Traffic from Halloween Past

My page Salt Lake Sites- Halloween used to have the top listing in Google and Yahoo. Multiple weeks of downtime at my web host pretty much wiped me out of the search engines.

This top spot gives insight into seasonal web traffic flows.

I admit, the data is disappointing. The top position on Google and Yahoo only delivered 1800 hits in October. I got just under 70 hits per day in the week before Halloween.

There is nothing really that compelling about my list of Halloween attractions (other than it's more complete than competitors). I thought the position in Google would have delivered more traffic. Let's see, I usually get a $1.50 in ad revenue for every thousand hits. The keyword position itself is only worth about two dollars. I just liked that I was getting a predictable spike.

I do have a costume affiliate -- Costume Craze. My affiliate stats says I've sent them 1266 hits since 2006. I've sold 11 costumes and made $50.33. Targetted local traffic is slightly more lucrative than random traffic.

In conclusion. Local web sites do not pay off, but data is fun regardless, and, yes, this post was just a pathetic attempt to recapture a decent spot on Google for 2011 so that I will have another Halloween Spike in my chart.

Second Quarter a Bust

April started out okay, but sales fell to recession lows in May and June making second quarter a bust. I made a theoretic $1241 in commissions for the quarter. Of course I never manage to collect the full commission amount.

Moving to a new server and getting a cellphone to test the mobile sites increased my costs by $100 a month. My total expenses are just about $600 a quarter. So my real income in about $641.

There is an outside change that, if I traveled to Las Vegas, I could find a small group interested in discussing the Medical Savings and Loan. I believe that, if people started discussing alternatives to insurance, we could overturn the ObamaCare, RomneyCare, The Utah Policy Project and other manifestations of socialized medicine.

The problem is that the lack of income means I can't afford a hotel room. I don't know of any good camping near Las Vegas.

Because I really want the opportunity to discuss the Medical Savings and Loan, I am going to end this blog post with an ad. By ad, I mean I would make money if I had any sales.

EvoraPlus is a new pro-biotic dental care product. Most dental care products have the futile aim of killing all the germs in one's mouth to protect the teeth. This is a futile goal because our mouths are part of a living biological system designed to digest food. The pro-biotic approach replaces the bacteria that cause tooth decay with beneficial bacteria.

The EvoraPet product is designed for dogs and cats who simply don't brush their teeth on a regular basis.

Here are two coupons that expire 8/5/2011: Save $2.00 on Evora Plus, or EvoraPet

Master Index

I made a Master Index for the community color site.

I made this page primarily for my own use. As noted earlier, I changed the directory structure from using category numbers to using keywords. The Grand Junction Accounting page used to be gjct.com/dir.html?category_id=755. It is now gjct.com/dir/accounting.

The master index shows me all of the page names. Clicking on the page names shows the community sites with a page by a given name.

The only interesting part of the page is the summary. It currently reads: "There are 1944 pages in the this directory structure with 537 distinct names with a total of 8,850,656 page views."

My little directory tree has almost 2000 pages and is approaching 9 million hits.

Store of the Day Index

I created an index to the store of the day program. I created the Store of the Day as an effort to fund open community calendars (eg, Salt Lake or Denver Color).

Rather than putting a ton of ads on the calendar, I can have automatic links to the Store of the Day. A store of the day feature also lets me have an active rss feed for the directory.

This system does not give me enough money to hire a minimum wage clerk to maintain a calendar, but it pays for hosting. Lets see, there's currently 469 stores in the Store of the Day rotation. The system shows 324,567 page views on this feature since 2004.

At current ad rates, one is lucky to make a dollar per thousand page views. Since these are ultra targetted ads, I am probably making $5 per thousand page views.

An extra index for the feed might increase the traffic.

Sadly, this is the closest I've come to creating a working profit center for a web site.

Poster Stores

My Stats show the community color web sites pulled in twelve hundred bucks in the fourth quarter of 09. It is up from the previous year. The sites make about the tenth of what I would need to make one minimum wage job.

I did a great deal of work during the year replacing failing online merchants with new merchants.

I decided to concentrate on merchants offering widgets. A widget is a program that updates automatically with current inventory.

For example, I've been working on All Posters stores. I like the AllPosters.com program because the widgets add some content (pictures) with the possibility of making revenue. The Poster Store for Moab shows images of arches ... a visually pleasing subject.

The revenue has been scant. I've earned $15.00 for 1000 clickthrus so far. It takes about 100,000 page views to get 1000 clicks. So far, I've yet to find a niche on the Internet that is not marginal.

Seven Million Hit Mark

The offcials stats page shows the Community Color directory page just passed the seven million hit mark. In actuality, I crossed this line a month ago. The program deletes the stats for a page when I delete the page.

