Whenever I start a new site of any kind there is always that question of how quickly will the traffic come?
I actually built and continue to run these three other public sites:
http://rth.rockchipfirmware.com
https://www.topnotchtablets.com
http://www.rockchipfirmware.com
The first site (Roman’s Tech Help) was originally a blogger (i.e. the Google blogging engine…) blog that was dedicated to getting people up and running with custom firmware for their Western Digital Media Players back in the olden days of digital media consumption in the living room… before the Roku and Smart TVs started dominating that space. I didn’t have any new content to add and did a bad job of keeping it updated. Once I got some real hosting for my other sites, I archived the old site as a sub-domain and did a quick rebuild on wordpress CMS (great pilot project for getting introduced to WordPress…). It gets very little traffic and is just kept around for the handful of people that still need it.
The second site is a retail site for setting decent-to-good quality China Tabs. The traffic on that site has really taken off. Honestly I had a strong interest in the Chinese electronic scene and as a quasi-developer was really curious if I could pull off a good retail site. It has had probably 5 major revisions, two of which consisted of complete rebuilds as I switched from using Ubercart to Drupal Commerce, and has been an incredible learning experience.
The last site is exactly what it sounds like, a dedicated, fairly easy-to-use, upload and download repository of firmware for tablets based on Rockchip chipsets. I did some adsense monetization of topnotchtablets.com a year or two in to help subsidize the retail income from the site. I had such good results I wanted to see if I could replicate them on another site that was primarily community content driven but not a forum. There was, at the time, a big need for an easy-to-use, US based, non spyware/adware ridden file depot for Chinese firmware (both OEM and custom). It was also an excellent learning experience and taught me a lot about using Views, which is a huge part of Drupal development.
TNT and RockhipFirmware have seen rather surprisingly (surprising to me at least) rapid growth in traffic. I learned quite a bit about SEO through my journey.
My full-time job, however, as a Security/Microsoft/Linux Admin guy has seen me doing a TON of research and I noticed I was referencing the same links over and over and over again (same Google search queries). I would often get really frustrated when I would “pull something off” technically speaking, get it working, and then when I went back to it 6 months later couldn’t remember what I had done and had a hard time finding all the links I had referenced. This lead to me doing a lot of bookmarking… Well, that was fine for a while but keeping bookmarks organized is a pain and the bookmark system in Chrome/Firefox just isn’t “searchable” enough. To keep my head from exploding I finally decided to start a tech blog which you are reading right now.
In the spirit of my previous endeavors, Kiloroot lines up with my other sites in several ways. First, I wanted a project where I could learn something new but was very easy to get into and WRITE (that meant going with WordPress as it is new to me, easy to use, and obviously blogger focused as a platform). Second, I wanted to make technical stuff more accessible, a la’ Roman’s Tech Help. In other words, provide enough information in my posts when I write on how to do something, that those of us who are still learning and are not “uber-geeks” can actually read a post and do something productive with it, without banging our heads on our desk over and over again. I can’t promise some folks won’t have to bang their heads every now and again but that is what the comment section is for. Feel free to ask questions… Third, in the spirit of SEO and generating site traffic, I wanted to see if writing good content (both in quantity and quality) could really move your blog up the Google/Bing/Ask/Yahoo/etc search results pages.
Having just started Kiloroot in the middle of February, 2014, I am, once again, finding myself very surprised by how fast traffic is growing. Here is a screenshot of the growth curve courtesy of Google Analytics.
The past 30 days has seen 700+ users and 1400+ page views! Thanks!
Having been around the block a few times with sites now, I realize this is still next-to-nothing in terms of what kind of traffic = blogging success 🙂 and it is an infinitesimal fraction of the traffic I get from TNT and RockchipFirmware. That being said, the growth is “all-natural” (no focused SEO linking, no working with an SEO firm, most traffic comes from organic Google searches, not Youtube, forums, facebook, etc…) and has been quite rapid for a brand new domain/blog (based on previous experience). I am quite thankful, and honestly a bit humbled by the interest. This is good encouragement for me to keep writing, not just for myself, but as a contributor to the technical community which, of all professions, IMHO does a most excellent job of supporting those who are a part of it. I have been the beneficiary of the hard work (which is usually free/open) of others, and am thrilled to give back.
Thanks for reading and making the first quarter of my 2014 exciting!
Cheers!