The jamesehly.com Ads Project

While the main mission of this site is to provide quality content for its readers, the secondary goal is to be a money making website. I want to be open and honest about this business practice from the get go, because I want you to know why the ads are on this site.

The problem for me is that I don't generate a lot of traffic each month and I'm relatively new at the blogging game. Even though I've been in web development since 1997, have acted in various roles from designer, programmer, project manager, own my own web development company, and have worked on some pretty high traffic sites, I still have not grasped what it takes to take a site from zero traffic and grow it into a site getting tens of thousands of visits a month. That is the goal of what I'm calling the jamesehly.com Ads Project. In one year from today I hope to grow this site into one that gets 10,000 page views a day and generates at least $1000 a month in ad revenue.

The Strategy

This is the strategy I'll use to attain my results. This strategy is definitely not set in stone, and when I see fit to change it, I'll post what I'm doing and why.

• Write great content. Period. I don't think that there is a better way to get long term high traffic results without writing great, timeless content. This is something I've felt for a while and was reaffirmed when I read How to build a high traffic website. I write about a lot of things because I have a lot of varied interests, but part of my strategy needs to be to focus on content about web development and probably prune content that is not associated with it.
• Configure WordPress. This is the blog software that I use and to be the most search engine friendly blog that it can be, WordPress needs to be configured correctly. I need to better configure my categories, categories, plugins, theme, etc to get the most of what this already good piece of software can give me. I'll be writing about my configuration changes in the future.
• Define Goals. I'll define goals by breaking down traffic goals each month until I reach my intended 10,000 page views a day. I'll also be posting my progress, great or horrible, every month starting at the end of June to help keep me on track (or in the worst case, depressed).

The Conditions

• No cheating. Basically no Black Hat SEO. I'll only use tactics that I think will bring long term traffic to the site and are practices that are reputable in the realm of White Hat SEO.
• Disclosure. Every month I'll disclose my Google Analytics report on this blog, good or bad. I'll make a fancy chart with my projections and compare that to reality. I'll also try to inform you via this blog about how I'm going about doing all of this traffic generation so that this project can become a tutorial on how to generate traffic to your website (or blog).

The Timeline

This project officially starts today :) June 1 2007 to May 31 2008. I'll disclose my final results on June 1, 2008. I hope they're good and not another source of dissapointment for me.

Projections

Here is a link to the initial projections: [download#1]