I have a fairly new website (around 4 months old), and I was checking the stats today. Here's what I saw: 94% of visitors Direct address / Bookmarks 0.8% of visitors Search Engines 4.8% of visitors Referring Sites/Domains It's also still experiencing some google sandbox effects, but I still think 0.8% search engine results is too low. Do you ever set targets on this ratio? or do you have general average numbers/percentages that you can share? also last month's (november) stats: Unique Visitors: 3,455 Unique number of visits: 11,297 Page views: 165,000 Hits: 1,2 millions I've spent some quality time on this website and I've almost 400 active forum members and improving daily. What do you think my marketing strategy should be to take this website to the next level? I add articles/content daily, forum is very active. Do you think I should spend some money on an advertisement campaign? This site has only google adsense as income source, and doing ok for now. I am looking for general marketing ideas and answers to my specific questions if you have. Just to brainstorm. Thanks in advance
You are doing really well with the visitors you get - lots of repeat visitors well done! When you get somewhere in the serps for what you are targeting the site will potentially become very popular. What is the url? In terms of revenue, I'd look at if there is any aff marketing programs for products / services your visitors would be interested in as your recomendation would carry weight with them. Make sure you are capturing contact details.
I didn't promote it anywhere. I've written a script called Ebay Cross Promotion Tool, and told about it at Ebay Stores Board (where I used to post a lot). Then I put up the forum same week, and people who came started telling to others, and it became a very friendly community soon. I've only submitted the site to some directories, and couple of scripts to script websites. Also some websites wrote articles about the site and scripts, that's all. I haven't spent a penny on this site other than hosting yet. So my question is do you think I should start marketing campaign to take the site to next level? Next level means: a site which makes some money other than hosting domain costs.
I would be careful about giving out too much information here or any where else about your site..95% of all IMers Will not make a dime. The 94% DIRECT TRAFFIC you see in your stats ,you labeled it bookmarks..This is Direct traffic ,People are typing in your url and going directly to your site...And the very low search engine 0,8% is normal for a new site as you have here... It is not sandbox effects,it is only the fact that you have not done anything to announce to google or other search engines that you are trying to rank in any certain Keywords... You should start submitting articles that are keyword enriched as well as try and get some backlinks pointing to your site from high ranking sites.This is truly what you want to do...