Lewis Hamilton site - update 3 weeks later
Almost 3 weeks ago I launched my Lewis Hamilton site, so I thought I would give a quick update and share what I’ve learned.
The reason I launched the site was really to capitalise on the young Formula 1 driver’s huge success during his first F1 season. I could see the media hype building and building and saw a bit of an untapped niche. So I decided to build a site (using Wordpress) and try to get some decent traffic levels to it and then eventually monetise it.
I say “eventually” monetise it as I’m a firm believer that a lot of ads and an overly commercial site can be offputting to visitors and will cause them to leave. I would much rather build traffic and an audience first then subtly monetise the site later. As it stands, there is only 1 banner ad on the site and some Adsense ads.
Well it seems this approach has paid off as within a day of the launch the Blog over at BBC America linked to the site, so a nice PR6 backlink there. This helped get the site indexed in Google within 24 hours and since then the good old Googlebot is coming by every day to say hello.
My next job was to try and create some “interesting” posts that other sites would like to link to. So I did some research and then came up with “20 things you didn’t know about Lewis Hamilton” post. This worked quite well and within a day or two a couple of forums and websites picked it up and linked to it. Welcome more visitors.
I also found that posting things like this video clip of the brilliant new Mercedes TV commercial before anybody else did (well as far as I could see) worked really well. As I got loads of traffic for terms like “funny Lewis Hamilton TV ad” and the such when it aired last weekend on TV for the first time.
So I guess what I’ve learned is that the blog needs to carry a mix of news stories and original pieces of work that users will enjoy reading and people will want to link to. Nothing ground breaking here, but good to put it in practice and watch it work.
Yesterday the site received 317 unique visitors and 451 page views. Which I don’t consider bad at all from a standing start 3 weeks ago, and the good news is that the traffic is rising all the time. The site isn’t even in MSN yet, so still a way to go.
So how much has the site earned me so far then, I hear you ask? $12.29 from AdSense, lol. Remember that I’m not trying though…there’s a long, long way to go yet and a LOT of opportunity.
Next steps: I plan to submit the site to some decent directories and do a bit of link building, probably not much though as I find it so tedious. More importantly I’m going to write some unique articles and encourage inbound links that way, far more effective.
I’ll keep you all posted on my progress.
What I’m listening to right now: Prince - “Mr. Goodnight”
Friday, July 27th, 2007 at 1:42 am and is filed under Affiliate Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Welcome to my blog. My name is Kieron Donoghue and I run UK Offer Media Ltd. I thought it would be fun to post a daily (well hopefully daily) blog, writing about my experiences in Internet Marketing and more specifically Affiliate Marketing. I'll include some personal stuff too, probably about my other passions, music and cars. Please feel free to post your comments and thoughts too.
July 27th, 2007 at 9:11 am
thanks for the insight in to the growth of this site… it is fascinating to see how others do it.
I am impressed by the BBC backlink and the level of traffic you are seeing already!
When I was looking at the site in FF on OSX it looks broken however.
July 27th, 2007 at 10:30 am
Looks broken in Firefox on Win XP too.
July 27th, 2007 at 11:41 am
Hi Kieron
Thought I’d give you an update on my site. It has been live for just over 3 weeks. I monetised mine heavily from the off using Adsense, Auction Ads (a lot of outages recently) and Grand Prix Legends Aff programme. I submitted a couple of unique articles which I used in the site and optimised for several key search terms.
The site was indexed quickly by Google and it ranks no.2 behind Lewis’s own site for a UK search on my targetted keyword. I haven’t managed to get a PR6 back link, but the link from Kieron’s previous post has got me some good traffic (Thanks again!), I have other backlinks generated from social networks and through my article submissions.
To date I have made $2.89 on Adsense, $4.18 on Auction Ads and £8.10 from GPL. The site has received 497 unique visitors and 1500 page views. The traffic is steadily increasing but I have seen significant spikes on GP weekends.
I am new to this so I’m not sure how these figures stack up. It is one of my best performing sites though (I’ve produced a few duds up to now!). What do you think Kieron? I plan to write some more articles as the F1 season progresses and develop a better link-building strategy.
July 27th, 2007 at 11:51 am
Keith, all sounds so good so far to me. What will be interesting is how many repeat visitors you get, given that your site is heavily monetised. I guess time will tell. And yes the money you have earned so far, while like mine is small will continue to grow as long as you add unique fresh content regularly.
And you’re welcome for the link!
P.S. Lets hope Lewis gets a podium next weekend!
July 27th, 2007 at 12:06 pm
Kieron, Here’s hoping, it’ll be even better if he ends up winning the title! It has been the best F1 season in years though.
It’ll be interesting to compare how the sites perform over time. The blog is more “organic” than mine with the content regularly updated, mine is optimised then left to do it’s thing. As I said I’ve not got much experience-still learning every day! This is the last static one I created and I have been experimenting with WP blog sites more recently. I think they have a lot more long-term potential but they do take more time to maintain and update. I have 2 flagship sites that receive good traffic with several others in the wings. I found your revamp of UKOffer to WordPress v. interesting. Do you use an automated system to update the content?
July 27th, 2007 at 3:18 pm
[...] weeks ago, Kieron registered a domain to run a quick experiment determining how easy it would be to start a niche [...]
March 9th, 2008 at 6:43 pm
[...] first encounter with Wordpress,this is a simple design completed for UK Offer Media in a SEO experiment. Kieron grabbed the domain name and got us to set up the site before Lewis had even had his first [...]