June in review

So this was a discouraging month. It was a very low month and I have to chalk it up to the summer months and people not being in front of their computers as much.

It is hard to not get discouraged however. There are some attainable goals I have in place but, right now the site is going in the wrong direction.

Lets hope things pick up this month.

Here are the stats for June.

Visits: 71 ( last month 325 )
Page Views: 409 ( last month 566 )
Absolute Unique Visitors: 55 ( last month 409 )
Google Search Results: 1850 ( last month 1950 )
Yahoo! Search Results: 906 ( last month 1010 )
MSN: 33 ( last month 60 )
Ask: 70 ( last month 348 )
Revenue: $.00 ( last month $.41 )

Wow, this looks really bad. It is still better then the first few months the site has been existence. So I will just leave it here for now and see how things go over the next couple of months.

Summer News for June

The summer has been slow to say the least. However, there is a bright spot that happened yesterday. Langorang got its first legitimate non-spam post to the news story yesterday.

Here is the link if you would like to check it out.

http://www.langorang.com/news/article/934-dubai-s-leading-institute-of-languages-now-offers-language-courses-at-ductac-mall-of-the-emirates

Now, I really think that someone is trying to get exposure for their program. But, the link fit within the structure and content of the site. So it got approved.

This is the first bright spot in a pretty dismal summer.

May Review

As I had suspected, May was a low month for Langorang.

I wonder if there was more I could have done? It appears that there will be another huge life change on the horizon but that is for another post.

Here are the stats for May.

Visits: 325 ( last month 569 )
Page Views: 566 ( last month 987 )
Absolute Unique Visitors: 298 ( last month 450 )
Google Search Results: 1950 ( last month 2750 )
Yahoo! Search Results: 1010 ( last month 825 )
MSN: 60 ( last month 57 )
Ask: 348 ( last month 264 )
Revenue: $.41 ( last month $5.28 )

So, to say the least, this was a downer month for the language news site. I have some new tools to upload, but haven’t had the time to pursue it.

It has been a very difficult month and a half to say the least. Almost everything has slowed to a snails pace. Maybe there is something to the summer lul in general. Well, that is all I have for now.

I will check in with ya later.

Gearing up for the summer

So it has happened. Halfway through the month and Langorang and language news is on its way having its first month that didn’t grow over the previous month. I am not sure what is going on. However, if I learned one thing at my previous employer is that there is an ebb and flow with growth. I am still in my first year and I have no baselines to make decisions from.

That being said, I am optimistic. The summer was typically a slow time for the previous company as well. I have decided to expand my web holdings. I will be making an announcement soon that will change how I operate all of the stuff I have planned. So be on the look out. In the mean time, enjoy Langorang and feel free to let me know what you think.

Summer Lul??

So, in my planning, I am prepared for a lul to hit during the summer. Schools are letting out and people are getting ready for summer vacations.

Traffic to Langorang also had a major hiccup for about 3 days. I am not sure what was going on but it was certainly lower then previous weeks. However, it appears that things are starting to get back on track.

Revenues have fallen as well. Overall things seam a little slower this month. I will keep posting and just a heads up. I had another brainstorm of an idea that I will be developing in conjunction with Langorang. Looks like language news isn’t going to be the only thing for dinner.

SEO does it again

SEO, Really works!!

Of course everyone knows that it works when it is done properly, but I am amazed at the speed at which it works. I have a series of key words that I am using for Langorang and I have not seen any results in the top 50 searches since I started the SEO campaign.

Today is the first day that I have seen some results. Three pages into Google for my most desired key words language news is the site. I can hardly believe it.

I am not sure how long it will be there or even if I can get it to bump up in the rankings but this is momentous. I can’t wait to share this with my wife.

It is also the shot in the arm I need because traffic was down this weekend and has been low this month. I’m not sure what to do about that, but I am still in my first year and learning what the trends are.

Will the summer be slower? I don’t know. We will just have to wait and see.

April in Review for Langorang.com

April was another rocking month. Langorang’s unique visitors have gone up and I have two more things to get done before I launch the comments section. It is almost as if people are starting to take an interest in language news as a viable topic.

Here are the stats for the month of April.
Visits: 569 ( last month 326 )
Page Views: 987 ( last month 647 )
Absolute Unique Visitors: 450 ( last month 238 )
Google Search Results: 2750 ( last month 2830 )
Yahoo! Search Results: 825 ( last month 718 )
MSN: 57 ( last month 79 )
Ask: 264 ( last month 78 )
Revenue: $5.28 ( last month $3.29 )

So, absolute unique visitors nearly doubled for the month of April and the revenues started to follow. As usual the two most hit pages are the home page and the job page, however, some content items are getting a second glance.

The latest and most exciting news is that I am talking with a writer about potentially providing some articles for the site on a regular basis. This will help with the unique content arena and hopefully help give the site a little more exposure.

The last really big thing that was taken care of this month was the payment plan for when the site can no longer be managed by just one person. It is very different from the typical revenue models out there. I believe that is it fair for the people coming on board though. Provided they do not turn out to be selfish.

All in all I am very hopeful about the future of the site. There is an outside chance that it may hit 1000 unique visitors for a month by September and for me that would be an incredible feat. Here is to hoping and growing.

Who ever thought Vegas would help the reading list

So what does one do when ya spend a week in Las Vegas ? I am sure everyone has their opinion of what they would do. As for me, I must the most boring person on the planet.

I just recently went to the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) conference in Vegas. It was a grueling 4 days of standing and answering questions about the software I work with during my day job.

