I figure there are three reasons why would anyone publish their website performance for all to see.
- they have impressive figures to be proud of, and use them as a teaching aid – like Smart Passive Income or Viperchill (thanks to Glen for being cool about me copying his monthly report format).
- they’re fishing for advertisers or buyers.
- they have no figures whatsover and nothing to lose by being transparent.
Burn Down Easy falls squarely in the final category :)
This website hasn’t made me a single penny yet, and to be honest it’s my only website that I don’t have a financial interest in driving traffic to.
It’s my little, no-pressure island of zen, and well deserving of its name.
The aim of these monthly reports - and the whole website – is to help you move ahead with your own projects, by sharing what I’ve been working on and the lessons I’ve learned. If I can learn from you at the same time then I’ll be more the richer.
I know the figures are tiny but this is a benchmark if nothing else – they don’t reflect on my abilities as an SEO as I don’t stand to gain anything from ranking this site for any keywords.
Here’s the first of hopefully many monthy reports, complete with retro HTML tables:
Traffic Overview
The traffic spike is thanks to the My Blog Guest crowd – I designed a few banners for them to offer my support.
Subscribers
RSS and Email subscriptions have only just gone live… so you should subscribe :)
| RSS | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Last Month | 0 | Last Month | 0 |
| This Month | 0 | This Month | 0 |
| Total Subscribers | 0 | Total Subscribers | 0 |
Top Referring Sites
| Referring Sites | Visits | Referring Sites | Visits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Direct | 40 | StumbleUpon | 3 |
| Google Organic | 37 | Yahoo Organic | 3 |
| 7 | Manchester-SEO.org | 2 | |
| SEOmoz | 4 | Ask Organic | 1 |
Top Referring Keywords
| Referring Keywords | |
|---|---|
| david lindop | badlink neighbourhoods |
| mancseo | burn down easy |
| all links with the same anchor text | david lindop twitter |
| anchor text | does anchor text matter in seo |
Activity & Learnings
Both professionally and personally, March has been a really busy month.
Agency SEO has been great as usual – I feel lucky to be in the SEO industry at the moment, especially with an agency who invests into it as an established marketing channel.
I also soft-launched one of my own projects this month – that I’ll mysteriously refer to as Project Z – but underestimated the bug testing needed in a live environment.
Weird button combinations, unsupported characters, unruly images and so forth. Everytime I thought I’d finished finding bugs for my developers to fix, I’d discover a new one! My developers have been awesomely patient.
The soft launch was an excellent decision – no fanfare or expectations. It also meant my father and wife have done their fair share of bug testing too… even if they didn’t know it :)
Lessons I learned this month:
Better published than perfect.
There’s no chance I could have identified these bugs whilst still in beta: real-life scenarios and dirty data were needed to expose the cracks!
My projects laugh in face of any deadlines I have in mind.
I’d aimed to launch in December, then January, then February. The constant delays really got me down at one point (kudos to my wife for tolerating my dark moods).
Looking back on the infant state of Project Z then, I’m really glad for the extra time and objective distance this has given me. Some of these recent bugs could have been show-stoppers and it’s easy to lose perspective when you’re chomping at the bit to launch.
Last Minute Edit: It seems I’m not the only blogger inspired by Pat and Glen to publish a monthly report – Corbett over at Think Traffic is also running them too!
Anyway, I hope this gives you a taste of what’s to come on Burn Down Easy.
Feel free to subscribe and comment!
