Nearing the end of our first month....

[mattpark]

Its nearly one month after the forum was created, so I figured I’d write a little run down on how things are going.

We are seeing a steady increase in unique visitors to the site each day, however are only averaging 2.58 new members per day. Not a very good conversion rate, but this place is new, and content that people can actually search and browse through is limited. I would expect this to increase much more as new content is added.

Thursday and Friday are by far the most active days of the week, with 4pm the peak of traffic.

Traffic (not including spiders/robots, my ip address or replies with special HTTP status codes)
Unique visitors - 832
Number of visits - 1596
Pages - 21269
Hits - 105762

96.8 % of our visitors are running MS Windows.

Browsers
MS Internet Explorer - 55.7 %
Firefox - 40.1 %

Search spiders/robots - Googlebot loves the site for some reason, however other search spiders are a bit slow on the uptake.

Googlebot - 9061 hits
MSNBot - 280 hits
Unknown robot - 199 hits
LinkWalker - 196 hits
Unknown robot (identified by 'robot') - 76 hits

Referalls from search engines at the moment a low. This is most likely because our site is in “the sandbox” period. For those of you that aren't familiar with it, the sandbox is a penalty that is applied to new sites and new links under the assumption that they cannot play nicely with others. It is only after time that the penalty is lightened and eventually disappears and the site is left to play in the park with the rest of the "nice sites". So, if you ask me it’ll be at least 6months before we get listed for the keywords I would like, (voip, and forum).

I have however managed to get the site listed in DMOZ, the Open Directory Project. This is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. A search for “voip” brings us in at number 5.

http://search.dmoz.org/cgi-bin/search?search=voip

Content on the site is growing, and is of high quality at the moment. More importantly we have managed to attract a good handful of knowledgeable members to answer new users questions. With more traffic, comes more SPAM, but this is easy to keep on top.

For the next 6months or so the large majority of traffic will come from links placed on other sites, and links referrals from existing members. I’m not aware of any site that is displaying one of the banners I made yet.

How can you help? Links, referrals, links, banners, links, and high quality content. Oh and links. You can find banner files here - http://ukvoiptalk.com/viewtopic.php?t=23

I’d appreciate ideas on how to drive more targeted traffic to the site. When we are a bit bigger, may be a year or so time, perhaps we could run some sort of award program? “Best Overall VoIP Provider 2006” “Best Hardware 2006” “Best Support Team 2006” etc… voted for by our members? Or is this stupid? Fire comments my way.

Anyhow, i'll report back next month and let you know how things have progressed.

Matt

[mattpark]

P.S. I've been in contact with a number of hardware vendors and manufactures. I should be getting a load of VoIP related hardware to review over the next few months.

If your interested in being a reviewer, either post your interest in here, or drop me a PM. Some stuff we'll be able to keep , some we'll have to send back

[scottri]

I think the number of visitors is impressive given the short time the site has been running.

I have added a banner to my site for you...

http://www.somethingfunny.co.uk/index.asp

My only concern is that my site is not related in anyway? I didn't think that helps page ranks?

I am happy to help review products - and since my own expereince is very limited l can offer a review from a beginners perspective.

[mattpark]

Yeah im quite pleased with the number of uniques in such a short space of time.. works out just over 3weeks actually.

Cheers for the banner... i suppose it is a bit random on your site, but as i said, every vist will help in the early stages. If you make the image a clicky then i can see how many referrals your site is making.

Love that valentines Hoff picture.... Can't beat the Hoff.

I'll let you know when bits and pieces of voip hardware start coming through, a beginner point of view is defiantly worth having! You might get some free kit out off it for your time reviewing, and working in the background as a mod!

[scottri]

Doh, yeah been a clicky would have helped. Sorted it now

Free is my favourite price