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”
Original post by Kieron
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