Among the usual bunch of praise filled comments my previous post has a very interesting comment:

Come on dude.  Update your blog.  How do you expect your website to be a success with no updates?

Good point – how am I going to be successful without frequently updating this blog?  The song sung every week by  the choir is “Frequent posts lead to success”.  The preacher thumps his fist on the Good Book and sprays the first row as he shouts, “A website will die if  unattended – DIE!”.  Traffic will decrease, readers will unsubscribe, Google will stop sending you traffic.

Ignoring This Website And How it Effected The Success of This Website

For a couple of months my gaze has been elsewhere.  This website and blog have been on their own.  I have done nothing to prop or push it.  The last blog post was on Feburary 25, 2010.  Three months between blog posts – that can’t be good.

Normally things ignored deteriorate.  Empty houses spawn cobwebs, boards fall off fences, rust grows on pipes.    Without constant care lovers turn into ‘friends’; without constant care pet goldfish start doing the backstroke.

But surprisingly this website  did not  mind that I was gone.  There has been no deterioration, no rotting – the fish did not die.  3 months unattended was no worse for the website then 3 hours unattended.  Actually the fish are fatter and swimming faster.  Some of my stats have gone up in my absence.

Website’s Daily Visitors

Average daily visits has increased by 20%.  Nothing spectacular for 3 months, but pretty good for not doing anything at all.

But if the content is not changing then how can the traffic be increasing?  Without visitors coming back and reading new content you would expect traffic to go down as visitors realize the website is static.  How is it possible that the average daily visits has increased?

The answer is simple.  Even though the limited number of subscribers are not coming back, the almost unlimited number of non-subscribers are increasing.

Website’s Search Engine Traffic

Google seems pleased with my website – it keeps sending more and more .  Although not shown on the graph May 2010 is already at 290 Google visitors and will be at least 350 by the end of the month – making it the second best month ever.

There are millions of internet users for whom this website is fresh and new.  For them 3 month old website is fresh content.  They are looking for answers and this website provides them.  They do not care that it has not been updated in 3 months.  Google knows this and sends traffic my way.

Google does not care that my subscribers have not been provided with new content.  Google is concerned about the millions of internet users looking for answers to their’ how to make money with a website’ questions.  Which of course, this website provides.

Website’s Subscribers

But what about my poor subscribers?  Every morning they check their RSS readers with anticipation only to be disappointed – every morning for 3 months.  The agony and despair they must feel.  You can only court a crush for so long until repeated rejection forces you to look elsewhere.

The subscribers to this website did not miss me at all.  There was no despair due to my absence.  Hearts were not broken, dreams where not shattered.  There was not a mad rush to unsubscribe.   Nobody seem to care that I did not post – no one was angry  enough to unsubscribe.

The only reaction was from the commenter above who pleasantly requested that I write another post soon.  He did not unsubscribe, he simply and kindly asked for more.

This website had  around 80 subscribers 3 months ago and it has around 80 subscribers today.

What Will Happen If You Stop Updating Your Website For 3 Months?

Nothing.

Feel burnt out?  Is the sight of low traffic and no revenue really starting to get on your nerves?  Are you yelling at the dog for no reason?  Are you twirling around on your pivot chair trying to force new content out of your head?  Are you starting to think that the time spent on your website has been a complete waste of time?

If you answered yes to the above then you are like 99% of all webmasters.  You have 3 options:

1. Keep yelling at the dog.
2. Quit.
3. Take a 3 month break.  Don’t worry about your website, it will be there when you come back.

About Traffic, Visitors, Promotion, Actual Stats From The Website Used, What YOU Should Do

This website’s primary function is to provide accurate statistics for its visitors.  How many visitors a day, how many page views per visitor, how much revenue it has accumulated.  My task as a webmaster should be an easy one – get the stats and put them on the website for all to see.  Simple.  What could go wrong?

I am trying to do good in this world.  To bring accurate information to my visitors.  My intentions are pure and well spirited.  The world lacked knowledge about what a new website must go through at the beginning.  I saw the need and made it my purpose to educate.  With my sword of honesty and truth in hand my quest to educate began.

