I get this question about a zillion and one times a month. A person starts a blog and then starts seeing some initial traffic, maybe even a click or conversion and they get traffic happy. I’m talking about the person that checks Statcounter about 10x a day and gets excited about 1 additional subscriber via Feedburner stat tracking. So once and for all I thought I’d share some insight on a blog that I recently started (sorry no URL), but I’ll definitely give some hard stats which no one does for some reason. I still don’t understand that by the way, I mean why do people care so much about telling everyone how much they make via Adsense or whatever? Anyhoot, lets get to the nitty gritty details, here are some assumptions:

Assumptions:

1. You are not driving traffic to the blog other than commenting on other blogs, sending emails to your friends, or sharing the website with everyone you know via AIM. These stats will mean nothing to you if you go ahead and link back to your site from another major site getting 1,000,000 page views a day. This study is meant for the little guy out there looking for some direction.

2. You are using Wordpress or Drupal. I would highly recommend you use one of these open source CMS’s. They both are very SEO friendly and easy to use. Ok, so maybe Drupal is not exactly for the faint of heart, but it’s getting there. Btw, I love Drupal and if you need any help starting you can check out my Top 10 Drupal Modules for starters.

3. You are posting new content at least 2x a day. If you aren’t willing to post two articles everyday in the beginning it’s doubtful that you’ll even get indexed by the big Google. So commit to the computer 2x a day and get to writing already. Plus if you really want to be a problogger then you’ll have to get very used to this state of constant writing anyways.

4. You already own at least one website that is getting traffic from Google or that Google has indexed. This way you can link back to your new blog and at least capture the attention of the search engines. If not no worries, you’ll just have to wait to get indexed then. It doesn’t have to be PR 7, just have some decent history. If you don’t have this I’m sure you can get a buddy to link to you for free, at least for a bit anyways.

5. You are in a reasonable niche. Be realistic with yourself. Are you writing about online education, technology, gadgets? Well then you better check yourself, most likely you won’t get very many google hits. As always this is for that nice sized niche, like hmmm.. dog health care or something like that. Hey, that’s a pretty good one.

I’m sure I’m missing an assumption but these 5 are good for now.

OK now time for some Stats:

My blog fits nicely into all these assumptions and is really meant for the long term (i.e. 1+ years) profitability ($4K monthly revenue’ish). Lets call my blog, Mystery Blog Max.

Week 1:

Pageviews: 800

Unique Visitors: 212

Returning Vistors: 49

Feedburner Subscribers: 2 (probably my Mom, lol)

Week 2:

Pageviews: 1,011

Unique Visitors: 366

Returning Vistors: 59

Feedburner Subscribers: 7 (probably my extended family now)

More Weekly Statistics to come…

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