My Project

byCHattery

211 followers

Updated 10 years ago

I touched on this during my last post. www.everydayfam.com

Before I came to WA, I had an idea for a story telling website. My audience would mostly be stay at home moms/parents or retirees. I had a few friends on facebook that I pictured would love the idea, because they always try to tell long stories on facebook. haha. I've basically spent the last month building a site that those 3 or 4 people would love! Pretty risky, eh?

I started with getting a wordpress site up and running and researched what plugins I'd need. It was to be a community type site, so I added buddy press and a few similar. One of the biggest issues was fighting comment spam, registration spam and even group creation spam. Everyday, I'd have to flush out about 70 new users. I eventually found some IP/Country Block plugins. Highly recommend them.

I then moved to get my adsense in place. I figured this would be perfect for that, as opposed to cherry picking affiliate stuff for each of the pages. Since I was going to have dynamic content and hopefully hundreds of pages/stories, I wanted to use adsense to scan each story and display relevant ads.

I wrote a few stories to get it going, but I was way more involved with getting www.everydayfam.com to where I wanted it to really put too much into it. I jumped on fiverr.com to find some content writers. Since I had been working some freelance gigs, I had some extra money to invest into my project. I contacted about 7 different people. 3 really stood out to me and I've had them each write about 3 stories a piece for me. They're great to work with. I had two people that knew very little English so I had to rewrite their stories.

I also put an ad on craigslist, offering $10 for 250 words. I get about 1 hit a week still, and I honor it. Not every story was usable, but it was a start. I needed content.

I eventually want to offer money for staff writers. Basically, if one of my writer's posts gets an ad click, they would get a percentage. Has anyone done this on their sites? I'm not sure what a fair percentage would be. I think it would help make the post more active, because they would take an active part in promoting their posts.

I created a Facebook community and have purchased a few ad campaigns and boosted a few posts. Each of these I spent maybe $5-$10 on and maybe 1-2 a week. So, not too expensive. It hasn't done too much yet.

However, the other day, I pushed a story written by a grandma about her grandchildren for Grandparents day, and I was able to get 22 likes on it, and 2 shares. I was so excited. www.everydayfam.com jumped to 44 visitors that day. haha. I need to keep that going! (However, I got NO ad clicks)

I also have adwords running, at about $10 a day. I had a $100 coupon from them, but it's about maxed :( I can't keep that up.

So, here I am a month later. I wish I had more time for the www.everydayfam.com, but at the same time, I feel like I've put so much work into it and have yet to make an ROI. But as someone else wrote on here, new business owners typically have to dump THOUSANDS or Tens of Thousands into a new business before they even get their first customer. I'm only sitting at around $200. If I was to add to that, what I would charge a client for my time, that's probably about another $2000. haha.

At best, it has been a great learning experience and I think for the next site, I'll already have a few key practices down, but right now, www.everydayfam.com has all of my attention.

Thanks for reading. Anyone have any good traffic building tips? Or has anyone outsourced their content creation?