But there are evil forces in this world.  There are people whose pursuit is not good.  Whose intent is to destroy rather then create, misinform rather then education, to take rather then give.  It is these types of people that are my enemies.  Everyday my pursuit of truth and good information is being hindered by these villains.  Instead of focusing on bringing more and better information, I must spend time fighting vermin.

I am talking about spammers.

If I was a catholic missionary in Africa trying to educate the natives about all-mighty God’s preference towards a single sexual position, spammers would be there handing out copies of the Karma Sutra.

Everything I do in effort to better educate and help my visitors is hindered and exploited by spammers.

The Contact Page And How I Must Fight Spammers

The contact page use to have a captcha.  To send me an email visitors had to decipher distorted numbers and letters.  This is a common method used to differentiate between humans and machines.  Humans can read the disfigured characters but machines cannot (yet). Although it prevents spammers from sending me emails it has disadvantages.  The contact page takes longer to load because a unique catchpa image needs to be produced.  And sometimes the image is so distorted that even a human cannot read it.  So my good intentioned visitors must squint and move their head at different angles to figure out the characters – sometimes getting it wrong and having to try again.

To do some good and make it easier for my visitors I removed the catcpcha and replaced it with a simple question: What is 1+1.  Most humans can easily answer this question but machines cannot.  Now the page loads fast and my visitors do not need to decipher a captcha image.

I did good – but what does the universal rule state?  You do good and spammers will take advantage of it.  And they do.  Now I constantly get spam emails about pharmaceutical products.  Because answering the question what is 1+1 is easy, spammers find it worth their time to answer it for an opportunity to spam.  Captcha is too much work for spammers – but 1+1 is easy.  Easy for visitors but also easy for spammers.

I teach the villagers to read and the spammers hand out copies of “Teach Yourself 28 Different Positions in 28 Days”.

How Spammers Bring Traffic To Websites (Thousands Of Unique Visitors For Only $9.99)

At the beginning of every month my server side stats are cleared and begin at zero.  For the first few days I clearly see who is visiting my site.  Here is what my server side traffic stats looked like at the very beginning of the month:

There are 25 unique traffic sources to this website.  Only 7 of them are from legitimate sources.  The rest are spammers.  The most visits from a single source is also a spammer.

How do I know they are spammers?  Because I click on them to find out who they are and why they have a link to my website.  What do I find?  There is no link to my website.  These website are sending traffic to my website without having a link to my website.  How?  Why?

How they do it I do not know.  But because these are server side stats, all it would take is for these websites to ‘ping’ my website for it to show up in my stats.  A ‘ping’ is simply a knock on the door.  These websites come to my server and say – ‘hello, I am here’.  That’s all – they do not come inside and they do not read any of the pages.  They just knock and leave.  This is verifiable because these visitors do not show up on my client side statistics; if they were viewing the pages then Google Analytics would show it, but it does not.  According to Google Analytics these visitors where never at my website – they do not exist.

Why do these websites do it?  Why do these website’s just knock on the door and leave?  The answer is deviously simple.  They do it for traffic.

These websites paid for traffic.  They hired a company that promises 1000’s of unique visitors for $9.99.  As soon as this company receives its $9.99 it presses a button and a program runs that pings thousands of websites.  This creates thousands of webmasters that now have a new traffic source.  These thousands of webmasters click on the new traffic source to see who is linking to them.  Bingo – traffic.  Thousands of webmasters are now visiting the website to checkout the new traffic source.  1000’s of unique visitors for $9.99.

Of course these webmaster are not ideal visitors.  They click on the traffic source, see that it is a spammer, and leave the site in disgust.  But the company selling the traffic does not care – it delivered what it promised – 1000’s of unique visitors for $9.99.

Not only are these traffic selling companies ripping off naive webmasters by sending them useless traffic, but more importantly, they are hindering my ability to do good in this world.

They have rendered my server stats useless.  If I was to report my statistics according to my server side stats alone then it would be misleading information because most of my visitors are spammers.  Instead of showing how many visitors this website receives, I would be showing how many spammers it receives.

Because of these bastards, every morning I need to look at both the client side stats and the server side stats and figure out the actual number of real visitors to this website.

