live website creation and promotion

All three of our websites, Reader², MyFilmz and MyProgs, have received an honorable mention awards from SEOmoz.

Added AdSense tracking to all websites at my Google Analytics account, will report here any interesting results as soon as they appear.

Received Amazon revenue for Q3 and Q4 2005. Total of $89. Not too much, but Reader² is not that popular - yet. I hope this will change soon.

Some statistics for Q3+Q4:
There were 9677 clicks to Amazon, with 21 items ordered through direct links, 106 items total - means 85 items were ordered by people already after they navigated out of direct-linked items. Strange, but better for me - Amazon keeps the affiliate cookie for some time.
That resulted in conversion value of 1.10% - I don’t know if that’s small or large - but I assume it’s near the average.
That also resulted in 92 total items shipped, Amazon’s revenue of $1,566.

If you haven’t noticed it yet, I added links to Alibris bookstore, its main advantage is ability to buy used books. I’ll report here if there will be some interesting results about this affiliate.

Thanks to Lab, I’ve optimized ad blocks positions at MyProgs. Will report results after 2-4 weeks.

Changes (adsense formats reference):

• Removed ‘Wide Skyscraper’ block from right side.
• Stretched items list and made it 3-columns.
• Removed ‘Half Banner’ block from the end of items list.
• Added ‘180×90 link unit’ to the left panel, above tags list.
• Added ‘Half Banner’ block as first item in the list
  (only for unregistered users).
• Added ‘Leaderboard’ block to the bottom of the page
  (only for unregistered users).

It is much easier to work with AdSense, if you’re in UK - now I can transfer my payments directly to the bank account

December…

Reader² stats:

• 16200 visits from Google
• 300 visits from MSN
• 300 visits from Yahoo
• 200 visits from AOL
• 3500 direct visits
• 15% returning visitors

Other interesting referrers:

• 1100 visits from go.Mail.ru (russian search)
• 700 visits from LiveJournal
• 400 visits from del.icio.us

Popular search phrases are misspelled words, as usual:

• 233 “la palabra del mudo”
• 101 “cunninglus”

That’s very interesting: 58 “books to read”

MyProgs stats:

• 4200 visits from Google
• 400 visits from Yahoo
• 100 visits from MSN
• 1200 direct visits
• 11% returning visitors

Popular search phrases:

• 130 “lvllord”
• 72 “firefox gestures”

MyFilmz stats:

• 420 visits from MSN
• 360 visits from Google
• 1100 direct visits
• 25% returning visitors

Popular search phrase:

• 300 “new movies” - that’s nice

P.S. From now on statistics is gathered by Google Analytics, I’m going to turn off AWStats soon.
If you think that I can post here more interesting data from Google Analytics results - tell me exactly where to look for it, and I’ll do it.

Added PayPal donate buttons to projects’ pages, people can donate using both PayPal account and regular credit cards - we’ll see how it goes, I will report donation statistics here as well (if there will be any statistics at all )

When I first signed up to Google Analytics, I added tracking of Reader², but when I recently wanted to add tracking for all my other sites, ‘Add Website Profile’ link disappeared - Google limited number of profiles. Today I found out that I am able to add websites again - the limit still exists though, now I was able to grow number of tracked sites to 5.
Will keep you updated about interesting things that I find in Google Analytics’ results.

I’m releasing statistics script (which I was talking about here and here) as open-source. You can see live demo at http://stats.k78.info
While I’m waiting for SourceForge to confirm new project creation, you may ask me for the script and installation instructions by adding a comment to this post or via email.

Added redirects www.reader2.com=>reader2.com and www.myprogs.net=>myprogs.net, as Tim suggested.
Two lines in .htaccess:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.reader2.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://reader2.com/$1 [R=301,L]

(301 stands for permanent redirect)