God and Google showed me the path

When you work 14-16 hrs a day, sitting in-front of your computer screen, taking the pain to write new content, think and create new structures for your website...and then one day you realize you have been blessed with the success you dreamed of...I can say today that feels good. Because, today God and Google blessed me for my perseverance.

A month back I came up with the idea of creating unique content for India election results with the hope that on 16th may people will come to the website searching for result updates. I designed the pages in best possible manner so as to provide the maximum ease to the user in finding the desired information.

In general, google used to send me 2000 visits per day, but today I got 72,000 unique visitors. Last time, I posted saying I reached 1,00,000 unique visits in a month, today that stands at 3,95,000. My adsense income was $5 per day, today I got $88. My alexa rankings went to 72,000.

I know that from tomorrow, life may go back to normal. My traffic and adsense income will return to where they were. But, I am just thankful to God and Google for showing me the way. This is the path that I need to follow and I am sure that with the correct contents and hard work, I can make this a regular per day figure for me.

India election Exit polls show Congress lead

Today, 13th May '2009, the final phase of voting came to an end and so did the restriction by Election Commission to show exit polls on News Channels. A expected, all news channels went berserk showing exit poll results. Most of them seem to be pointing towards the Congress emerging as the single largest party, and UPA coming out as the single largest coalition. The BJP and it's NDA group is showcased as lagging just a little behind.
The results wil be out on 16th May and till then these speculations will continue. However, one must keep in mind, that in 2004, the News Channels predicted a BJP success, but it happened just the opposite. So these exit polls can't be really always trusted.

google search engine optimization and 1,00,000 page views

Site: India Travel Guide

My India travel website today crossed 1,00,000 pageviews (per month) with around 1800 visitors per day. Now this was a fairly new site for me, I started work on the domain in just Nov last year and by Dec, I had 200 visitors coming daily to the website. My google adsense earning was also very low (around $2 per month).

This is what I did to get more visitors in just 5 months:

1. In early January, I decided to work on the content. I took to writing and adding new content to the site on a daily basis.
2. For new content, I used wikipedia and 3-4 other sites on that topic. Then re-wrote all in my own words and created unique articles.
3. I reorganized the website structure to be more simple, no more folder inside a folder inside a folder thing. Checked a few other sites who were my direct competition and followed their link structure.
4. Submitted to digg and other sites very often. I got a lot of diggs for my article on 26th January, India's Republic day. I think that made google notice my site.
5. Slowly my traffic rose, I started coming up on first page for different keywords and by March I had 800 daily visitors.
6. I have continued the same concept of adding new, genuine contents in. Now I have over 2000 pages on the site and traffic has reached to 1800 visitors per day.

For Adsense:

When in Feb I was getting 500 visitors, I was still making $2 per month. That was really a bad earning. In March I decided to do something about it.

1. First I studied a lot of tutorials and found that it's all about clever ad placements. Earlier all my ads were either in the left menu or featured some where bottom of the page.
2. I added in the 720 px ads to the top header sections and moved the left ads towards the top of the page. Text-link ads, although not high paying, proved to be a good source for clicks.
3. Another important thing was adding channels for tracking. The channels helped me identify which ads were doing the best and I followed the same structure in the new pages I was making.
4. Channels also helped me target publishers and earlier if one click gave me 0.01 cents, it moved to 0.14 cents per click.
5. Now, I get on an average 150 clicks per day and an earning of around $5.

Although I feel it's still not much as I can optimize it up to at least $12 per day with 150 clicks that I am getting, I can't complain considering I made $2.28 in Jan, $16.07 in March and now in April it jumped to $95.22!

My alexa rankings have also been fast improving and today I am ranked at 2,43,487.

Just happy to see my site crossing 1,00,000 page views/month today and thought of sharing with you all. I am sure many won't consider this a BIG achievement, but it's great for me considering the fact that 4 months back the site was going no where.