If only there was no evil in this world.  If only I could be left in peace to perform my good works and provide great information.  Instead of spending my time informing and giving, I am forced to hack away at demons who are always trying to undermine my efforts.

I know how the missionary must feel when during the middle of Sunday school one of the students raises their hand and asks, “Why does the Lord disapprove of the Reverse Cowgirl position?”

About Traffic, Visitors, Promotion, Actual Stats From The Website Used

Last month this website did not make a lot of money.  No surprise.  I have become comfortable not making money with this website.  My world would be in chaos if this website made money.  What would I do?  How would I act? Who would I be?

Obviously making money does not motivate me to keep this website.  For motivation I need to look elsewhere.  Like the man who is suddenly happy because he finds an unscathed sock amongst the ashes of his burned down house, I too have something to smile about.

The Search Traffic Graph

There are many graphs on this website.  But none of them please me as much as the organic search traffic graph.  If I was a father and graphs were my children then the search traffic graph would be my favorite son.  The one that makes me most proud, the one that is going to grow up just like dad, the one I always take fishing.

When everything looks bleak and I start to feel like Sisyphus, all I need to do is to look at my beloved search traffic graph and everything becomes alright.

Every month organic traffic increases to this website.  Last month was a huge increase.  Almost 500 visitors from Google – twice the amount compared to the previous month.  For the entire year the graph is almost a perfect 45 degree upward slope.  For the last few months organic traffic has been doubling every month.  If this keeps up I will have 8,388,608,000 monthly visitors in 2 years.

It is a well known fact that to increase search engine traffic you need two things: time and backlinks.  As more time goes by the amount of search engine traffic should increase naturally – the older your website the better.  Google checks the date your domain name was registered to determine the age of your website.

(It is also claimed that Google checks the expiration date of your domain name.  If your domain name registration is about to expire, or registered for only a year at a time, Google thinks you are a fly by night operation – maybe even a spammer.  It looks better if your domain name is not close to the registration expiry date and is registered for the next three years.  It is claimed – I am not sure if it is true but it makes sense to me.)

Besides time you also need backlinks.  The last few months were a guest post frenzy.  Continuously spinning the lever on the guest posting machine gun:  Problogger, Dailyblogtips, JohnChow, Blogsessive.  Not because I want to entertain and inform people, I do it for the backlinks.  And it works; the graph keeps stepping up and up – 8,388,608,000 monthly visitors in two years.

The Real Value of Search Engine Traffic

500 visitors a month is not a lot.  There are websites a lot younger then this one that receive more search engine visitors in a single day.  But that does not make me envious because not all search engine traffic has the same value.  Some visitors are worth more then others and mine are worth more.

Google sends me visitors who are searching for “how much money can be made from a website’ and variations on this theme.  These are valuable keywords – I know because I tried to buy them.

Last month I created an account on Google AdWords.  I wanted to buy traffic.  I was going to pay money to have my website appear on search engine results in the sponsored links section.

I opened the account and then 30 minutes later I abandoned the account.  Visitors for this niche are expensive.  Imagine someone does a search on Google for ‘make money with website’.   My website appears on the side of the search results, if the person clicks on my link then I pay Google around 5 dollars.  5 dollars to have somebody land on my website, look around, and leave.  My earnings which took a year to accumulate would be gone in 4 hours.

Of course if I thought that the visitors would buy the ‘website starter kit’ then 5 dollars is a small price to pay.  I would be paying 5 dollars  and receiving 65 dollars when a paid visitor buys the starter kit.  To break even I would need 1 in 13 paid visitors to purchase the starter kit.  Being a realist, I know that is not going to happen.

My keywords are expensive so I cannot afford to pay for visitors.  But the flip side is that this website receives valuable visitors from search engines.  People looking for ‘make money with website’ are worth a lot more then people looking for ‘how to comb down a cowlick’ which  cost only 5 cents per visitor.

Last month I received 500 visitors from Google.  Visitors that if I had to pay for them would cost me around 2500.  In other words, last month I saved 2500 dollars.

