Thread: Case study in real time - inner forum at Classipress site

ahh.. feeling so, so, so stupid :/

checked analytics data of one of my other sites and saw this traffic spike.. 1st though: wow! what is it? // 2nd thougt: ahhh, another spam attach on g analytics servers // 3rd though: wait.. what about Lust Jobs? ... please don't, please don't..

opened G analytics account of Lust Jobs and voila:


+ considering reddit traffic (from a small adult webaster subreddit) of:


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.. f***... :/ I was so happy to finally hit 1k sessions 3 days in a row.. now it is a downer.. kinda

.. just being transparent..

still the impact of the forum + chat has finally caught the eyes of large advertisers and I have received several compliments..

#lifeasitis .. take care all, H

..... **** ***** **** **** :/

I also had the same Reddit traffic spike and a load of visitors from Russia other day.

well - reddit traffic is real and highly targeted (did you see the bounce rate?) and it is the 2nd or 3rd most important social media channel I'm working on.. I'm not spamming it left and right - just using it.. my reddit profile: https://www.reddit.com/user/hmprivate/

with reddit, I'm not after numbers (traffic) - I'm trying to get the attention of people from the x industry.. classipress success is quite simple > all we have to do is to have genuine, high quality and to our niche relevant ads posted.. and the more the better..

huhh.. you are right about Russian traffic.. it isn't an issue now, but it was a while ago..

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@dalemiles fancy sharing for numbers of yours? .. url?

that's good to know. I am getting 500 visitors a day from reddit.com on my drones site, but I never posted anything there. I thought this was spam traffic. "ghost" traffic. I wonder what is going on.

wow, that's good! it means you have quality ads >> pm me your url - I will might post it on reddit as well

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regarding the Lust Jobs performance on google - nothing has really changed within last month:



.. just a sad update

you might want to run this search query in google to see what has been indexed so far:
have a great day all,
Helmuts

Sure,

Mines a niched site for New Zealand for a hobby with only a few thousand people.
Other countries have much bigger player bases but NZ only has 4.5m people population wise.
I've recently secured the .eu domain name so I can expand and make a version of my site for the EU and players within the EU countries.

Anyhow, the domain is www.airsofttrader.co.nz
It's a trading site for airsoft stuff (similar action sport to paintball).

I have a Facebook page with 1,145 likes, its growing bit by bit weekly. Small player base though remember.

The website has 800+ registered users.

I have on average a 75% returning user rate.



My income is mainly from Google Adsense, although roughly 25% of my users use an adblock. I'm thinking of making it so the core content of the site won't show if they have an adblock enabled (they can add my site as a 'safe site'.
I've recently added the ability (under 2 weeks ago) to have featured ads at $3 a pop. I've sold one so far.
I've sold a few bump packs as well.

But the bulk of the money generated is from Adsense.

Plans for the future is to expand the site across several key countries and compete with other established classified trading sites. With the track record of this site along with some support of friends i know in these other countries i'm hoping have 3 versions of this site ticking along will generate enough adsense money to keep my hobby paid for.
I currently make about $30 a month from Adsense on the NZ site, which covers the running and hosting costs.

my suggestion - raise the price for featured ads to $27 - just try it .. people tend to like pricey things that they can afford.

.. $30/month from adsense these days isn't bad at all. .. at least it covers the hosting..

// posted your site in airsoft subreddit of 33k+ users https://www.reddit.com/r/airsoft/ (see under NEW)... start tracking the stats .. as well, you might want to join this private subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/AirsoftNZ/

Thanks for the submission Helmuc, I will see how much traffic I get.

To be honest, I've not promoted it internationally because there's not really much point in getting traffic outside of NZ (other than for adsense). Ideally I want my traffic to be local as it's these users who will be submitting ads and buying items.

I may think about the featured ad price increase in the future - see how it goes and what the uptake is like. $27 I think might be a little on the dear side, purely because of other trading site TradMe (our ebay) and their fees / success fees whome I'm competeing against.

Ill join that private sub reddit though and see what's going on in there.

Great thread, I will be staying posted on this one!

@helmuc I have also felt the downer pain of a traffic spike only to discover it's analytics spam Even with various filters and different approaches it seems hard to eliminate the spam in analytics.

I see forums as icebergs where the top ranked threads are just a tip of the iceberg.. it is all about the progression where the sequence is: more indexed pages > more keywords > more ranked long-tail keywords > more traffic (it isn't an overnight success - every step needs time)..

At the moment the situation is as follows and starts showing some interesting things:

Indexed pages:


Impressions (last 90 days):


.. does it make sense?