Well, well, well, it appears one of my tactics has worked. Al from Self Made Minds must have seen my clicks in his incoming links stats and decided to stop by to check the place out. While he was here he left a comment. Much appreciated. Hell, “get at least 1 comment” probably wouldn’t have shown up in my “goals” posts for another couple of iterations.

Since I posted the New Goals article, there have been a total of 4 unique visitors/ip’s (not including my own of course) that have visited the site. Not too shabby. Slowly picking up steam?

I have also posted my first comment since ending my self-enforced publicity blackout. It was in response to Al’s recent post over on SMM. It hasn’t shown up yet though, so either they are moderating comments or I have failed to properly use the ‘internets’. I’ll check on it tomorrow to see which is the case.

With the first goal out of the way, it’s time to set some new ones. Here’s a recap of what I have accomplished.
Old Goals:

• Make a minimum of 1 post per day – CHECK
• Receive at least 1 visitor via search result – CHECK

New Goals:

• Continue to make a minimum of 1 post per day
• Write “topical” posts with searchable keywords or phrases (Don’t worry, this does not mean MFA articles. It will be something I’m interested in.)
• Write comments and participate in the threads on Digital Point’s AdSense forums. Eventually working my way towards the minimum 50 posts needed to participate in revenue sharing.
• Write comments on other blogs that I visit such as:
  • Green Llama
  • Self Made Minds
  • Tyler Cruz

• Receive at least 10 visitors (not page views) in a day.

That looks like a good list of goals to work on. Remember. Baby steps.

I have finally received the first (non-accidental) visitor. The first goal of this site has been achieved. When I started out I wanted to set a simple goal of being discovered using only a search engine. The actual very first visitor appeared to be either a mis-type or someone trolling for a domain name.

This time someone did a search on google for “nissan xterra 30,000 mile service“. If you search Google for that phrase, my post “Cheap Nissan Xterra In-Cabin Microfilter” is the 8th result returned. The visitor came from somewhere on the University of Michigan’s campus and they were using IE7 if you’re curious.

Now that the first visitor is out of the way it’s time to find some more readers and set my next goal. Find all about how I’m going to do that tomorrow.

No visitors. Got that out of the way. The irony of telling someone who is not there that they haven’t been here is not lost on me. Consider it a diary at this point.

I’m probably going to spend my day working around the house and watching the do over (not Dover) NASCAR race that got rained out last night. That’s right I just admitted that I watch NASCAR. Admitting that to some people will automatically dock 15 points off of your IQ. Isn’t true though. You can watch the races and still be a normal human being.

Consider this to be my very own NASCAR version of Snopes.

True or False: NASCAR fans were the kids that rode the short bus with the tinted windows and seat belts to school.

FALSE

Note to self: Must start my NASCAR Wives and Girlfriends site.

Just a quick site update today. All is clear on the visitor front. Today marks (let me check the calendar), only about 15 days since I made the first post (woot?).

I would imagine that if I haven’t had at least one true visitor by the time May 21st rolls around, which would make one month, that it may be time to call this little experiment a failure. I would consider a true visit to be someone who searched Google or Yahoo etc., for a word or phrase and clicked one of the results to bring them here.

I’m not getting discouraged though, because it wasn’t my intent to roll out a made for AdSense (MFA) site. I have written a few posts with keywords that I hoped would be searched for and I’ll write a few more before the month is over. I think it will work. I’m sure I could have loaded up all of my posts with keywords that people search for all the time and then spammed my site on every message board around but what fun would that be? I’ll take the road never traveled.

Since I’m the only visitor here you won’t have noticed the WordPress theme changes that I’ve made recently. Thankfully for you, random future visitor, I’ve captured the progress via screen shot so you can pretend you were actually here. I’m by no means a professional web page designer, but I am proud of my amateur status. I do visit a lot of blog design/tips & tricks type websites and one of my pet peeves is when a someone actually does redesign their site but they just assume everyone remembers what the page used to look like. That’s like getting a face lift and not taking a before picture.

