Its time for the quarterly performance appraisal. TechBanyan was started in the mid of November 2007 but the process of experimentation and finding the right mix of look and feel, original content, advertising structure etc. carried on until some weeks after that.
Over all so far I have been quite satisfied with the way things have turned out w.r.t to my blog, which is still in its nascent stage and has a long way to ago. The number of daily hits and unique visitors has seen a three fold increase since the time the website went live.
Alexa Rankings
Initially, when TechBanyan started, it had an Alexa ranking of 5+ million and the visitors were primarily from United States and India. Today we are in the 1+million ranking and we have added visitors from countries as diverse Canada, Croatia, UK, Singapore, Turkey, Serbia, Indonesia etc.
Although we have cracked the 100,000 ranking barrier for India, in other countries we are still in the neighborhood of half a million or less. Therefore, the next quarter goal for TechBanyan is to break the 100,000 rank barrier for all the countries where it is popular.
Referrers
Most of the incoming traffic in the site’s initial days was from networking sites, social media sites like Digg, Mixx, Yuyam etc. However, as of present, the majority of the traffic is referred from the search engines primarily Google. This is a good indicator of our SEO optimization strategy and tells us that the effort has paid off well.
Advertising Philosophy
TechBanyan’s advertising philosophy is such that it should not interfere with the content on the site and should be as non obtrusive to the reader as possible. We have a vertical sky scrapper abutting the main post and then again a column on the right of it for related content. There is a Chitika MiniMall at the bottom, just above the Comments Box.
The primary intent of advertising is to pay off the webhosting fees for now. If the readers are generous, then we might even go for a custom theme for TechBanyan at some later date.
New Features
I have been exploring with the option of providing email subscription to the users but since I update/edit my post quite a bit after publishing it, I am not sure how that would impact the subscribers. Will they get multiple emails every time I publish the post? As soon as I am able to perfect my proof reading capabilities before I publish, I will make the ’subscribe by email’ feature available on my website.
Any feedback on all of this is greatly welcomed!
March 1st, 2008 at 5:45 pm
I like the transparency! Keep up the good work and good luck.
March 10th, 2008 at 11:15 pm
Dear Tarun,
you may consider using feedburner for email subscription to your blog. On feedburner, there is a feature that allows you to send the email only once everyday. So you can work on your proof reading skills later
March 11th, 2008 at 6:42 am
Alright! This resolves the conundrum. The availability of this feature would be on a fast track now.
November 9th, 2008 at 6:54 am
Your blog is doing well on internet, best wishes for your future.