First of all: Merry Christmas! I hope everybody had a happy holiday and didn’t party too hard.

Now, for the real reason I’m posting…

I’ve been running an experiment for the last month, which you folks know as Christmas Geek. Personally, I love the site and will keep it up and running for as long as I can; however, when I announced the launch of Christmas Geek last month, I was not simply announcing the launch of a new site, I was conducting an experiment.

The experiment was to find out how long it would take for the Web site to turn a profit. Here’s the groundwork for this experiment:

1. The biggest issue is hosting costs. I already run Geekstreak, so I saw no reason to get another hosting package. Therefore, I ran Christmas Geek on the same server.
2. I chose to use Google AdSense for this particular experiment. Aside from the rants and raves from various geeks across the Internet, it offers a very comprehensive and easy to use reporting system.
3. I used Drupal to create the Web site, because it was the fastest and easiest way for me to go.
4. I would not spend time optimizing the Web site for keywords and such (as many experts recommend you spend a fair amount of time on). I would not spend money on advertisements, nor would I spend time on submitting my Web site to the search engines.
5. I did not spend time optimizing my AdSense units. I simply placed them at the top of the content and let them sit.
6. I would not factor in the cost of time. I had debated whether to factor this in or not; however, maintaining the Web site took, on average, less than an hour per week.

Here are the results for the month of December:

During this one month span, my site statistics break down like so:

*When this number increased, so did the visits from the large search engines.

OK, so these are not some spectacular results. If I were to write a book on the subject I would probably be laughed at. Hell, Chris Pirillo and Joel Comm would probably have a field day with me; but I believe there are some important facts in there that any would-be Internet millionaire should pay attention to:

• Ignore the small search engines, and play with the big boys. While Yahoo! never indexed my site, MSN and Google could not get enough of it. Not only did the smaller engines not want to index the site, they also produced fewer visitors.
• AdSense just works. People like to read text, and will click on links. I’m not going to get into it here, but there are a wide variety of Web sites and books on the subject.
• Getting links from outside Web sites may not help in terms of obtaining eyeballs; however, if you get a link from a Web site that is already indexed in the big search engines, then the chances of getting your Web site indexed increases dramatically.
• Content is king. One of the statistics not present here is the number of articles I had placed on Christmas Geek. I either took the time to add more content to the Web site than necessary, or made sure to add a little blurb to the site once a day to keep the content fresh and eyeballs moving.
• Overall, this experiment is nothing spectacular; however, it has taught me a lot. Specifically, this experiment taught me that it is possible to turn a profit on an unknown Web site from an unknown entrepreneur… basically, you can still be a nobody and make a profit (it just helps to already be a somebody).

If there is one piece of advice I can give you that you must not throw away, it would be this:

Keep track of everything yourself. It’s nice to have AwStats and AdSesne generate reports for you; however, keeping track of everything (income, hits, unique visitors, bandwidth, etc.) in an external spreadsheet program is more than essential. This is not so you can see small changes in the number of visitors (this will fluctuate on a daily basis), but so you can easily see trends develop in your visitors (how often they visit, where they tend to visit, etc.). You can use this information to better optimize the parts of your site that are lacking visitors, and also to better monetize the rest of the site.

Thanks for reading! I hope to see you on Christmas Geek soon!

<edit>
I would like to make note that, while I do have RSS feeds on Christmas Geek, the major RSS directories played little or no part in bringing visitors to the Web site (3 people, in total).
</edit>

Provided by Geekstreak

Tags: adsense, christmas geek, geekstreak, experiment, web site marketing