Ahh - thanks Rothko - that makes sense. Thank you - will add that to the to-do list!

Sweets, thanks man I appreciate it.

Some day, and that day may never come, I will call upon you to do a service for me. But until that day, consider this justice a gift on my daughter's wedding day.

as a victim of black friday i'm getting into online marketing for the third time. first time i was in high school and actually made some money, but since i was learning everything and was slow as **** i actually was making like 4 dollars an hour or something. take 2 was one of those i should build a backup to poker things but the motivation wasnt there.

hopefully with pokers demise in the USA ill actually make this happen as my new career. sort of throwing **** at the wall with poker, sports info sites, gold bullion etc and seeing what sticks. hopefully i don't spread myself too thin. looking forward to seeing others progress and helping out the people who know even less than me.

you have a site that is going to need to succeed due to branding and referrers and not ranking for "breaking habits" or something (although that would help).

the great news is that you have a site that provides a legitimate service to users and has no ads on it. doing all the article directory crap, hiring spammers, link exchanges or whatever is not for your site.

this is the kind of site that you should be trying to get bloggers to talk about. this isn't someones pokerstars bonus code site that couldn't get an organic link to save its life. search the internet for productivity bloggers, life coach type people, addictions/bad habits websites/forums and start whoring yourself out. people will want to link to you. they don't view you as a competitor and your site provides a good user experience.

try different stuff.

go on a forum and just post reasonable useful stuff and have a link to your site in the signature. on another, just directly suggest your site as a way to set goals. if you want to spend some money you could even buy some cheap advertising on forums.

for bloggers try directly emailing some and say "i love your site and i think my site could be useful to your users, do you mind doing a review or giving a quick shoutout." another tactic could be to comment on blogs for the purpose of getting the bloggers attention a little less directly. if you don't post stupid **** and the blog isn't a top 500 blogger there is a 99% chance he visits your website. you might get some writeups like this.

definitely leave the ads off until you have lot of visitors and users.

ps: maybe put some little "we hate spam too" type thing under your sign up box. sure anyone can do it but it may help get a few extra people through the door

Networking with bloggers is definitely an A+ strategy IME. Actually just networking with anyone who owns a website is a pretty solid strategy and opens up a lot of doors.

"definitely leave the ads off until you have lot of visitors and users."

Strongly disagree with this and with not being able to SEO the site.

obv you have more experience with this stuff but here's a detailed reason of why i think those things.

ads generally make the user experience worse and people are going to be more hesitant to link to a site when they think its just another guy who has had a site for a week and is trying to make a buck on the internet. if it comes off as a more personal pursuit or passion, i think people will be a lot more likely to link freely to it. unless this guy really needs the money to cover his hosting bills fast it seems like a situation where there is a huge downside and little upside. i mean how much is he going to make on 200 uniques a week on a site where he isn't selling anything? i would say that most free online service type websites start off without ads. twitter, facebook, google, youtube, linkedin, picasa, reddit, digg etc all started off ad free. thats not a coincidence.

the seo thing is a bit trickier, but if you are looking to do things organically it will be hard to get any decent anchor text and loop change probably isn't much of a keyword. there is not much content other than the long tail stuff that will be generated by missions. i'm not saying to neglect all the onpage stuff, getting some long tail traffic is great, its just that at the root of this there isn't any content to rank well with. i suppose if you start writing articles about personal development or blogging about your missions or something then you can get somewhere.

I disagree that ads make the user experience worse. How many sites that you go to that have ads make your experience worse? I go to a lot and I have no problem with them. A standard AdSense block in a non-intrusive slot on the site is not frustrating to deal with and doesn't lower the experience. I'm not saying throw in blinking popups and voiceovers and other crap.

There's no reason not to monetize initially and gather as much info as you can.

Loop Change would be a brand name, obviously not an SEO term. I would venture a guess and say there are TONS of decent sized keywords dealing with breaking habits, quitting habits, changing your habits, etc. and that's just a general term. Like I said, split up the site into "quitting smoking" and other bad habits and there's TONS of SEO to do.

Yeah, there isn't tons of content right now, but that's part of SEO, creating content that can rank.

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I have no idea where you get this idea that other webmasters will think the site sucks because it has an AdSense ad on it. That's pretty ridiculous to me. Nobody is going to decide not to link to a helpful site because targeted ads appear on the page. A few non-intrusive ads on a page with lots of great content doesn't suddenly negate the content. Also, you realize ads are helpful and beneficial to people who click on them right?

I don't think creating content changes the focus of the site at all. I think it goes hand in hand. You can have a section of the site devoted to lessons learned from the experiments/goals people are conducting and monetize that accordingly. If people want to break a habit of smoking, why wouldn't you say, "Here's an article we've written with 10 tips on how to stop smoking" and help them even further? I think it'd be a great addition to this site.