I based this design on the K2 theme version 0.9.5 RC1. Here’s a screen shot of what the site looked like with that theme. Click for a bigger version. One exception to my pet peeve rule from above is that I had already installed the Image Headlines WordPress plugin before I took the screen shot. Damn.

I’ll spare you all the gnawing and thrashing that I did when trying to modify the theme and show you the first version I was happy with for all of about 14 seconds. Actually that’s not totally true, I have kept a lot of the layout from this version but the header and logo have all changed since then. This is the way the site looked, minus the filler text, when I took the site live.

I thought the logo was too tall and I wanted a smaller header so in the next revision I changed the logo, positioning, and size of the header.

Still unhappy with the logo, I came up with the current one that you see.

In this final shot you see what the site actually looks like right now. Again, I just put this up because it’s inevitable that I will change the look of the site and by posting this I (and you, hopefully) will always be able to see it.

At this point in the design stage I again do most of the work on the header since it really is the first thing you see when you come to the site. I removed the sill shape on the right side, used a black to silver gradient as the header background to lighten the page up, and added another glossy button. I also came to the realization that I didn’t really like the redish/marroon color and went blue with it. I’m much happier with this scheme.

I’ve tamped down my desire to make a really dark site which is usually my first inclination on any site I design, but I’ve still been able to keep it somewhat in the shadier color region. Hope you enjoyed the picture show.

This post ends up being the end of an impromptu three-parter. Parts one and two for your perusal. Last time I said AdSense diagnostics showed that my robots.txt file was blocking their web crawler.

I think this problem stems from when I first created this WordPress install and set it to private while I was customizing the theme. During this “private time” I was writing some draft posts and also getting the look and feel just right before I unleashed the Google search hounds. When I finally decided to publicly post I stil had the private option checked and didn’t realize it until later. The date I went public (the 21st) also corresponds to the date the site was last crawled as evidenced by the diagnostics.

Usually when you make a new post in WordPress the Ping-O-Matic tool will notify all the relevant engines that you have a new post. I’m not sure why this system wasn’t working. The solution I came up with is a little different. I created a Google sitemap and submitted it to Webmaster Central. Webmaster Central is a place where you can monitor how often your site is crawled by the Googlebot and also submit your sitemap. I can go into how to generate a sitemap in a later post if the need arises but just to wrap up, I am now seeing relevant ads on my Xterra filter post. Ahhh, much better. Even with no visitors.

As I said in the last post, I thought something fishy was going on with my ads since they were so narrowly focused on one single topic (b l o g s) even though I have written about other things. It has been my experience through other sites that even though ads may not be properly targeted to the specific topic you write about, they vary when you write about a different subject.

I’m not sure why this didn’t occur to me sooner, but I finally decided to check the Google AdSense diagnostics and lo and behold I found a problem. As you can see below it says that the Robots.txt file is blocking attempts to crawl the site and hence this place hasn’t been crawled since the 21st. So, that’s why I’m since such narrow ad focus.

The thing is, I don’t actually HAVE a robots.txt file. Not one that I can see anyway. It’s not a hidden file, I checked for that also. Hrmph. I’ll do some more research on this and report back tomorrow. No new visitors today by the way.

No other visitors have shown up, so the first one was a fluke. This isn’t a surprise since there isn’t a lot of content yet. I’m still sticking to my experiment and not commenting or listing the site anywhere else. This is starting to be more and more difficult since I’m getting impatient, but I’ll hang in there a little while longer. And really I would rather make the site “public” with as much content as possible. That’s what I keep telling myself anyway.

I do still have the Google ads up on the site but something unusual is happening. Almost all the ads are b l o g related even though I wrote the Xterra piece. I expected to see the ads diversify more than they have. I’ll check into this to see if I can figure out why.

Just as I finished the AdSense and Visitor Update post where I said there had not yet been any visitors to the site, I happen to go check the stats one last time and the first visitor has arrived. They were from Jacksonville, New Brunswick, Canada. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. They weren’t referred from a search engine so I’m guessing the first visitor was actually a misspelling of some type. One last tidbit of information from this visitor is that they were using Internet Explorer 5.5. That is quite outdated.

One down, many to go.