puremango.co.uk

I’ve had over 1.5 million visits and over 2 million page views, I’ve earned nearly $3000 in adsense, and been linked to from W3C and xkcd, and I look to the future of puremango with optimism. But it wasn’t always this way. The journey started with all the counters on zero.

Six years ago today I registered my first domain name as a place to dump my code and generally show off my spare-time projects, silly little pieces of code that had no real business traction and so wouldn’t see the light of day at work. I wrestled with a few cringe-worthy domain names (stuff like PHPPro.com? Leetcoder.com?) before I decided that going abstract was the way forward, and PureMango.co.uk was born.

So I thought it would be interesting to review the lessons learned over the last six years as a blogger. If you’re a blogger just starting out, or you’re thinking of starting a blog, or even if you’ve got a blog that you don’t really keep up with, I hope you’ll be able to learn from my mistakes, and perhaps even be inspired by my moderate success.

The Domain Name (I don’t even like mangos)

Should I have decided to go for a “keyword rich” domain? Stick to a dotcom? Perhaps that would have helped my search engine rankings, if I only knew what I wanted to rank for. Certainly for things like my Geek Wallpapers blog, having the .com and a good solid domain name is great for SEO – it does exactly what it says on the tin. But puremango is just my personal dumping ground, it has everything from awful spoof poetry to business focused rants to machine learning algorithms.

So maybe that SEO wisdom isn’t always on the money. Indeed – look around at some of the most popular products and services – Google isn’t called searchengine.com, Facebook isn’t called socialnetwork.com, techcrunch isn’t called startupnews.com. I think that’s true as much for launching a startup, product or business as it is for a personal blog. Don’t get hung up on the name unless you’re aiming for specific keyword searches (like I do with geek wallpapers, and like Patrick McKenzie did with Bingo Card Creator).

Launching a Website

I decided to write my own CMS and front-end design. This turned out to be a mistake for several reasons. Technologically it held up fairly well, it was only last year that I finally dumped the old design and CMS and migrated to wordpress. But the big thing I’ve learned about making your own website from scratch is that it means you’ll have to do *everything* from scratch from then on. Want to redesign? No off-the-shelf template for you! Hours of designing and front-end integration lays in wait! Want to add analytics? Or a twitter widget? Crack open your text editor and FTP-client!

Which is all very well when half the fun is creating your own custom system, but when your main objective is connecting quality content with interested readers, you’ve got better things to spend your time on than working out why that div won’t float.

These things all bog you down and create unnecessary maintainance. They also split your focus between building a software product (your website’s architecture) and creating content.

Design is hugely important. I can tell the exact date I moved to wordpress by looking at my analytics: Bounce rate reduced by 10% overnight when I moved to wordpress- that’s how powerful a good design can be.

Addiction to Statistics

For the first year traffic trickled in gradually. The wayback machine shows that one month after launch the homepage had received a staggering 324 views, probably mostly from me. I remember checking the stats and proudly saying “ooh, another 10 visits since yesterday”. Yes, really.

I’m still hugely guilty of statistic addiction. I check my analytics at least once a day, and my adsense too. This is a really bad habit. It makes you focus on unimportant things like popularity and revenue instead of audience and content.

You might think that popularity and audience are the same thing, but they’re not. Popularity means “how many people are seeing my stuff”, and audience means “how do people like my stuff?”.

As the site grew, I had to spend a lot of time replying to comments and removing spam and nonsense, and it started to become a chore and I began to lose interest and stop updating. This continued for a few years while I was concentrating on university. I slapped adsense on and made a decent enough amount of money, considering I wasn’t updating any more; around $1 per day trickled in. This felt like recognition for my blog but it wasn’t, just like increased pageviews feels like recognition but it’s not.

Like I said, I’m still trying to overcome my addiction to stats. I know now that stumbleupon might send me 30,000 visits one day, but it’ll be back to 12 the next. That the only search engine that counts is Google, and that blogging for stats is not fulfilling.

The only true reason to blog is because you know something, and you think the world needs to know it too. Don’t blog for keywords, or pageviews, or revenue, blog because you know someone out there needs that information.

