Maintaining A Content Site

It requires a little work. My recommendation is to just commit yourself to at least an hour a day towards development and marketing - whether this be adding new pages, updating current pages, seeking out new affiliate programs or link partners, etc.

This is working out very well for me, in addition to outsourcing. If you have a willing family member, you can easily put them to work on repetitive tasks or teach them to do specific updates. The key word there is "willing" LOL. My son hasnt been quite so willing lately, but fortunately it is Albert's off season with work and he agreed to help me out for these next few months.

The updates and new pages keep the spiders visiting frequently, and create more "landing pages" that will get indexed by the search engines for a different set of keywords. The more pages you can get indexed the better - as you will be able to reach a wider market with slightly different terms or more specific terms.

I'm also updating the product feed (RSS) several times a week - usually once a day. I've stopped promoting strictly holiday items there, and am listing more general (but seasonal) items... and will soon begin Valentines Day promotions shortly after the first of the year.

Sales were slow this past week - we're up to 12, now. But I'm happy with having landed a dozen sales in the first month or so. These are good results, in my opinion - and I anticipate the site will do VERY well in 2005 as it settles into the search engines.

There are now 117 pages indexed by Google, and 36 pages indexed by Yahoo. (Yay! Finally!) There is only 1 page indexed by MSN - and it's the RSS Feed. MSN Beta, however, has 49 pages indexed.

My stats show that the bots or spiders are really active on my site now, and that someone is subscribed to the Feed through bloglines (very cool!). Moving along real nice...

As for Adsense, so far only 2 click-through's. I'm not complaining, though - I'd rather visitors click through the product links ;)

The top 20 search terms used were very interesting. One phrase brought 4 visitors in from the search engines, and my page was ranked #5 in Yahoo and #31 on Google.

There was another phrase that brought 4 visitors, and that page was #3 on Google and I couldnt find it in the top 100 at Yahoo (probably not indexed yet).

Another phrase that brought in 3 visitors was #8 on Yahoo and not in the first hundred listings at Google.

Interesting...

Anyway, so far so good - and we've added 23 pages to the site this week already :) That should keep the spiders happy!