This website receives only 500 search engine visitors a month while other websites receive 500 visitors a day because the ‘make money with website’ niche has a lot of competition.  Visitors who want to make money with a website are worth more because they spend money.  Visitors looking for hair combing tips do not spend money and that’s why they are worth only 5 cents – nobody wants them.  Other websites get 500 visitors a day, but these are messy haired visitors without a dime to their name.

Other websites get 500 search engine visitors a day worth (500*.05) 25 dollars a day or 750 dollars a month.  My visitors are worth 2500 a month.

Now all I need to do is figure out what to do with these valuable visitors.  I have them but how do I use them – how do I convert their value into cash.  People come to my store with cash stuffed pockets – how do I get them to give me that cash.  So far they just walk in, look around and leave.  Some of them accidentally dropped a few pennies on the floor but the bulk of the 2500 dollars that came through my door left.  I need to convince visitors to give me their money before they leave.

How to make visitors give me their money?  My days are spent thinking about this question as I lovingly gaze at my beautiful search engine traffic graph.

About Traffic, Visitors, Promotion, Actual Stats From The Website Used, Optimistic and Motivational

For the last couple of days there has been a spike in traffic.  Retribution has come at last.  Finally the recognition I deserve.  After almost 9 months of work and waiting, after over 400 hours at the keyboard, the website is taking off.

That was my initial reaction after seeing the sudden increase in traffic.  But after some digging around in the website stats I discovered that it was not my hard work paying off – it was somebody else’s.

Clue 1 – Referral Websites That Do Not Link Back To This Website

The first thing I checked after seeing the spike in traffic was who it was coming from.  Who is sending me all the traffic.  Is it Google, is it a guest post I did, was this website featured on some blog, was this website submitted on a social network like reddit.com? 

I quickly discovered that it was none of these.  Using awstats I noticed that the top three websites sending this website traffic are website’s that I have never heard of before.  I checked them out and discovered three things:

1. They had nothing to do with my niche (make money online)
2. They were not in English (mostly Russian)
3. They did not have a backlink to this website

Number 1 and 2 are strange.  But 3 just does not make sense.  How are these website sending me traffic without having a link to this website?  Something is not right.

On seeing this the initial smile on my face slowly flattened out. 

Clue 2 – Traffic was not increasing in Google Analytic

Every morning I check the website traffic via two sources: awstats and Google Analytics.  Awstats is a server side analytic tracker.  Every time a request is made of the server then awstats make a note of it.  It could be a human viewing a webpage, or a search engine spider indexing the site, or a hacker trying to gain access.  Server side means that every request the server is asked to do gets recorded.  It is the most detailed and accurate measure of your website’s activity.

Google Analytic on the other hand is a client side analytic tracker.  It is a small java script sitting on every webpage that gets activated only when a browser views the webpage.  Client side analytics is a good measure of how many people are viewing the webpage – every time a browser reads the webpage the Google Analytic script is activated and the page view is recorded.

There is a major drawback to client side analytic tracker: the visitor must permit the running of java script in their browser.  If the visitors browser has java script disabled then the Google Analytic script cannot run and the visitor is not recorded.  For this reason the server side analytic traffic stats will always be higher then the Google Analytic stats.  That is why every morning I check both.  Usually they report the same number of visitor but sometimes Google Analytic is a little lower.

But with the recent traffic spike the numbers being reported where completely different.  Awstats was reporting 218 visitors while Google Analytic was reporting only 54.  Why the large discrepancy? 

The edges of my mouth became heavy and I could no longer hold them up.

Clue 3 – Pages That I Did Not Create Had The Most Amount Of Page Views

Again looking at the awstats I noticed that there where some strange looking pages that where quickly rising in the number of page views.  The odd thing is that they where pages that I did not create.  Pages like:

• howthiswebsitemakesmoney.com/SpryAssets/_vti_logs/CitiBank/CitiBank/citibankupdate/images/newimages/secure/bankofamerica/signon.php
• howthiswebsitemakesmoney.com/library/_notes/www.bankofamericaonline.com/www.bankofamerica.com/Onlinesecuritydepartment/bofa-update/session.cgi/cgi-bin2/Signin.Do/

CitiBank?  Bank of America?  What the hell is going on?  What are banking pages doing on my webpages?  I clicked on the links and here is what came up:

Request for banking information.  This is not good.