My homepage is google.com

Being addicted to stats can be bad for your blog, but stats can also be really vital. Check out the up-and-to-the-right over the period I’ve been running analytics (monthly visits from Nov 2006 to Oct 2010):

So what’s changed in the last year to make it skyrocket like that? Updates, that’s what! I’ve been trying to update around twice a month for the last year, and it’s paying off massively in terms of traffic, as you can see. Google love frequent and regular updaters. And that’s good not just because it plays to my own vanity, but if you’ve got something to say, it’s good to be able to say it to as many people as you can.

It’s pretty clear to me now that my homepage is google.com. Sounds a little weird, but it’s completely true; two thirds of my visits over the last 4 years came from google. One fifth came from referring sites (Top Five: stumbleupon, xkcd’s blog, youtube, reddit, wikipedia), and one tenth direct traffic (people with referer blockers, and subscribers).

Sure it helps to have links within your own site… but most visitors stay for 1.39 page views. I think I could remove all internal links – the tags, the categories, all of it, and my traffic wouldn’t suffer much at all (that’s something to A/B test at some point. Let me know if you do it.)

How I Made $2800 in Just Six Years!!1!

It’s not exactly a license to print money. But through adsense I have managed to turn a profit, and more importantly it’s opened my eyes to the potential of making money online. Again with the stats addiction warning though – if you concentrate too much on ad revenues you can start making some dodgy decisions about your blog. I once wrote a page about insurance to see if I could get higher paying keywords (sorry, it only stayed online for a short while). I once put adverts all over the blog, intermixed with the page navigation and all sorts (my CTR was great though!). These things aren’t nice to do, they’re not good for your users, and they’re not good for your blog’s long term prospects. You start taking users for granted and concentrating on squeezing more money out of them instead of serving them quality content.

I’m enjoying blogging more than I ever have, and I only put adverts back on the blog in July after over a year of ad-free goodness. Notice the correlation between increased updates, increased traffic, and lack of adverts. I’m not saying Google penalises you for having ads. Rather, your priorities can change subtly depending on whether you have ads or not. I’m hoping I’ve learned my lesson and strike a happy medium between serving my users and making a little pocket money from my hobby. I’m making as much now as I did when I was using nefarious tactics, simply because my traffic’s so much higher I can afford to have lower CTRs. I *could* slap an ‘optimised for adsense’ template on this blog and probably quadruple my monthly earnings. But then I wouldn’t be able to take pride in my blog and show it to friends.

Crashing

Downtime. When I hit reddit’s frontpage for writing GIFExplode, it knocked puremango offline. I think when I hit digg’s frontpage for writing gDrive it knocked me offline. These things happen. I read at techcrunch that going down on launch day is almost a rite of passage. Although that was in a post about cuil, so….

The thing is, downtime doesn’t matter. Of course it makes your stats look ugly:

but that’s ok because we’re not addicted to stats, are we? ;0) Remember: traffic spikes are just spikes, building audience steadily over time is what matters. Of course if you being down means customers are losing money then it’s a different issue, but if your blog goes down for a day? Well sure there’s a chance that Larry Page was about to look at it and offer you a job, but in reality your downtime doesn’t really matter. It happens, fire a quick polite email to support and go to bed.

So What Now?

The future? I think I’ve found the winning formula, and it’s not a secret you’ll find in $24.99 ebooks, it’s a no-brainer:

Write good content often, and you’ll be a success.

I started with no audience. Zero visitors. Now I’m number one on google for ‘hacking facebook’ and a whole bunch of other terms. This didn’t happen over night, it happened slowly and steadily over many years. It’s been great fun growing the blog, making decisions about how to run it, what content to focus on, and even making a bit of money from it. I’m enjoying more traffic than ever before (2000 per day!), and people are commenting and emailing and tweeting and liking my stuff, which is just awesome. I sincerely hope to be writing another post in six years about how I’m hitting 20,000 visits per day :)

If you’d like to ask me anything about my blog or yours, fire away in the comments or on twitter @.

Thanks for reading, if you found it interesting I’d appreciate upvotes on HackerNews.

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