Celebration!

[nicholassolutions]

I'm in a celebrating mood: not long ago we broke the triple digits in membership, 101 users and climbing. Let's sneak in some beer and have a party  :-$

[coral1]

Beer! I'm in.

101 members. Not bad for 2 months.    :thumbup:

[seandelaney]

 =D>

[seandelaney]

oops

http://www.pixelhead.com/photos/uncategorized/guiness.jpg

[Anonymous]

I'm sure as hell you didn't get that pint in Ireland!

Oh.

And happy St. Patrick's day to you all.

[COBOLdinosaur]

Okay I'll have beer, and by BTW we just went to 102.  

In truth that is the one number not up to expectations, I expected to be double that by now.  The traffic to the content side is higher than expected, but the conversion from visitor to members is much less than I thought.  I'm working on moving more visitors to the forums and there will be some changes coming.

But a celebration is definitely in order so start with this.  I went to Google and used a search argument of: expertsrt

That returns 891 hits.  The number one page is:
http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/www.expertsrt.com/articles/Cd/Formsin4.shtml

That is a sweet review page of some of the content.  I have put 5 or 6 links with good tags on the Stumble Upon group pages and they are paying off.  Those page have good PRs, and it helps to support our PR3 and start to edge it higher.  If you look through the search list you see a lot of diversity.  We are building a solid long term presence that is going to pay off over time.  Everytime one of us posts a link to ERT, it gives us a boost, as long as we don't violate any one else, TOS or rules when we post them, they are gold.

Some hard numbers that show a nice uptrend:
total visits:
Dec : 1293; Jan : 3331; Feb : 3393;  Mar(MTD) : 2355;  Mar(projected) : 4700
Unique Visitors:
Dec : 447; Jan : 1299; Feb : 1935;  Mar(MTD) : 2005; Mar(projected) : 3900
Page views:
Dec : 3809; Jan : 12,702; Feb : 11,735;  Mar(MTD) : 8,047 Mar(projected) : 15,600

For the last 5 days (Sunday to Thursday) we have averaged 217 unique visitors a day, that would be over 6000 on a monthly basis. Today at the halfway point 12noon GMT we are at 98 so the 200+ a day average is continuing.  A contributor to that surge is Alf's site getting posted on Digg Sunday, but the flow continues to stay high, and the number one external referrer so fat this month is Alf's home page with Google search now running second.

The most popular entry pages are: the home page with 56%, followed by the forum index with 26%, the rest of the top 5 are My re-direct page which is what user clicking my links on EE get; Matt's PAR tutorial; and the tech news page with the news feeds.

One last interesting number:  So far in the month of March, where it is possible to detect the country, we have recorded visits from 69 countries.

So yes a celebration, because it looks like with a little more tweaking a some promotion this site is going to be a success.

The small group of people who have gotten us here should be proud of themselves.  Thank you. You have done a magnificnet job of getting this site onto a solid foundation that we can build from.

 =D>  :notworthy:  :notworthy:  :notworthy:  :thumbup:

[Daydreams]

Nice work! Congratulations!

 =D>  =D>  =D>  =D>  =D>

[Huntress]

<slips in unnoticed>  103 and climbing.  Great work everyone!   =D>

[muso]

One of the first mile-stones of many.  Great work everyone!  :notworthy:

[COBOLdinosaur]

Over the weekend I installed page counter and tracking code in the forum pages and many, but not all of the content side pages. The code gives me detailed stats and where users are coming from and how they are navigating the site. For the ones that come from a search engines I get the search arguments they used to find us.  It has only been a couple of days but I can see some things that are positive and one that is puzzling.

The puzzling thing is that it is like there are two sites.  There is almost no crossover between the forum and the content side. the forum is mainly the regulars who have no need to cross-over, but also we get a few from searches who do not look beyond the forum.  On the content side I see users coming in most through the howm page beut not coming to the forum.  Some explore a lot of th econtent but never come to the forum.  The few that do generally hit one page on the fourm and leave.

So my job at this point is to get the changes in layout done that integrate the two side.  I am almost done the prototype of the new common layout.

Now some good stuff.  We are not just getting traffic from Google; we are getting some great SERP positioning. Almost all the traffic we are getting is coming from PAGE 1 listings. Serveral times each day we are getting hit as the NUMBER ONE, first entry in the results.  On good tech and programming specific arguments, we are coming up on a page one, tha often includes EE, MSDN, and other top tech support sites. We still don't get number ones on those but we are sharing page one with big support sites and being competitive.  We are getting visits off those results; that is how I am seeing them in the stats.

I was also right about putting the RSS feeds on the home page, we are getting a lot of hits, because users are searching on arguments that reflect current news, and the spiders treat the content.  Not only that the search engines have seperate spiders crawling site with RSS feeds on a daily basis so a lot of our changes get picked up every day. As a result we are showing up on pages along with Digg and slashdot, because we are carrying the hot stories.  

There are a couple of members who have not had a lot of action to handle in teh forum, but they have been active posting our link on other boards.  As a result when I search on expertsrt there are over 900 hits.  On stumble upon we have picked up weight as a result of some users adding us to their favourites list.  On Alexa our rand continues to move up (we could use a few more positive reviews there).

A lot of times it may seem like one link or just posting the name of the site is not going to do much, but those are exactly the activities that are driving traffic, and those more casual looking entries have more favour with Google then getting formal links, on a link pages or directory.

Now that I am seeing how our Google traffic is getting generated, I will be able to select good key word phases for ads, and the changed text for the pages in the new layout will carry the right key words.

Now I back to work on the new layout.

[Anonymous]

Would it be worth having a specific topic in the forum for each article? That way, the article they are seeing has a place for active discussion.

Maybe a lot of people think they have nothing to say or are just looking for a quick fix.

[COBOLdinosaur]

I think we need more cross linking.  There are some of the topics that are going to get converted to articles, so we will link them back to the original topic.  The probelm is perhaps just that there is not enough internal cross linking.