From 0 to 100.000 visitors per month

This project is a test to see if its possible to go from 0 visitors to 100.000 per month using nothing but hard work.

A friend and colleague and I bought access to a fairly large amount of original content of health related articles, and we have put it up on a new homepage. We have absolutely no visitors, but we intend to base any profits purely on Google Adwords. Perhaps, by time, also by getting advertisers.

I am gonna write down our efforts and endeavors and try to share the knowledge that we gain and hopefully pick up some constructive advice or even help from visitors.

This first post marks the beginning of the project. And old friend and colleague of mine is starting up a new health portal (entirely in Danish, sorry about that) and I will attempt to see how far you can actually get by using SEO techniques and link-exchanging to reach a bigger audience.


About the design
The design is fairly simple, utilizing as little fanciness as possible, yet trying to keep it fairly interesting and appealing for the eyes. Since the project is founded to be monetized entirely by Google Adsense, we have made room for it in the articles themselves, over the fold, as well as in the header. The banner in the header is set to be used for either Google Adwords, or for banners when/if we have enough visitors to be attractive to advertisers. The banner in the header can and will also be used for links referring back to people friendly enough to swap banner views with no cost. Again, as stated earlier, we will not put any money into the project, only blood, sweat and hopefully not so many tears.

About the back end

We will utilize the CMS system built by ID Solutions. The system is a CMS we have a lot of experience with, and it has the benefit of being a hosted solution, which means we will get the benefits of all the updates that gradually come out, one of which we are waiting for, read more in the "not-so-good" section below. The data could be transferred directly into www.sundesider.dk with some fancy SQL commands and a bit of touching up the leaks here and there.

About the usability
We have several things we wanted to add to the homepage, but several things were not possible to implement directly, and some will have to come later. Some of the things which we want to have implemented is the "Tell a friend" which is a feature we love ourselves. There are several other things that we want to do.

The problems we face
We have a major problem, one big one, according to the clever SEO people out there. Our URI's are not descriptive, and that might cause us some problems in ranking better in searches. The CMS system we are using, simply does not have that capability … yet… They have it planned for later updates, but as of now, we have no idea when that will be. We are hoping that Google will be happy with our sitemap, and that will benifit us enough to get a good ranking from the start.


SEO programs/utilities (weapons of choice)
As of right now, we have no stats, there are no back links, no nothing, but I have a few tools that I intend to use to track our progress:

Urltrends.com - Great little tool to track the progress of stats for home pages. It's handy to give an overview of how your progress has been for the previous months, and see if you are doing enough or too little. The company also provides you with the option of e-mailing you statistics on a monthly basis, of if you pay for it, you can get updates even ofter. You can see the progress of our homepage directly on this link: http://www.urltrends.com/viewtrend.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sundesider.dk.

Google Sitemaps - (Rebranded as Google Webmaster Tools). As mentioned earlier as one of our primary problems, our current back end solution provides no option for SEO-friendly URI's.

Web CEO - By far one of the best investments I've made - software-wise - in the last couple of years. This piece of software helps me do thorough ranking checks, optimization analysis, auto submissions, search for potential link partners, and so much more. The package provides you with a lot of knowledge and saves a lot of time for you doing mondane tasks. Disclaimer: The link refers you via my affiliate id, so if you buy, I will get a commission. If you do not want to support me that way, click here for a direct link.

Status for day 1

The first status will be pretty pathetic, as we are starting from 0. On the positive side, we will be very happy with just 10 visitors per month, as it will be a major step forward! :-)

Here are the current stats below, which are showing an increase in traffic. We hope we can maintain the current climb.

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