On seeing this my face was completely deformed.  Eyebrows pointing downwards and wrinkles on my forehead.

This Website Was Making Money By Collecting Banking Information

My website had been hacked.  A not so nice person uploaded and ran a script on my webspace.  This website was sending out requests to people asking them to update their banking information.  Those that dutifully complied sent their banking information to the not so nice person.

Based on the stats the request to update banking information was viewed around 500 times.  Unfortunately there is no way for me to tell how many people actually filled out the form.  Or how much money was stolen from those that did.  But to those that did fill it out, and had money stolen, I apologize for the small part this website played.

The funny thing  is that thanks to my low traffic numbers I was able to catch the problem quickly.  Only because my traffic doubled from the usual 70 visitors a day to over 150 visitors a day I able to notice the hack.  If this website was more successful and had 1000’s of visitors a day then it would of taken a lot longer (if ever) for me to notice.  An extra 50 visitors a day would a been a small unnoticed blimp on the radar.

How This Website Makes Money?  By stealing peoples banking information.  This website makes money – but unfortunately in this case I was not be the one receiving it.

How the Hack Was Removed

Although I liked the high traffic numbers I felt the right thing to do was to remove the hack.  I contacted my web host and told them about the problem.  They quickly disabled the infected folders on my website and deleted the hacked files.  Now if somebody tries to access the banking page’s  URL’s they get a 404 error instead of a banking information update page. 

Then I did an IP block for the suspicious websites that where sending traffic to my site.  So now if they try to send traffic to this website they get an access denied message. 

Now my website is back to its old self again.  Traffic is down to where it should be and the website is back to making a couple of dollars a day that go into my pocket. 

I admit, there were casualties – some people lost a lot of money.  But I am glad it happened.  I got the taste for success.  I got to feel, even if for just a brief few days, the excitement of this website finally taking off.  And I learned something – how to make my website is a little more secure.  I benefit from somebody else’s loss – that does not happen to often.

About Traffic, Visitors, Promotion, Actual Stats From The Website Used

When I decided to create this website the first thing I did was open an account with a web host service.  The second thing was to create a few email accounts.

Three email account where created:

1. info@: this is used for the contact page.  When a visitor fills out the contact form and clicks send I get an email from info@.
2. roman@: I use this address when I want to email somebody or when I need to leave a contact address.  For example, on blog comments and on my AdSense account.
3. paj@: When someobody fills out the PAJ order page this email is used.

It is amazing how optimistic and ignorant I was.  The reason I created 3 different accounts was for organizational purposes.  I imagined that emails would be flooding in all day.  By having 3 email address I would be able to quickly determine what the email is about.  Is it a contact page submission, PAJ order, or a response to a blog comment I left?  It was suppose to be a great time saver.

Seven months have gone by since I created the email accounts.  No emails have come in via paj@.  Not a single order for a PAJ.  You are not surprised – I am.  Of course I did not expect 100’s of sales but at least 1 or 2 a month.  Nope – nothing.

I also expected that people would have questions and comments about the website.  Where did you get that number? How did you make that graph? Can you tell me how I can…?  I was actually worried that I would be spending all my time answering email questions and have no time to work on the website.  I have proof of my ignorant optimism – when you fill out the contact form the thank you message states:

Thank you for your comment. I read all emails, and I try to respond to all emails.

TRY to respond to all emails.  Large mail bags arriving everyday and my hand cramped up from writing to all my fans….I will try to respond to all emails.

Reality: the contact page has been up for 227 days.  I have received 12 contact page emails.  Around one contact form email every 20 days.  Wandering around the Sahara desert for 227 days I would certainly stumble upon a oasis more often.  Every time an email comes in from the contact form I think it is a mirage – it has been so long since I have seen one.  I will try to respond to all emails. 

A couple days ago I received one of the precious and rare contact form emails.  For me it is an event – I do not just open the email.  I savor it – somebody took the time to send me an email.  I get an coffee, close the door, turn on some music, and click on the email.  Before responding I read the email over and over again.  What do they need?  What are they asking?  How can I help?  Taking a sip of coffee my brain begins to formulate a response.

