It’s been a few weeks since I posted my last update on our 2 latest fan sites; to be honest they were a few very unproductive weeks, but I think Dave and I have turned the corner so to speak. We’ve started running on a schedule of 2 work sessions per week, averaging 2-3 hours per session - granted, we started this last week, but I think we can easily maintain that sort of commitment so I expect to see some additional progress.
A few major things have happened: with BEP-Fan.com, we decided that a Black Eyed Peas fan site wasn’t going to work out - when we commissioned the design a few months back, we were negligent in doing our due diligence and simply assumed the traffic numbers hadn’t changed much since summer of 2006… and boy were we wrong! Somewhere along the way, people stopped searching for them and the traffic dropped from around 400,000 searches/month to just over 50,000. When we looked up the trend charts, I was shocked to see what looked like a minor dip back in the summer had in fact turned out to be a major downhill slide in the number of searches… to make a long story short, Dave and I discussed it, and decided to change BEP-Fan.com into a Fergie fan site, since she’s already featured so prominently in the design.
I expect the changeover to be completed over the next 2 weeks.
The second major change to happen was that I effectively took over the link building for cenasource.com, and in order to help kick-start things I’ve set aside $200 of my own money to help promote the site. The first purchase was $20 in directory submissions over the next 3 months, and the remaining $180 will be put towards the creation of buttons and bribes - meaning, for $5 I can have 10 affiliate buttons designed which I can donate to large fan sites for a one way link, and I expect to spend at least $100 in bribes (ie. offering cash for top affiliate spots).
The last major change was that I’ve become more accepting of hiring freelance writers to handle the day-to-day content writing on the fan sites; in the past, I’ve felt we should handle that side of the business, but content writers seem to be willing to do the work for $20-30/month per site - so it’s been growing on me ever since Dave hired someone to take over the writing on Cenasource. Even if the current writer doesn’t work out, we can find others.
Overall, Cenasource is bouncing around between ranking 80 and 300 on MSN, and is now getting 5-10 visits a day - so both still sites need a lot of work. In general, a fan site would be considered a moderate success with 200-300 visits, and a big site easily averages 1000+, so… we still have a ways to go. :)
