A Record Day Of Revenue!

Wow! I'm on my usual schedule right now of staying up all night and sleeping all day while the kids are in school.

I noticed a trickle of traffic this morning at about 5-6 AM coming through on my main website Diggers Realm this morning. OK, it was more than a trickle at 600 visitors an hour, but I've experienced this before such as when I got Farked in November. Back then this is what I reported:

In terms of traffic after getting linked I was receiving 6,000 hits an hour or roughly 1.5 per second. In the end I estimate that over the next day or two I clocked about 50,000 page views from the link. A hefty number for any website and only my 7th largest traffic day ever. It was nowhere near my largest day, which approached 90,000 page views.

You can read all about how this affected my revenue at the above link. A big difference is that since then I have optimized the placement, size and coloring of my advertising and taken it more seriously.

So, I went to bed thinking it would probably slow down and that revenue probably wouldn't be affected a whole lot after that experience.

I got up when the kids got home, made some dinner, made sure the dishes and laundry got done, watched some soccer on TV and then Scary Movie 4. Yeah, I'm virtually a single dad right now because the wife is out of town for an extended period of time, so I have to do and coordinate everything myself. The sites were the furthest thing from my mind. Having done this for such a long time and experienced quite a few days of good traffic, I'm not as giddy and sitting there refreshing my stats every 5 minutes anymore when the traffic floods in.

The day is not over yet, there's still 3 hours since everything is based on PST and not EST, so I can't truly estimate my numbers yet, but they're pretty good for the day. The big difference this time around is that I've spent time on making sure my advertising is more productive than the time I got the FARKing.

So, far I've nearly doubled my single day record AdSense revenue and beat my single day total income record -- including affiliate sales etc -- by about 30%. I was thrilled at seeing this.

Below is a screen capture of how the traffic came throughout the day. Sitemeter is not very accurate though, Google shows more and by server logs the traffic is probably sitting around 50,000 page views for the day so far.

The good thing is that my Click Thru Rate (CTR) didn't drop dramatically like it did back in November. Almost all of the traffic today was search engine generated. A big difference in the traffic between FARK and the search engines is in the quality of the traffic. People had to search for the topic on Google, see my ink and click through, much better than the FARK traffic which consisted of mostly "rubberneckers" who saw a funny written link, clicked through and just took a quick look at a page and then left.

One item of note to those of you who are starting out and thinking I'm just lucky and it was something I threw together over the past few days. It's taken me 3-4 years of developing that site and trying to write and post daily. The topic was something I covered months ago. It's not like I put up a page and the traffic swarmed in. It developed some links to it and grew naturally and rose up the Google and Yahoo ranks.

Now I just have to figure out how to keep my revenue numbers at this level permanently and things would be great.

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