google likes for page rank.
John Soares´s last post ..Setting Writing Priorities — What’s Most Important Now
John, I think this is true. I try to work on Blog Post Engineering an hour every day, sometimes it’s really hard (like this morning). But your comment has my timer running! I’ll get my hour in this morning for sure.
Dave Doolin´s last post ..Want your WordPress and your Flickr- too Flickr secrets revealed
That Woody Allen quote makes me think of my current difficulties learning Latin Dance – I even have a Groupon for it but anything that involves scheduling ahead and driving somewhere is too much to me. It never gets anywhere … so I’ve decided to get some DVDs from the library and teach myself. Which is off the point a bit except that one could say, remove the barriers to the “just showing up” part wherever possible, add a little discipline, and if that still doesn’t handle it, you probably had a “lack of interest” problem to begin with.
Anna, my partner Stephanie and I have talked about taking a swing dancing class, but we never actually do it. Perhaps we want the ability to do the dance, but we don’t want to put in the effort to get the ability = not a strong enough goal.
John Soares´s last post ..When You Should Do a Half-Assed Job
Exactly – the stronger purposes are easier to make stick. Though even that takes discipline …
I have to say this leaves me very discouraged. I find myself in a very prolonged plateau.
Ralph´s last post ..Coot’s Lesson 14- Don’t Suffer Fools!
Keep writing, Ralph. Your writing is getting better, you’re just too close to it to see it.
@Ralph -
Not necessarily – I was struggling with one business model’s inadequate speed of expansion when another business model fell in my lap. And now my husband and I make a full-timing living working from home online which is at least something …
Anna, this is a powerful post and provides much inspiration. As I realize my last set of mistakes were ‘costly’, I’m hoping I’ll use the lessons learned to do better “round 2″.
Thanks.
Moon Hussain´s last post ..Do People Want to Hear That Making Money Online Can Take Time
Moon, I think we’re in the same boat… I’ll be doing a lot of things differently on my next big project. It will go faster too.
Dave Doolin´s last post ..Google PageRank- What does it tell you
I agree – not that we like to waste time or make mistakes. Would be great if we could do things right the first time. But when we don’t, the value of the lesson learned should not be overlooked – as long as we DO learn the lesson
I’m still stuck in a whiteout. How is it that you know what of what you are doing is right and what is killing you when you aren’t getting any signals whatsoever?
Ralph´s last post ..Social Media- Making and keeping connections
Pick the part that makes you happiest or most excited?
Don’t know about anyone else, but I’ve always had more response when I’ve been passionate about something. Been keeping track of your blog, though as always haven’t had much to say in response; coots suits me better. Writing is improving a lot though, I can tell you that much.
Heather´s last post ..5th Life Crisis Cutting to the end
Ralph is too close it to see how much he is improving. That’s the usual. Whenever I don’t feel I’m making progress, I look back a year or two and wince at how bad some of that writing is.
Dave Doolin´s last post ..Want your WordPress and your Flickr- too Flickr secrets revealed
An effect amplified by it being a piece you were particularly proud of at the time. ;)
Heather´s last post ..5th Life Crisis Cutting to the end
It might sound obvious, but a good use of Google Analytics shows if you are reaching the sub-statistics that will lead to an overall improvement, and if those are increasing. You can use these to zero in on successful and unsuccessful actions which will lead to overall success.
There’s absolutely no substitute for experience. You already have the knowledge to easily get started as you’ve proven with blog B. New bloggers have to spend time researching and learning the ropes.
Richard´s last post ..Learning a New Way to Get Targeted Traffic
Curious to know the differences between A & B. A good future blog post maybe?
Mark´s last post ..CouponPress Review – Coupon Theme for WordPress
@Mark – Will keep it in mind, but this post was written sooo long ago …
I had two shots at blogs before 3D Student; neither did very well. Took a break inbetween those and my current one, things got better – reassessing now and we’ll see where that goes.
Practice helps though! Sometimes you have to make the mistakes to know how to improve on them.
Heather´s last post ..5th Life Crisis Cutting to the end
It also depends on a niche. In 2002 I made a small site (about 60 pages) for a photographer working for men’s magazines. As soon as Google and Yahoo indexed it, it had about a 1000 unique visitors a day – just because it had some nude photography with corresponding captions and ALT tags. And my friend’s speedskating site which was created in 2000 and ranks very well on all relevant queries still gets just a couple hundred visitors daily because very few people care about speedskating.
Dennis´s last post ..Decorate Your Blog For Halloween- Free Icons- WordPress Templates and Tutorials
Dennis, thanks for stopping by. I can tell that you’re Old School. Commenting is different now. Anonymity is out, completely out. It’s not like usenet back in the day, or even early blogging.
I’d like to promote you here, I think. Please drop me a line (contact form) if you’re interested.
Dave Doolin´s last post ..7 Scenarios for Blogcasting which one is yours