Hitwise, we find Salt Lake City is approaching the 3 million hit mark. Provo is near the three quarter of a million hit mark. The newer Colorado directories are moving along as well. Denver approaches the half million hit mark with both Colorado Springs and Boulder at the 100,000 hit mark.

Internal pages are hopping along. There's been 180,000 views on the venue pages, and 1.5 million hits on the review pages. These figures are low as I delete the hit counters when I delete the pages.

Currently there's 20,000 links in the directory. I have deleted 6,000 old and broken links. About a quarter of the web sites listed have gone dark since starting the directory.

Recession Taking It's Toll

Tallying up the Q2 2009. The take for Q2 had fallen from $1,463 to $766. That is is fell from about a quarter of a minimum wage job to about an eigth of a minimum wage job. Costs are about $300 a quarter. So really the take is about a 1/16th of a minimum wage job.

The lack of a funding source has kept me from adding features.

To make matters worse, many of the links in the directory have gone dark and the directories are showing signs of excessive link rot.

Five Million Hits

According to my handy little hit counter, the directory page of the Community Color family of directories is just about to trip 5 million page views. The most popular sites are SLSites.com, which had 2M hits, Provo Utah dot US, which is up around 500k, followed by Denver Color and gjct.com which have 300k hits.

NOTE: The hit counter is low. For example, the counter is attached to the page; so, when I delete a page, the hits go away. The counter only counts hits on the dir.html page. The calendars, review pages and photo directory get tons of hits.

There are currently 18109 web sites listed in the directory. That is an average of 276 hits per listing. I've placed a number of test links in the directory. Sites in the directory get about 100 hits a year. This depends upon their location in the directory.

Note, I've deleted over 4477 of the entries as web sites go dark. About 20% of the sites added to the directory have gone dark. The turnover of web sites is higher than I had expected.

Ad revenue is currently at the point where I would need 5 million hits a year to provide one minimum wage salary for the year.

Deleting Old Links

I just completed a link deletion frenzy. I checked 1650 links and deleted 285 of the beasties. If your site was down in this last week; it is possible that I deleted it. So you would have to re-add it. NOTE, this directory only serves the Mountain West at the moment. The old link page shows were I am on this project.

Link deletion is an ongoing project. My goal is to check all links in the system at least once a year. The chart below shows the number of link additions to deletions:



Yes, at this point in time, I am deleting things faster than I am adding 'em.

Boring Meaningless Statistics

I decided that community color should have a press release (dagnabbit). The little hit counter I put on Salt Lake Sites just clicked passed a million. I figured that was as good as any to have a press release. Of course the counter is wildly inaccurate. Due to a programming glitch it missed about 6 months of activity, and it only shows the activity on the directory structure. Anyway here goes:

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Community Color Press Release 12/9/2005: The Salt Lake Sites open directory officially passed the 1 million directory hit today. Salt Lake Sites in an open directory in the Community Color family of sites. The directory currently lists 4697 links to 4054 unique domains. The most popular categories on the site are Salt Lake Night Life, Salt Lake Radio and Shopping.

The second most popular directory in the family is Provo Utah dot US. This directory covers the Utah Valley area. It lists 1282 links to 1060 distinct domains. The most popular categories in Provo are crafts and apartments. Provo is a college town where people like to do crafty things. The Provo directory shows 254,000 hits. Missoula.ws shows 174,000 hits and gjct.com (Grand Junction) shows 155,000 hits. A new comer in the line up is Denver Color which past the 100,000 hit mark earlier this month.

The purpose of the Community Color family of sites is to promote local web development in the mountain west. The directory includes one of the most complete collections of links to local artists, cultural institutions and businesses in the area. The site allows free listings for all residents in the areas served by the directories. The entire Community Color directory structure averages 2700 hits a day.

NOTE, the directory is only one component of the site. In November, 2005, the Community Color Sites reported 49,638 sessions and 414,233 page views. The directory accounts for about 20% of the site's traffic.


The web sites are funded by a small number of clearly marked advertisers (affiliates). 2.7% of the links in Salt Lake Sites go to affiliated sites. 3.1% of the sites in Grand Junction go to affiliates, 3.3% of the sites in Missoula go to affiliates and 5.8% of the links in Provo go to affiliates.

Unfortunately, there is a very high turn over in local web sites. Salt Lake Sites has 4697 links. In the last three years, I’ve deleted 770 broken links. 14% of the total links have been removed! I greatly appreciate people who mark broken links. I apologize for the large number of broken links still on the directory...especially broken links that go to unsavory sites.

System wide, the community color family of sites lists 14181 links. 990 of the links go to "affiliates." I believe that this is a good balance. The take from the advertisers has been averaging about $650 a month. Hopefully the use of the directory will grow with time.

The entire directory structure shows over 2.37 million hits. This figure is actually an undercount. I have a tendency to delete data.

This concludes the press release. I have another one planned in about a month.