March 2006 Site Success Recap…

March was an interesting month. It actually verified a few things I already knew, and showed me how much potential there is in LaptopLifestyle. First, let’s talk about Futurelooks…

Last month, I renegotiated our contract with contextual link provider, Vibrant Media. Before, we were receiving CPC revenue. That means that for every click that we received, we would receive a certain percentage of the cost of that click, as dictated by the advertiser. We were able to switch to a CPM arrangement, meaning that for every 1000 times the ads would show up, we would receive a set rate, regardless of performance.

This is a quick comparison:

February - CPC TOTAL: $13.49 USD

March - CPM TOTAL: $651.06 USD

Vibrant Media was never something I relied on. In fact, the amount of attention I pay to it is non existant. However, because I took advantage of my opportunities, it has paid off. i hope to have more of these revelations as I become full time at Futurelooks.

Let’s talk about Laptop Lifestyle now. This month, traffic decreaed to about half, around 10,000 page views from February’s 21,292 page views. The major change was the fact that no new content was posted to the site, just my regular news postings about laptop related news. I’ve always known that content was King, but since the site was a bit of an experiment, I could really see the effect of no content. That is why news only sites don’t survive on the web. You have to have new content to drive traffic.

So for the month, Laptop Lifestyle ended with a total of $148.84 US from a combination of Google Adsense, KONTERA Text Links, and Dealtime. However, this is still good news because last month, with double the traffic, we did around $200 US for a CPM of $9.12 US. This month, our CPM rate ballooned to $14.88 US. This is great news because as soon as I’m able to push regular content again to build traffic, we can take advantage of the higher CPM and hopefully make more money. If the CPM rate remains relatively the same, I can say that the site is “Tweaked to Perfection” and will prove my tweaks are good.