So what did I do in Vegas? When I wasn’t standing and answering questions, I was reading, sleeping and working on Langorang, of course. Who would have thought a site about language news would gain this kind of momentum.

I managed to get 3 more books read and I also watched as the site spiked in absolute unique visitors. Langorang has already surpassed last month and is setting the bar pretty high for the rest of the year.

Some other good news, the site is already staring down the 500 unique visitor mark for a 30 day period of time. It seams like just a couple of months ago that I was writing to rejoice about reaching the 100 unique visitor month. I can directly attribute the success to SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

I am getting geared up to launch a comments section. I just hope that people will participate. There have been a lot of hours put into this tool and I believe that it is about as solid as it can be.

March in review

March was the first month that I tried search engine optimization (SEO) with Langorang.com. With all of the suggestions I have gleaned from books and sites that I have studied, Langorang turned out to be a slightly different beast. Most of the topics that I read about dealt with content that gets updated every so often or single landing pages. This site is a daily news aggregator. Some days there are a lot of stories and some there are very few. The site grows as language news grows.

Here are the stats for the month of March.
Visits: 326 (last month 134)
Page Views: 647 (last month 511)
Absolute Unique Visitors: 238 (last month 91)
Google Search Results: 2830 (last month 2290)
Yahoo! Search Results: 718 (last month 627)
MSN: 79 (last month 134)
Ask: 78 (last month 76)
Revenue: $3.29 (last month $1.79)

So, at this rate, if the traffic can be built up to 200000 unique visitors a month, I could stay home and just run the site. That is assuming that nothing changes. I imagine that momentum would kick in at some point and I would be able to generate revenue as a better proportion of the traffic.

The site has come a long way since the initial launch back in September. I’ve almost completed the comments system. It has by far been the longest tool to build. I just want to make sure that I have it right when I add it to the system. There are 3 tools that are required to make it work; a user registration component, a captcha system and the comments manager. The first 2 are ready to go. The last one is really taking a while to hammer out.

In the mean time I am also adding a ‘link to us’ section. I’m trying to make it easy for people to copy code snippets and add them to their sites. Hopefully I can build some linking traffic and increase the search engine results for some of my chosen key words. I’ll keep you informed about it as progress is made.

Finally, I bit the bullet and picked up The Ruby Way and the newest version of The Rails Way. I really needed to ramp up my library incase traffic gets out of controll. One can only hope.

Principles to growth

Langorang has been a trial in sanity for me. With life as chaotic as it has been the past 6 months, I have been able to stay sane because of my wife and my time working on the site.

As I follow the numbers, it reached another milestone today. Last month Langorang reached 91 absolute unique visitors and so far this month it has already accomplished the same. This may not seam like a lot but there are some principles in play here that I thought I would share.

Have a crock pot mentality
It may take you 10 years to be an overnight success. I understand that we live in a world where everyone wants super results now. That may happen on occasion and we can all name sites that have gone from nothing to millions in revenue in a year or two. But this is not the case in general. If that happens to you, enjoy the ride. As for the rest of us, dedication over time is the key. Langorang has been in existence for almost 7 months. When I started there were 2 results in Google for the term Langorang. As of the writing of this there are 2990 results. Also, on my old analysis tools there were 50 unique visitors for the month of October. Using that same tool the site already has 179. The point is that it has grown every month. The numbers may be small now but be ready, when you catch the wave of momentum you may be in for the ride of your life.

Spend a little bit of time every day making your site better
This is key. It is difficult to get others excited about the site if you are not improving it. This site started out as a community. However, no one signed up so I had to start adding features that would make it useful to people. Starting with a video and job tool, I built in a language news aggregation utility and more recently I have been working on a unique content tool and a comments feature for people to add comments to the news items. The point is to keep improving even if it is just a little bit each day.

Be willing to adapt
I heard an older gentleman one time say that he who is not flexible will be bent out of shape. This is very true. If you want to grow your site you need people. You may want people to do one thing and they may be doing another. If you find that instead of buying all your products they are reading all of your content, consider enhancing your content tools. Don’t throw away your products but instead build the traffic to the content and then make the products available through a soft sell approach.

Learn about SEO and Usability
This is can be a very inexpensive way to grow your site. There are several helpful books available to get you primed for the pump. My reading list has a couple that I read recently and they have helped me to get the site on track for better usability and make it easier for search engines to sift through the content on the site.

Build your site debt free
With the plethora of inexpensive hosting companies on the web, it shouldn’t be too hard to keep costs down in this area. Also, you don’t have to pay for expensive software to build your site if you are willing to get a little bit of code dirt under your fingernails. For example, Langorang is built using Ruby on Rails, MySql, Aptana (a tool used to write the code), and MySql Query Browser (a tool used to edit the database when I can’t do it from the Rails code). All of these products are free and there is a lot of community support out there. Don’t be afraid to dig in and make it happen.

Track your success
Finally, how will you know you are doing well if you don’t track it. There are 3 primary metrics that I track with Langorang (you may need to track something different): Visitor Stats, Items Clicked and Revenue. You should be able, at a glance, to tell people how your site is doing and what the trends are. There is an excellent free tool out there called Google Analytics that will help you with this. It has been an invaluable resource in my quest to grow the site.

Most of us have ideas, families and full time jobs. We don’t have a lot of extra time to make the next big thing on the web. However, you may find that your hobby has turned into a full time job. Don’t let it become work!!! Keep it fun and exciting. Always growing and improving. Always try to make things better. Even if you one day have a team working on it with you, establish a culture of excitement, growth and adventure. Have fun storming the castle!!!