GoTeamsGo.com Progress Report - GoLive 2/8/2006

This is the most accurate description I've ever read on how to monitor forum results. Thanks much for this posting, amazing stuff.

Indexed pages continue to fluctuate in Google. Last few days were down into 7,xxx but today up a little:
Results 1 - 50 of about 8,740

All thru this, the most reecent subtrend of moderate Google referral growth has continued. 10 days & counting.

More importantly, new member signups continue doing well and the forum just "feels" more active than in the past. I've had a couple long time members recently comment on the growth so they've noticed also.

Threads: 5,641, Posts: 36,155, Members: 1,226, Active Members: 279

More of the same.

Results 1 - 50 of about 9,680

Threads: 5,744, Posts: 36,751, Members: 1,262, Active Members: 299

I added about 10 users for some new articlebots I'm running so the active users are padded by that amount.

My gut tells me that a significant change in Google is gonna come soon. Google's been pretty consitent in their referrals for a month. 2 months if you spread out the peaks & valleys. Hopefully, there's another round of aggressive growth on the way.

But we'll just have to wait & see

I like the article bot idea... can you post the whole news? where did you get the script for that?

I got the articlebot script at vBulletin.org but the developer has pulled it from there and moved everything to his own forum at vbmodder.com

However, there are zero posts at his forum about Articlebot. So not sure that bodes well.

There is an RSS Feeds functionality included by default in vBulletin 3.6. I've not tried it yet and have heard mixed opinions on how well it works so far.

Originally Posted by rmjvol

My gut tells me that a significant change in Google is gonna come soon....
Hopefully, there's another round of aggressive growth on the way.

I must be a freaking psychic... or psychotic

Check out the attached graph of Google referrals. My prediction was the day before the latest growth spurt started. (call me for your lottery numbers, lol) I've had the most Google referrals ever these past few days. 1200 referrals yesterday from Google.



Indexed pages in Google have incre.... oh, hell, it really doesn't matter. It's neat to see that # go up but it's meaningless.

Here's more of what matters:

Threads: 6,273, Posts: 39,576, Members: 1,416, Active Members: 399

That's an increase in 10 days of:
Threads: 529, Posts: 2,825, Members: 154, Active Members: 100

Hands down this was the best 10 days I've ever had.

Has it been all due to Google? Nope, I've been working my arse off to capitalize on the increased G referrals. Been doing some myspace marketing, started new sub-forums, getting some links, football season started which is a big help... lots of things working together to make us busier than ever.

New Members
Another favorite indicator is checking my new signups vs other (larger) boards. In the last 30 days, I've had 38 new members signup that have 5 or more posts. Poking around some other vbseo'd forums, that looks like a pretty solid indicator of growth. I see several much older, much more active sites who sound like they're making much more $$ than I am who only have 10-40 new members that meet the same criteria. Highest I found from any of you guys who expose that info was 133.

That definitely makes me feel like I'm going in the right direction for my 7 month old forum.

Monetization
I still suck. Either the figures I see about other forums are stretching the truth or I just suck. Probably some of both. OTOH, I'm deliberately wanting to keep ads as unobtrusive as possible so that I don't run off new members who think I've got too many ads. So just trying to tweak some things. Hope to add AS w/ images soon which will be the biggest change yet.

For my next prediction....
Google will delete all indexed pages in every datacenter except those from my site. I'll get 40 million referrals from Google every day. Sorry guys, your sites are DOOMED!!

Unfortunately, my monitization skills mean I'll only make $3.15/day from the added traffic.

Good luck, Ross

More good news.

Threads: 6,511, Posts: 41,397, Members: 1,498, Active Members: 450

Increase in 6 days of:
Threads: 238, Posts: 1,821, Members: 82, Active Members: 51

Continued increasing traffic from Google. 15 continuous days of significant increases. It's not coming as a big spike but I am up 250% over what Google was doing a month ago. 475/day to 1220 yesterday.


I missed my last prediction so I'll skip making another one this time.

Awesome Ross. I hope your growth trend continues.

1 other interesting thing to note.

While I'm still getting the classic long tail searches driving the majority of the referrals, alot of the recent increase has come on 2 & 3 word searches. It's still not the extremely competitive phrases but they are less and less obscure. Feels like Google trusts my site more and is sending me more traffic on those 2-3 word search phrases.

I'm usually not ranking #1 on those phrases but I'm #2-10 surrounded by LARGE brand name sites.

FYI I've been noticing the same thing here recently (last 2 weeks).

How are you tabulating "Active Members"? Is that a vBulletin function?

That is a default feature of vBulletin 3.6.x.

It figures. I can't upgrade past 3.0 due to a shared-membership app with no replacement where the developer abandoned support.

We've been live for almost 9 months. It's been 7 weeks since my last update. Progress report is more of the same.

Threads: 8,254, Posts: 53,446, Members: 2,570, Active Members: 811

Here's the increase (raw # and %) since 7 weeks ago:
Threads: +1,743 (+26%), Posts: +12,049 (+29%), Members: +1,072 (+71%), Active Members: +361 (+80%)

The member numbers are a little misleading because I have a large amount of spammers signup. The thread & post growth is much more meaningful to me. So bottom line is that the forum has grown about 25% to 30% in just the last 7 weeks. I'll take that.


Steady Google Increase
Our traffic seems to vary quite a bit based on the day of the week but we're still trending upward. We had our highest Google referral day ever this week on Monday with 1,845 referrals. You'll notice a 1 day big dip in the graph. My server was down for about 6 hours on that day.



Yahoo & MSN are not doing much. No real change. My traffic from MySpace has picked up a decent bit. In the last 2 months, I've had 55 signups from MySpace making it my 4th largest source of members.


New Member Growth
Again, I don't watch the raw #'s much since I have alot of spammers sign up which skews the numbers. So my benchmark that I mentioned a while back is:

new members with 5 or greater posts in the last 30 days.

As of my Sept 6 post in this thread, that benchmark was 38. That has risen to 44. If that keeps growing, everything else will work out just fine.


Monetization:
The totals still suck but we're improving.

I implemented images next to AdSense right after my last update here and it had a dramatic affect. CTR went up about 700%, ecpm is up 400% and total earnings are up dramatically. If I can grow the average daily Earnings Totals by another 200-300% by end of year, I'll feel I'm on track.

I've got my programmer working on improving the images next to adsense so I hope that we'll see another increase when that's done.

To try another revenue stream, I had tried implementing a popunder ad. Unfortunately, it went horribly wrong and somehow blocked alot of visitors. We removed the code and haven't had time to get it working. I had posted a request for help from you guys but got zero responses. Here's another chance to help me out:
Code for Pop-Up Ads


Bottom Line
So we're still moving forward. It's taken longer than I wanted to get to this point but I can see that we're having some level of success. And it beats having a real job

Good luck,
Ross

Great thread... Wow, I've been up and running for 4 years and I think my Google $$ is probably similar to yours a couple of months ago. Breaking even? What's that... LOL

But I've just been a member of my forum for the last 4 of those 4 years, with a desire to start making something of the site in the last month.

It's great to see how hard work and persistence can pay off. Very well done, and GREAT tip on the pictures near the adsense stuff. I'm going to give that a shot FOR SURE!