But the email I received a few days ago was different then the 12 before it.  I read it over and over again.  I could not believe what I was reading…it had to be a mirage.  An email that cannot exist. 

In essence it called me a liar.  It questioned my honesty.  It stated that the numbers on the website must be fabricated.

The reason the person doubted the numbers was that my AdSense revenues are too high for the first month.  The first month my AdSense revenue was $40 dollars.  That is too high.  The whole website it bullshit.  That was the message of the email.  It was not a mirage, the oasis was real, but the water was poisoned.

Why The AdSense Revenue Was High During First 2 Months

Here are my AdSense Revenue’s for the first 6 months:

As you can see for the first two months AdSense revenue was great.  Much more then the next five months.  How can this be explained?  There are two possibilities:

1. I am a liar – and this entire website is spattered with fabricated information.
2. The numbers are real. There is a rational and logical explanation for the high AdSense revenue.

The first possibility cannot be discounted – I am making the numbers up.  Even though the homepage states: “This website is a no nonsense, no hype, honest account of how it makes money online.”, it is just another lie on a fly infested dung heap of lies.  This website should have been called: How This Website Lies To Make Money (and how much it lies).

Of course there is nothing I can write to persuade you to believe me.  You do not know me and I do not know you.  The safest thing for you to do is not believe me.  The only argument I can give is that there is no reason for me to make up numbers.  How do I benefit by fabricating numbers?  Would this website make more money if I made less during the first month? I have no idea.  I cannot think of any reason to pull numbers from a hat.  It is actually easier for me to give the actual numbers because it requires no thought from me – I simply take numbers from one report and enter them into another.  Monkey work – no thought required.

Fabricating number with an intent to make more money is a level of thought beyond me.  I do not even know where to start.  Should I be claiming that I get more traffic?  Will more people click on Ads if I do?  Will that improve my SEO?  Or maybe it is better to claim that I get very little traffic.  People will come to my website just to see what kind of loser I am.  I do all this work and all I get is 10 visitors a day – would this website make more money if people thought I was an idiot?

Lets assume that you do not think I am an idiot and that the numbers are real.  What could be the logical explanation for the large AdSense revenue the first two months and then the big drop thereafter?

Here is a graph showing the traffic sources for this website for the previous 7 months:

Looking at the graph, what sticks out like a pimple on a super model, is that for the first two months most of the traffic is from referral sites.

The first two months I received almost no traffic from search engines – the website was new and not indexed.  All my traffic came from forums I visited.  Forums in my niche: make money online.  I was leaving comments and the signature was a link back to this website.  People who clicked on my signature where exactly like me – they were looking for ways to make money online.  They come to this website and see ads about making money online.  They clicked them because the ads are specifically targeted to them.

This was great.  I was driving perfectly targeted traffic to my website.  And made money with AdSense.  The problem was that it was a lot of work.  I spent countless hours on the forums reading and making comments.  Roughly an hour a day.  So for the entire month I spent 30 hours driving traffic to this website which earned me $40.14. A little over a dollar an hour.  Pathetic.

Month 2 was more of the same – 30 hours work for $50 dollars.  I needed a new plan.  Driving traffic from forums is too much work with very little gain.

So at the end of month 2 I changed strategy.  Instead of working like a donkey for a measly $1 an hour I changed focus.  Decrease my forum time and spend more time I getting search engine traffic.  Increase backlinks, improve SEO, add more content to the site.  Because of this change my AdSense took a big drop.  Search engine traffic is targeted but not as perfectly as the forum traffic.

The hope is that in the long run it will pay off.  If ever the day comes that search engines start to send me traffic in the 1000’s per day then I will be making a lot more in revenue and doing a lot less work.

And as this is going on I will be diligently updating the website’s tables and graphs.  Monkey see number, monkey copy number.  Of course, when I do become a success there will be lots of people who will not believe the numbers.  But whether that will help or hinder the website I have no idea.  Honest sells, but so does a lot of 0’s.

Actual Stats From The Website Used, Bitter and Pessimistic When I Wrote this, So You Want To Be A Webmaster...Get in my Head, What YOU Expect vs Reality