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Today morning, I read this article titled “How Did I Double My Subscribers In a Week” by Caroline Middlebrook.
She’s fast becoming one of my favorite writers and bloggers, because she’s open, generous and frank about her data and results – not (yet?) having felt the urge or need to fudge facts and figures to fit an ‘image’, like most MMO-IM bloggers do!
Caroline, I think what you’re doing and sharing is AWESOME.
Just one thing I’d offer as a suggestion – get the ORDER right.
First, you get either a ‘marketing’ or a ’selling process’ set up, tested, tweaked and if not maximized, at least working consistently well… and then ramp up traffic to the process.
If you throw a million visitors at a non-converting process, you’re literally throwing away a lot of value. For instance, if you got 16 RSS subscribers from 335 visitors off Yaro’s blog (a ‘conversion rate’ of 4.9%), and worked on improving that to, say 20%, you’d get five times more value from the same traffic – and a proportionate rise from even bigger surges.
And reading Yaro’s article, I noticed something that might account for the lower conversion – this quote: “She hasn’t made a dime at it yet, but she hasn’t actually attempted monetization yet either. What she is doing is totally dedicating herself to growing her blog and so far she’s on the right track.”
The first bit is a direct quote from your own blog. And most ‘make money’ bloggers will ignore your excellent advice and content for just that reason – “Oh, it doesn’t work – after all, she doesn’t make money doing it!”
Reminds me of what Steve Pelzer says: “Never let them see you bleed!” 
You write: “All in all, I have had over 22,000 visitors in 11 days”
With a well honed conversion process, you *might* have 2,200+ extra RSS subscribers instead of 250 – though the 250 is nothing to sneeze at.
On my new ‘Infopreneur Blog‘, I’m conducting a whole bunch of social media experiments.
In the last week, I have got 1,222 unique visitors (without using my in-house list, JV partners or paid traffic) and I have 20 RSS feed subscribers and 1 email subscribers – a miserable 1.6% conversion.
It’s why improving conversion rates will be the prime focus of my work BEFORE driving more traffic – because without the conversion working better, the traffic is less valuable.
On a completely unrelated note, that blog has already made $400 – from members who paid to observe and learn from the process I’m using to promote and monetize it.
The biggest lesson I’ve learned is, while doing a ‘for profit’ venture, to plan revenue and profit models first BEFORE even starting the project – and then testing small before rolling out big.
I go through this in greater detail in the series of posts, “How To Launch a New Blog in 2 Weeks”
All this data you’re sharing so willingly is worth GOLD to anyone who already has a monetization process for a blog or website. The niggling question that keeps popping up in my mind every time I read your posts is… “Why isn’t she making money with this?”
By all rationale, you should. You know that, anyway, though, don’t you? I sent you a direct message on Twitter about it. Let me know what you think.
In the meantime, please keep sharing these wonderful posts – I’m finding them very helpful
{ 1 comment }
My problem as you probably know by now is that I never really thought about monetizing the blog until recently because I was hoping to make money from other ventures.
It’s beginning to become apparent to me know that I am leaving a lot of money on the table and many people have expressed that they are ‘rooting for me’ so this is the right time.
I just need to get a plan together and implement it
Thanks for this post, it’s enlightening.
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