Pro websiting, part 3

Check out pro websiting part one and part two.

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. Currently, the site receives about 4-5k visitors a month. I suppose you could say traffic has increased 100%.  After writing my post last year, I actually lost all interest in writing on the website for quite awhile.  Thinking about all the numbers too much seems to redirect my creativity to running numbers.

I’ve learned a lot about pro websiting since last year.  It’s mostly been from sites dedicated to making money with a website online.  ThinkTraffic, SmartPassiveIncome and ViperChill are the top three, offhand, plus StevePavlina.com’s forums.

Here’s their basic thought process:

1. To make money, provide valuable content to people.
2. People find your site mostly from google, facebook, youtube.
3. To increase exposure on google, create great content and also develop links to your site.
   1. create great content by sharing inspired material
   2. create great content by providing stuff people want to learn
   3. develop links by letting people in other places know about your website. forums, comments, free pages.
   4. imagine how people would find things online if there were no search engine. and create links based upon this idea
4. Create a facebook page
5. Add good videos to youtube with links to your site
6. Once you have decent traffic make money with affiliates, google adsense and personally developed products
7. Affiliates and personally developed products make the most money.

Folks seem to making between 500-5000 USD from their websites.  I have a lot of ideas about what would make guitarkitchen.com even better for folks. Here’s some:

• blues lessons
• 1-2 more reggae and 1-4 more latin lessons
• more classical music
• more video instruction
• intermediate lessons
• comprehensive coverage of scales and chords
• ebook(s)
• albums or individual songs
• product reviews
• more lessons about popular songs
• organize all the posts so the are easily findable by category in the menus
• figure out how to speed up download time

There’s lots of other stuff but that’s about where I am at.  I would love to make some really cool lessons, too.  At the moment, I am trying to fill in a lot of the cracks.  It’s kind of a house cleaning/sprucing up.  Once I get a lot of that stuff out of the way, I am going to focus more on the big lessons.  For example, the salsa lesson in both english and spanish has been a big hit.  The only other lesson in that category would be the reggae lesson and the blues lessons in spanish.

In terms of possible money, it’s something that I’ll find out when I get there.  If 1/2000 of the folks do an affiliate or an ebook, then I would be making about $40 a month at current traffic levels.  I just started google and I’ve made about $4.  This is great! It’s more than I’ve ever made before!  I think I could provide more interesting possibilities to folks.

I feel like guitarkitchen could have 50k-100k of visitors a month if it has a real solid base of content and also about 20-50 more high quality lessons. This would mean 400-1000 USD per month.  Enough to go to the beach! We’ll see.

Ultimately, I would like to start adding original music and videos to the site and expand the focus of the site to a site that provide lessons to some people but also original music.  And use income from the site to travel to learn music from the source, as well as create music from around the world and learn more languages so I could translate content into other languages.  I could create lessons with people I meet along the way as well

Thanks to crazyhorse for the photo!