The New Project – Have I Earned a Million Yet?
I finally got online this morning after another dumb-ass power outage of almost six hours duration. Normally I’d be a bit fuming hot, but in the circumstances I was kinda glad to get a rest from my daily work regimen. I’m currently suffering from some sort of virus, which is not pleasant and makes me feel all dozy and dreary.
Anyhow, one thing that I did notice as soon as I did manage to get back online (other than the heap of emails in my accounts) was a sudden traffic spike on my new project site. Why so?
I finally got around to feeding some images onto FoodGawker and three other cooking-type image hosting sites. To be honest, I had my doubts that I’d get any of them accepted at all. You know how it is when you do something that’s new to you – you often feel hesitant about thinking positively.
Google, How You Continue to Disappoint Me!
One disappointment I’ve experienced with the site thus far is GOOGLE. That darn monolith!
For sure, they’ve been (slowly) but surely indexing my pages and posts and categories etc., but what they are NOT doing is ranking anything much.
Damn nuisance so it is! I suspect they’ve placed my posts and pages in the supplementals. It’s almost like the site’s been given a ranking penalty, for what reason I have NO idea! It’s a damn nuisance!
After all, I’ve been relying on the graces of Google to afford me some early visitors to the site and I’ve been targeting quite a number of low-key keywords in order to gain some early-days leverage. But to no avail.
My concern now is – will Google ever see fit to rank my webpages in search, or is my site going to be entirely foresaken?
Google Images
There is one thing however, and that is I am relying on Google Images to pick up my site’s glossies and hope to see a goodly amount of visitors via that. For sure, I don’t expect Google Image type-traffic to generate me much income, if any at all, but it all helps to gain site popularity over time. If I’m providing super-duper quality content on a regular basis, then I’ll surely get a name for myself as a true bona-fide fatso in the kitchen icon smile The New Project Have I Earned a Million Yet?
Now, back to the traffic spike.
The Traffic Spike From the Food Image Hosting Sites
Admittedly, I did not monetize the site with AdSense (yet).
Some of you must be wondering why I’m writing this blog post and not monetizing with AdSense right this moment. Good question! Nevertheless, I need to do a little bit of research on that to figure out best practice in terms of ad placement. For sure, it’s all about trial and error, but if I can get a good start, so much da better!
Otherwise however, even though I’ve had around almost 350 unique visitors (see the Statcounter image just below) in the previous… erm… 18 hours I think (since the first image went live on FoodGawker), there’s been no sales. That’s a very good surge of traffic to a site that is a mere 18 days old, I’m sure you would agree. And that provides me with quite a bit of "food" for thought because a regular good-sized traffic surge can offer a reasonable amount of potential to almost any website.
2013 01 12 1549 The New Project Have I Earned a Million Yet?
FatsoInTheKitchen Traffic Spike
My income from the site after it being live for those 18 days still stands at nil. Good going Joseph!
However, the only way I’ve monetized the site thus far is by way of some tools and stuff like that which pertain to those who are intent on setting up their own cooking blog. It’s not at all cuisine-focused monetization, so I can hardly expect stuff to be flying off the shelves and my bank account to be overflowing with greenbacks (as much as I’d welcome it!).
Furthermore, the way I see it is this. As I build up a "momentum" on the Food Gawkers (Alexa ranking for Food Gawker is some 10,000, so we are talking about an intensely strong website to be garnering patronage from!) and a few of the other foodie-type niche blogs that support foodie-type images, I’ll hopefully begin to get the rep of being a trusted "advisor". Perhaps not entirely in terms of how to cook up a fantastic lump of roast beef (I am vegetarian after all icon smile The New Project Have I Earned a Million Yet? ), but in terms of how to make some extra cash online from your blog if you are a foodie-type lover and you wish to embrace the online world for all it’s worth (and it’s worth a whole lot, I may add!).
One interesting point to note (I would say that the word "interesting" is a poor choice here) is that although there’s been a good-sized flow of visitors to the site over the past number of hours, there’s been NO comments, nor has there been a single Facebook Like, or Tweet.
Erm… well, okay, I’ll put that down to the fact that nobody knows me in this niche as of yet. But that’s not exactly the flying start I was looking for! This is exactly why I have a strong preference for visitors who find your webpages in Google search – they tend to be more interactive early on, and that interaction can be the difference between carrying on with a project wholeheartedly and giving up in vain because there’s little to no social feedback.