

Tell HN: Site statistics for month #2(35K Visitors, top 100K alexa, PR5)  - vaksel
http://blog.styleguidance.com/post/341255858/site-statistics-for-month-2-35k-visitors-top-100k

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spokey
That's great growth for two months. It would be awesome if you do a little
writeup here or on your blog about some of the techniques you're using to
promote the site and the lessons learned from this.

Also, just something I noticed, your main site is still showing a 2009
copyright date in the footer.

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vaksel
thanks for the heads up.

good idea, I'll write something up and will post in 1-2 days

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jacquesm
Good to see you doing well!

Rembember though: growing fast in the beginning is easy, maintaining that
growth once you get larger can be very hard.

From 100 to 1000 visitors per day is 1000% growth, but from 1000 to 2000
visitors per day is only 100%, it is just as much if not more work.

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vaksel
Thanks man :)

oh yeah I know that it'll start slowing down, and I'm more or less prepared
for that to happen. Slow and steady wins the race :)

My current goal is to generate the type of numbers that'll get me some more
mainstream coverage. I think 100K-200K visits a month, should at least get me
some mentions here and there. Which will in turn drive traffic to the site,
but most important will boost my link juice and will rank my questions higher
in search results.

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jacquesm
I wished I had some rabbit in my hat that I could pop out to give you a boost
but the 'match' between what you're doing and what I'm doing is pretty slim.

What I've found about media over the years is that it works wonders but only
for the moment, it is very hard to translate that in to longer term
sustainable traffic.

The way you are going about it right now is very close to the optimum, with
more coverage you'd reach some more people quickly but you'd also risk killing
the atmosphere that you have right now.

100k to 200k visits / month looks like an achievable goal to me, but you'll
have to determine how many people you think that translates in to. You could
be looking at a 'hard core' of between 3 and 6 k visitors that comes back
_every day_ all the way to 3 and 6 k visitors / day that will never come back.

The first is obviously the one to go for, so visits / month is a bad metric to
optimize for.

The numbers from analytics that have the most importance for you at this stage
imo would be 'time on site', 'bounce rate' and 'recency'.

Those are hard to get under control but that's where the real pay-off will be.
As you increase time on site and decrease bounce rate you are increasing
stickyness, which in turn should lead to people re-visiting.

Bounce rate is mostly landing page optimization as well as making sure that
you're found for the right kind of stuff, as well as linked in a way that
creates an expectation in the mind of the person that clicks that matches the
impression your site gives when it first presents itself.

Otherwise that link is a wasted one, not that it would be better without, but
the text of the link could have selected people more likely to convert in to
repeat visitors.

Time-on-site is another measure of how well you are doing in this respect, a
'bounce' is just the shortest way of being on your site, increasing time on
site shows that people found what they were looking for and will dig deeper to
find more.

A/B testing is your friend!

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vaksel
Don't worry about it, you've given me a ton of help already.

For me media, is mostly link juice. Q&A sites are very content oriented, so
the more link juice I have, the more traffic I can get. Even if I get a jump
by one search engine results position, it'll equal thousands of people long
term.

Yeah I'm focusing on uniques too, right now with 35K visits, I had 28K
uniques.(I just use visits since it's a a bigger number hehe). My
return/recency rate seems to be about about 22%, which isn't that bad since
people who come through Google tend to have a horrible bounce rate, so they
screw up the results.

I'm not sure I can use time on site and bounce rate to track progress. The
Google people tend to throw numbers off. Since most people who come through
there, are only on the site to find the answer(don't really care where they
get their answer). So when they find it, they just close the page and move on.

\+ I think my current design is too polarizing, it's about 50/50, half the
people love it, and the other half think it sucks. So I'm probably losing a
lot of people on that one aspect alone. So a more streamlined web design
should help improve the bounce rate big time.

Yeah A/B testing is good. I'm doing that right now for ads to see what
type/positioning converts best for me.

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jacquesm
> The Google people tend to throw numbers off.

You can drill down to exclude them

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vaksel
oh yeah. Man Google Analytics has so much information it's hard to track all
of it down

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blehn
Does your site use the Stack Exchange platform, or is it just similar?

Also, I think your site would benefit greatly from a visual design overhaul,
seeing as you're in the fashion/style industry.

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vaksel
Yeah I use the Stack Exchange platform, but it's heavily modified. At this
point I have something like 4,000 lines worth of modifications.

I kinda agree with the design, the users they are kinda split 50/50. Fashion
people like it, techies hate it. The current design was more or less hacked
together due to user feedback, which is why it looks like it was designed by a
committee.

So my next version will be a lot more universal. It'll still have a fashion
feel, but it won't send regular people running for the door :)

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kyro
You need to push your site on sites like styleforum.net and
askandyaboutclothes.com.

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vaksel
I didn't find forums to be all that effective in my initial marketing. A forum
with supposed 100,000 members, usually means you'll get 50 thread views, and
maybe 2-3 clicks.

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blehn
If you make valuable contributions to the forum on a regular basis, and
include an unintrusive link to your site in your signature, you may get many
more clicks over time.

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vaksel
10-20 clicks a month(and that's what those signature links tend to get you) is
not worth it. My time is better utilized on SEO.

Because with SEO it's a linear increase, every month you get slightly more
visitors. With forums, you hit your peak right away. And that 10 new users are
no different than the 500-550 a day I get from Google.

