I’ll save all the formal stuff for a post at The Inquisitr later this week, but I’m sitting here on a Monday, nearly a week into the process, and thought I’d share some thoughts and numbers.
– I’d forgotten the joy (or pain) of running my own large WP blog. I’ve managed to break the template a number of times, including Sunday night where I thought it would be smart to auto-update the plugins. Big mistake
– Feedburner is still like a Rollercoaster years after launching. I can’t give an accurate subscriber number because it’s up and down, but it’s roughly 1200 subscribers on average one week in (highest count has been 1500+). Not huge, but more than the 300 or 400 I thought the site would get. BTW: why isn’t Feedburner using Google logins yet? have they forgotten about the service?
– All the missing bits are now fixed: about page with full bios, contact page complete with form (3 form plugins later), Twitter account here which auto updates via plugin, but painfully posts on pre-posts.
– The site is averaging around 18,000 page views a day as of yesterday (but including the entire month including pre-launch). The biggest day was Thursday (US time) where a post hit the front page of Digg. If the average holds (it wont) about 750k page views month. I’m betting on 500k, but hope it’s higher. When planning this I thought 100-200k, so I’m more than happy (its nearly hit 200k now)
– Started running some basic affiliate ads to demo the 125×125 spots. I’m not going to actively try to sell them until there’s a month worth of traffic to use, but if anyone is interested and would like to buy one now, I’m certainly open to offers.
– The writing team is working really well, I woke up Saturday to find I didn’t have a post on the front page. It was magical knowing that there was a pile of content up and I wasn’t pressured to add to it. Spent 2 hours playing with my son: it’s been a long time since I’ve felt able to do that without stressing about getting content up. I still worked both days of the weekend, but it was more leasurly and fun…well the Sunday night breaking the template and coding part aside 🙂
– slowly working my way through some value adds and partnerships. Couple of small announcements hopefully in the next few week.
– Haven’t had one headline on Techmeme yet, only the odd link in. Reddit and Digg headlines therefore have become easier to obtain. Bizarre.
