Well, it has been quite a while since I updated this blog, my documentation of my blogging beginnings, as well as my dabbling in wine. I still occasionally enjoy a glass of wine (pinot gris, please!) while my mind wanders fondly back to the goode days. I keep in touch with some of the greatest people, mostly over at facebook these days, which makes me laugh. I first got started with facebook during the Murphy Goode gig and remember feeling so utterly overwhelmed. In the mean time, I see facebook as an amazing tool for marketing efforts.
I have been quietly working on various projects over the past months and have even come so far to start training new people to come up alongside me to help with my efforts. Which is wonderful and only possible because of the financial opportunities I have had over the past months.
Two projects which I want to remember here are my local niche project here in Frankfurt. An automobile blog targeting also insurance and the geographical region. The site is growing slowly but very nicely. I am pleased that the visitors are highly targeted (I do not need oodles of hits, I need qualified hits). So this is my very first super tight niche in the German language and I am flabbergasted at the potential!
Here is a peek at the back end:
You can see the steady growth, over 2.5K posts and over 11K comments. An active little niche. I post this because now I am entering the phase where in the new year I will approach various local automobile related companies and solicit them for direct marketing opps on my blog (or via other services I offer, for example mobile site creation).
As you can see in the next graphic, there is hardly any traffic coming from off page sources OTHER than google. This is due to my lack of attempts to get or create backlinks to the project. I only have google adsense up on the site to get the bots coming and indexing and I post aggressively (up to 10 posts a day, all automobile related). This is all I do. Have a look at the hits from yesterday, where they came from:
The first pic is of the referrers, you see, perhaps 3 if I have a lot on any given day:
And now the search engine traffic, you see that yesterday’s hardly fits on the screenshot! Every day I get great, qualified traffic for this super tight niche! (And this excites me…)
So that is one of my German niche sites which is doing very well (amazon affiliate sales for such gadgets as “car seat heating” are in full swing and an added bonus). I wanted to also mention a new project which I started last week and will be pushing through over the holidays. It is an English language (targeting the US market) campaign to sell ONE toy. I incorporate online tools such as flickr, youtube and web2.0 properties to see what combinations work well in promoting this kind of project.
I currently have a flickr campaign set up as well as the first web2.0, a squidoo lens. Simple layout, pulling the graphics from the flickr account which simply allows me to connect the two web2.0 sites together. Here is a screenshot, not much happening yet since this is the beginning of the campaign.
I plan on reporting on these two sites again in the new year.
Andy's Goode Life Blog 