Pro websiting part one is located here
Around the end of 2009, guitarkitchen.com was reaching about 18o0 unique visitors. During the first few months of 2010, unique visitors numbered around 2200, but a significant part of the traffic increase was related to downloading songs. In fact in April 2010, over 11,000 people downloaded a Fernando Sor etude I recorded many years ago. It seems folk in China are listening to me play guitar! Also please note that I posted a Chinese translation of how to play the blues. Perhaps the two events are interrelated.
I hope to record more music for folks to listen to. I hope do a 10-20 part series of solo-type guitar that I post on youtube with some pictures (and in mp3 format, too). I am planning on doing a few albums in 2010, so that will end up being 30 or songs I could conceivable post for listeners.
I haven’t made more than $1 on my website since it started in 2004, though I haven’t pushed the commercial angle of the website. By the end of the summer I hope to have a series on how to play reggae, on how to play salsa and how to play blues. All 3 styles interest me musically and I would like to learn more about them myself. Hopefully, by the fall returns will around $3 per 1000 page views. I currently have about 8000 page views, not counting music downloads.
Also, I plan to continue writing in the thoughts section. Some of the posts have been read, but really only a dozen or so times each. I feel like I have some good posts but some articles are unrelated to any other articles that I have written. For example I have 1 article about hemp and 1 post of a protein content in hemp. There need to be at least 5-10 articles about hemp before it can be any draw for hemp readership.
In general, it seems like websites that have around 200+ articles begin to see a significant increase in traffic. Steve Pavlina has written at least 800 long posts and Scott Young weighs in at over 700. Currently I have about 40 posts and about 30 lessons, including translations. Only about 3-4 lessons give notable traffic – the reggae lesson and 2 lessons in Spanish! I think there is a fair amount of room open on the internet for decent guitar lessons in Spanish.
By August, I am planning to have around 80 posts and 50 lessons and about 10 more translations in Spanish. At this point I hope to see marked increase in traffic. Around August I plan to start “marketing” guitarkitchen online using forums and offline with small business cards. I am estimating about 4000/month unique visitors at this point. Depending upon the subject matter of the lessons and posts, this number optimistically could reach 8,000 or maybe even 12,000 per month.
Basically, if a site has decent to good content, a critical mass is required. In terms of a website, critical mass has several aspects. One, there is enough content that someone will stay for awhile. Two, other folks who are at least moderately serious about the subject matter of the site will begin to take note around 50-80 articles. In terms of guitar sites, after about 50 articles the amount of sites begins to taper off dramatically. Having 50-100 articles results in more frequent links. Three, current search engine algorithms register both the amount of content and the number of links. At a certain number the begins to show up in search results. The combination of personal links and search results can increase traffic significantly once a site becomes ranked in the top 5 for a search phrase.
My general rule of thumb – for every doubling of significant content, traffic increases by four times. I don’t know if it’s true but it makes sense. If all things are equal and website A has 100 articles and B has 200, B would be a few steps above A in website ranking. This would result in much more than double the amount of traffic. Of course it’s not so simple because of many other factors. But it’s a good rule of thumb .
If the increase to about 150 articles and lessons proves to be useful to people and fun and rewarding for me, I hope to continue the trend and add around 40 articles/lessons/translations a month for the rest of the year. By the end of 2010, guitarkitchen would then have about 300+ pages. At this point, I predict there would a significant increase in traffic. If similar sized blogs and guitar lesson sites benchmark correctly (Cyberfret.com has 100x more traffic and about 600 pages according to Alexa), guitarkitchen would probably receive around 25x current traffic levels. This would mean around around (25oox25) 60,000 visitors per month or (8000×25) 176,000 page views. If $3 per 1000 pages is correct, then guitarkitchen would gross around $500. $500 is not an absurd amount of money but it’s a good chunk of change.
If the doubling in good content results in quadrupling in traffic, then around 600 pages would quadruple page views again. So $500×4 = $2000 per month. This is a good part-time income for a musician. At a pace of 40 pages a month, 300 pages would be added by August 2011. After about 600 pages, I am not sure if the 2x content/4x traffic theory would still work. But adding another 300 pages by April 2012 (a rate of 40 per month) would be a 50% increase in content and would theoretically double traffic. This would put income for guitarkitchen at around $4000 per month with about 500,000 visitors per month. Though 1/2 million sounds like a big number, it isn’t completely out of question for a personal website.
Beyond a reach of about 1/2 million, a personal website should be amazing instead of just good. To become something great and worthy of so many people’s focus, a website needs to provide great value for it’s readers. This is where careful thought, planning and passion come into play.
On another level, guitarkitchen is not my primary focus. I want playing music to continue to be my primary focus. If I am to contribute 40 posts to guitarkitchen a month with a breakdown of 20 articles, 10 lessons and 10 translations, I need to consider the best way to go about creating content. I find writing articles easy, it’s just a stream of consciousness. Writing good lessons takes time because they require creating video, audio and diagrams. Some lessons have taken 5-10 hours. Translating an article into Spanish takes about 1-2 hours. Writing an article can take about 30-60 minutes. A normal lesson, if the video and audio don’t take long to set up, takes around 2-3 hours. Perhaps I need to write 5 lessons a month, 20 articles, 5 translations and 10 creative works. This allows me to play guitar while I work on my website. This would be perfect! It would also help to make guitarkitchen more unique and hopefully would be a great experience for folks who stopped by! Alright! Peace!
Thanks to crazyhorse for the photo!