eCuffo (site in sig) has reached top 100,000 in 3 days. It's currently at 91K approx. Is it normal for sites to jump this quick?

__________________



TheBiggestBoards - See where your forum ranks - Size Matters!

if you have massive traffic and it just started maybe. it goes off of the last three months data and if it just started and has some pretty decent traffic it could be. do you not think it has this kinda traffic?

I've had 8,000 Uniques in the past 4 or 5 days. There's no 3 month stat but the number for the yesterday part shows up.

__________________



TheBiggestBoards - See where your forum ranks - Size Matters!

lafsunlmtd (and everyone else)
We have been working on the eCuffo site pretty hard (mh and I work together on some of our sites).
Question - we need to take advantage of this traffic and hopefully it will continue. in your opinion and if you are getting quick big hits of traffic, what is the best way to make some $$ from this in your opinion.

__________________
The Biggest Boards | Political Disgust | JAMOOZA

it depends on whether it is consistent traffic and if it is real (targetted) or fake traffic. i think you could really pepper that thing with a couple more ad blocks. the trick in my opinion is to make the ads look like content on your site.

on the top, if you could take the border from the google ads off it would look more like your site and less like an ad and that generally gets more clicks. and change where it says sponsors on your side bar to say something else like "deals" or something like that and that also generates more traffic.

many people frown on this, but if you put like a block of ads or a link unit directly below the first listing that separate it i think that would do really well too.

once you start to get the traffic to a consistent level maybe you could sell the top spot in a category like yahoo and google do.

you might also want to see about maybe placing something like etology or something on there as an alternate to google in case you have too many ad blocks.

i think the "sell a link" thing is cool on the top, but maybe until you get some customers you could put a google link unit (different from ad block) and that might net you some more clicks as well.

as far as the alexa thing, that is your daily rank and that can fluxuate based on your actual traffic, you don't have a real rank because i guess they dont have enough data for you. your real rank is an average of three months of rankings. i think they probably give it to you after a week or two

Thanks for the suggestions on the monetizing. Problem with most of this is the software is encrypted so any modifications are done with the template files. I'm trying to figure out some conditionals I can use to do the first link thing.

I'll change the Sponsors and take that border off here later tonight.

As for Alexa, I know the daily changes daily if you're in top 100k. I don't know if there's "fake" traffic. I googled "Webmaster Forum" and have been going down the list promoting the site on a few new sites every day to spread the hits out over time. I'm sure it will calm down after a few weeks as the marketing will decline. Hopefully it will stay up!

Thanks!

__________________



TheBiggestBoards - See where your forum ranks - Size Matters!

I changed a few things:

Featured Links > Suggested Links and instead of link saying "Buy a link" I put "Place My Link Here".

Sponsors > Hot Links

And took off the border around the header banner. Do you think I should have some sort of ad at the footer? Either text links above my bottom navigation or something else?

__________________



TheBiggestBoards - See where your forum ranks - Size Matters!

I was able to do this even with encrypted stuff. I used some variables I saw in the templates and created the conditional in the template.

Just sell one spot in turn making it more expensive?

__________________



TheBiggestBoards - See where your forum ranks - Size Matters!

Thanks for the suggestions lafsunlmtd. Great info.

__________________
The Biggest Boards | Political Disgust | JAMOOZA

it looks a lot better. taking away the border on the google thing i think helps a lot. let me know how it goes

you know how the first few listings on yahoo or google are paid cpc? why not either sell the top spot in any category either on a flat rate or cpc? i think you could drum up more business and more interest that way.