Blog Case Study: A Noob's Journey to 500/month!

[raegrex]

Hey guys,

I've been reading these forums for 2 months now, finally decided to make a account. I've noticed that a lot of other newer IMers often have questions about related to a blog site, or questions about how to make money with adsense and such. So I've decided to make my site into a case study.

This case study will be about my 3rd site (the 1st two didn't go very well lol) but i feel like this one have potential. In this thread i will cover every detail i could possibly think of - and to everyone reading, please remind me if i forget anything since i'm really new to IMing as well lol.

I will update this at least once a week (most likely on saturday mornings) but i visit this forum daily so i'm pretty sure i'll end up updating it much more often to reply to comments and such.

To get started:


1.0 Background Info:

Goal: To create a blog/website with a lot of good content that readers will enjoy reading. I'm an engineering student. I'm hoping when i graduate in 2 years that i'll have a well established site to work with as a part time hobby. (besides i'm really starting to love working on the site lol)

Site URL: hidden for now, just to be safe

Domain Age: 2.5 month

Site Age: 2.5 month

Site Type: Blog, Blog styled website - It's in the blog format, in the sense that I make posts and such instead of pages on the site. But I've edited the template to remove the dates for each post since I'm hoping the information on it will be relevant for many years to come.
My site (lets call it Domain.com) is over 2 months old, so it's had time to sit and get all it's pages index and stuff.

CMS: WordPress

Content Update Frequency: Once a week minimum

Content Type: top lists, summaries of niches (e.g., best apps for weather, the years best cars, etc)


2.0 Current Statistics at The Time of Post Creation (December 27 2011)


This is the Analytics report for the last two months:









This is the adsense report for the last two months:








3.0 Costs:


I'll note down all costs associated with this site including hosting, domain, backlinking and other services.


Domain: $12

Hosting (3 month): $25

Backlink Service: $35 (from WF's Gyuman) and $12 (From WF's Cam Connor) - These services were purchased 2 days ago. So backlinks won't kick in for 10 days probably. I'll update with statistics once it does tho!


4.0 Next Update:

Case Study Creation: December 27, 2011

Next Statistics Update: Saturday December 31, 2011






Thanks for reading! Any tips, advice and encouragements are all welcome!

David

[raegrex]

Reserved incase of need

[abeng]

what plugin do you use?

[raegrex]

Originally Posted by abeng

what plugin do you use?

For SEO, i use Yoast SEO. I've heard great things about 'All in One SEO' as well though!

Other Plugins i use are:

Add Meta Tags
Adsense Now! Lite
Akismet
Auto Post Thumbnail
Better Related Content
Count Per Day
Fast Secure Contact Form
Google Analytics
Intelligent Traffic Generator
Official StatCounter Plugin
Quick Post Widget
Relevanssi
SEO Smart Links
Static Random Posts Widget
STC by Otto
Theme My Login

yeah... a lot lol i guess i got a bit overboard. but hey! its my 1st site so i was having some fun

i think it might be a good idea to take off some lol

[watson229]

These type of case studies of your website will definitely effective and everyone should try this.

[BigNorm]

Whats with the spikes? Are they from backlinking campaigns you've brought to try and boast your rankings?

[raegrex]

Originally Posted by watson229

These type of case studies of your website will definitely effective and everyone should try this.

That's the goal when i first started i really wanted to find a complete case study, from start to finish regardless of whether or not the website actually made any money, so i thought this would be a good idea for new comers as well as anyone who likes to read these case studies

Originally Posted by BigNorm

Whats with the spikes? Are they from backlinking campaigns you've brought to try and boast your rankings?

The spikes are from me posting my site on a forum. I've never paid for any traffic. Basically i made a topic saying something along the line of "check out this blah blah blah" and instead of copy and pasting the content of my post, i simply put the link to my post. But it looks like non of the traffic really stayed in the graph (in reality, a handful of people did end up book marking it, it's hard to see the slight increase in the graph tho)

[JohnieT]

Any chance of an update?

[hamzidosh]

Hey dude,
What happened to the update?
would really love to know how you are doing.

[ramdom123]

So are you going to try to rank for more keywords? and what is your backlink method or you outsource?