A Year In The Life of TDW: A Cautionary Tale

[KG Gary]

Wow. Fascinating and surprising. For a "hope to run a successful link list one day" guy like me, posts like this are incredibly helpful.

I would never have expected TDP to be making a loss, not in a million years.
I do have some questions if I may, sorry if they are too intrusive!

1. Has TDP's generated income grown month by month in it's first year?
2. Has TDP as a Link List grown steadily in it's first year? More & more visitors each month etc?
3. What's next? Do you have any plans that you will implement other than a new design? (The new design looks really nice, by the way).
4. Are you going to post follow-ups to this post? Please?

Thanks for the honesty, Preacher. It really helps keep things in perspective.

[virgohippy]

I mean this as no offense to you Preacher, because I know how intellegent and capable you are, but I'm not surprised.

Thanks for sharing.

I think a lot of people confuse SE traffic with profit. Quality traffic is great, but traffic does not always = sales. When I look at my stats, unique hits per sale, it's my freesites which do most of the selling.

And anyway, my entire network of freesites all together bring in more SE traffic than all the pages on my LL, though their pretty close.

[Preacher]

Originally Posted by virgohippy

I mean this as no offense to you Preacher, because I know how intellegent and capable you are, but I'm not surprised.

You might have been surprised a year ago though. When I first set up the linklist the general opinion being thrown around at the time was that it would take at least a year for a linklist to become profitable. So I took on this project with that knowledge and general assumption.

Maybe a month or two in, it seemed as if the general opinion suddenly shifted to three or four years.

Would I have put the majority of my efforts into building a linklist if I had heard about that time-frame at the beginning...I just don't know. But now that I'm in and I'm emotionally committed, I plan to stay in.

[Preacher]

Originally Posted by KG Gary

Wow. Fascinating and surprising. For a "hope to run a successful link list one day" guy like me, posts like this are incredibly helpful.

I would never have expected TDP to be making a loss, not in a million years.
I do have some questions if I may, sorry if they are too intrusive!

Well, I'm glad it was helpful to someone.
Like I said, I'm honest to a fault and there are few questions which I will consider too intrusive.

Originally Posted by KG Gary

1. Has TDP's generated income grown month by month in it's first year?
2. Has TDP as a Link List grown steadily in it's first year? More & more visitors each month etc?
3. What's next? Do you have any plans that you will implement other than a new design? (The new design looks really nice, by the way).
4. Are you going to post follow-ups to this post? Please?

Thanks for the honesty, Preacher. It really helps keep things in perspective.

1) No. I rarely saw any income from the linklist in the first 8 months or so. A sale here and there but nothing worth writing about. Honestly, the last two months have really picked up...but I don't have any checks in my hand for those efforts.

2) Yes. Unfortunately I did not keep the logs from my first hosting company, but if I recall correctly, the first month's daily average was about 150-200 uniques a day. This month I had 2 or 3 days of a stats outage, but I bet I'd be pretty close in saying that I am seeing about 1300-1400 visits a day.

I took a significant hit in my search engine traffic in July which at the time I believed stemmed from to factors. Google's enforcement of reciprical linkage penalties and MSN finally determing that my site was nothing but a linkfarm. It really hurt to lose that MSN traffic.

My google traffic has since self-corrected with absolutely no structural changes to my pages, I am at loss to explain why. Yahoo however has steadily increased pretty much every month.

3) The new design actually began when I took that very noticeable hit to my search engine traffic. The goal was to make the site more search engine friendly, including removing all the tables -- which was quite a feat for a completely tabled site and listings template (and yes I know that there is still one table on the page). Now that google has self corrected I was almost hesitant to implement the new design, but I put too much time into the redesign to just toss it away.

My original main concept behind TDW was ease of navigation, and I think moving my sponsor links off the firt page a surfer hits and reducing things down to two columns has only helped in that effort. I left in the functionality of those old third column's information in the tabbed laballed pages.

I may have an inside track with one of my sponsors that will allow me to do some unique advertising in place of one or both of those screen caps, other then that I have no long term plans as I have found it much more useful to be flexible and make changes based on short term results and long time trends.

4) I don't exactly know. I know that breaking things down by class in Quickbooks has created some very confusing reports. I was thinking about redefining all the classes just back to adult so I can read the reports without sidescrolling through a ton of classes, like free-sites, free-site rebills, blogs, blog re-bills, no-referrer, 2 different linklists, etc...