I don't see the problem/relevance of your homepage anchor text comment.

it's not that i think that people think sites with ads suck, its that from a web savvy persons perspective is that when you see a site without ads you go "this person wants to make something cool and useful" and when it has ads its "this person wants to make money." so i do think having ads at least somewhat reduces "linkability." here's a graywolf post about linkability and ads with similar sentiment. here's another article of his stating "Once you’ve got a significant focused reader base, that’s the time to slowly ad in the advertising."

and i really don't think that the majority of ads are helpful. have you looked through all the ****ty ebook and supplement/weight loss crap that is on the content network?

ill shut up after this and let the thread return to its intended purpose.

I'm talking about content-based ads, such as AdSense, not plugging some crappy affiliate eBook or something. We'll just have to agree to disagree, although there's not even really an argument here, just preference.

I tend to agree with the logic that ad sense / banners make a worse experience and I do generally start a new site without ads simply because the money is not worthwhile to even worry about it. That said I think it depends how it is done, but most people arent great at laying stuff out so I recommend against it but I do think it can be done well. There have been a lot of instances where I didnt link a smallish site because their ad sense looked like garbage even though I wanted to link to the content.

Brag: 94% on the Google Analytics Certification Test

I took it two months ago. Was harder than I thought it would be but I still passed. I didn't use any of the study links/videos I just paid and started the test right after - would recommend others to use the study links they provide.

thanks for the info guys - some great ideas and I plan to start a blogger blitz tomorrow - just shooting for something like 5-10 per day.

I did start a google adwords account and got 75$ free. I was shocked that for the phrase "change a habit" - mine is the only site advertising (something like 92 cents per click) -- form a habit is the same.

in 4 days that google adwords ad has had 8 clicks on 2500 impressions (which I think isn't saying much)

2 users have written the site up on their blogs - resulting in 14 visits.

Ironically this thread has resulted in 50 visits to the page - 3rd highest source behind 'direct' and facebook - kind of sad! References from 2+2 has averaged 28 seconds per visit - so I guess that's a total of almost 25 minutes spent on the site.

I have written a couple articles (3rd on the way) and submitted through ezines - but that hasn't resulted in much of anything. Because of the google ad campaign - I'm not getting some referrals from 'how.com' and askwhy - but the numbers are very small.

have also had 20 from twitter (466 total visits so far - 303 unique)

I'm guessing that no one else is bidding because it is too broad of a topic to sell info products or magic pills.

My main site also receives a non negligible amount of traffic from a webmaster forum, i think that kind of stuff just happens until you get a bit of loyalty.

I wouldn't run an AdWords campaign for your site until it is properly monetized (obviously use the free $75 though). That keyword is also too longtail.

Try these:

break habit
breaking habits
break habits
breaking bad habits

There's not going to be tons of advertising for these terms because like we've already established, it's not super easy to monetize. But like I said, that's a super wide generic term and people who already have a bad habit they want to quit are searching specifically for that habit, not all of their habits.

Edit: And I would NEVER pay anything near $.92 for a click, that's ridiculous. If there are only a few competitors then you can bid much lower because you don't need to fight for the top spot. Change it so your max bid is like $.10 or something.

Thank you - added the new words - and modified the cost per click (though at 10 cents it now tells me that I'm below 1st page estimates?)

I'm very thankful for all of the advice!

I checked those terms and there's only a few advertisements anyway, at least from my end. You can always tweak it if you don't show up, but I'm pretty sure you will.

Does anyone use google analytics? I've been suspecting that it was inaccurate - and today I got an opportunity to test it.

My buddy in a Dallas suburb went on to the site; started a mission; updated his mission; read another person's mission and commented on it - this had to be at least 5 minutes (his first time). Google analytics is showing it as a 0:00 bounce.

My buddy then went back on this afternoon for 7 minutes surfing around (this visit was planned) and that also came back as a 0:00 bounce...

How inaccurate is the stinking analytics??

Im not an expert on analytics, and have just started playing with it for my site, but that should be the right statistic

"Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page"


If he actually navigated around, clicked various stuff/left comments etc, the bounce rate should be 0; The bounce rate is if someone pulls up the landing page, than just closes.

I would suggest anyone with a startup/website that is trying to make money does not download the android widget for analytics if you want to keep your sanity (ie not check your phone like someone with OCD on coke. )

haha - very true about the OCD on coke comment.

I'm sure i didn't explain well. He navigated around the site - went to different pages - and basically explored it's full functionality (created a mission, made a comment on someone else's - etc) - and it showed up as zero time spent - and it showed as a 'bounce'.

definitely strange.

About the analytics:
I haven't used Google Analytics in a while but I saw (wish I could remember where) a blogger talking about how he installed 3 analytics programs on the same site and got somewhat different results. Not like huge but ~5% difference in unique visitors and pageviews. Guids is right that if someone doesn't click anything it counts as zero no matter what. Sounds like there was some glitch or maybe the page didn't fully load or something and your script was in the header. (This all assumes that you mean that the time spent on site is showing 0 minutes spent, not that the bounce rate is zero, I think there is some miscommunication there).

I have been using Piwik and I love it, although I'm going to try Open Web Analytics once I figure how to get past some php.ini BS because it has click maps and other goodies. But I can't imagine a phone app for stats, I sit here and check like 20 times a day as it is lol.