PhpBay Site Build – First Month Stats

I am a few days late getting this posted, but the good news is that I did remember to get it done. I have since added reminders in my calendar to do this for the rest of the year so that you may follow along with the progress.

It has been a month (on the 24th) since I first uploaded phpBay to the site I used in the phpBay Site Build Series - http://gorgeousforless.com

Unlike most sites I build, it was not my intent to make money in the first month. As I will be building this into a monster of a content site, my only goal was to basically get it spidered and start receiving a trickle of traffic. Which these goals were both met. I will talk about goals for this month toward the end of this post.

As you will see, I have not made that many posts yet - which is actually good for a site. If you post too much content too quickly, the search engines become suspicious that your site is spam. At which point - into the "sandbox" you go.

Now before we go any further, I want to make it clear that I have done absolutely NO promotion work on this site. Zip, zero, nada, zilch. I have not talked about promotion for phpbay sites yet and did not feel it was fair to begin promotion on this one. All I have done is install wordpress, upload and tweak a theme, upload my plugins - including phpbay and begun making posts.

So without further ado, let's see how the test site performed.

This first image is the general visitor information that you see at the top of AWStats. The visitors are from 07/01/08-07/28/08 and do not include those from last month. Click on the image to view it full size.

June Visitor Stats

I don't feel that is too bad considering there has been no promo work done on the site. Of course, some of the traffic came from this blog and I have to allow for that.

The second image is going to show you spider activity for the month. Click the image to view it full size.

Spider Activity Stats

The spiders continue to show up pretty much daily and as you can see, have been quite active on this new site.

The third image shows how long visitors remained on the site. The other numbers will go up as more content is added, but I do not feel this is too bad for not having much content and no promo work.

Vistor Duration Stats

The last image shows you how many visitors came from a search engine. It is no surprise that they all came from Google. I do not have a screenshot from the stats plugin I like to use, however I can tell you that many of these search engine referrals have been repeat visitors.

Search Engine Referral Stats

Now some may disagree with me here, but I feel that the site actually did quite well in the first month for not having done anything other than make a few posts. The other item you must consider is that this is a very competitive niche.

So did it make any money? No, but I did not expect it to. I am growing this one slowly and as I said, did not feel it was fair to begin promotion when I had not talked about it here. Once I have talked about ways to promote phpbay sites, I will build another one that you all will be able to follow along with which will earn money in the first month.

Since it is so close to the end of this month, next month's stat report will run from 08/01/08-08/31/08. This way, you will have a clear month by month picture.

Here are the goals for August:

• At least double, if not triple, the amount of posts/content. Some posts will display auctions, others will not. In my experience, visitors like it better this way and you build more trust.
• Begin promotion tactics for the site.
• Gain at least one and half times, if not double, the amount of traffic the site earned in July.
• Last but not least, have it earn some money. Even if it is $1-$5.
  (Like I said, I will build one in the near future that I will have earning much more than this in the first month and you will be able to follow along.)

Stay tuned for the next month. We'll see if these goals are met and I have a lot of good information coming. If you have any comments, I'd love to hear them.