I just wanted to provide another update to what I’ve been working on over at Spartan-Football.com.
We’re just about 72 hours away from kickoff. Traffic was really huge the first two days that the site launched, since I got a lot of traffic from Spartan Tailgate. It really drove more traffic than I could have imagined. I’ve also seen the share of traffic shift from referring sites to direct hits and search.
In the first week, 88% of traffic came from referring sites, with 8.5% from direct traffic and just 2% from search. Those percentages have changed pretty substantially. In the past 7 days, just ~30% of traffic came from referring sites, 43% from direct traffic and 26% from search. Over the past week and a half, organic search traffic has really started to pick up, and it appears that the site is slowly coming out of the Google sandbox. It seems like the site was able to get a decent amount of initial traffic from referring sites since it was a new website that people hadn’t seen before. Visitors wanted to see the new site, check it out, and now that initial “introductory” traffic has now subsided a bit.
Also, the growth of the Facebook page has been really interesting to watch. The pace of growth of the Facebook page has just about doubled every week.
Spartan-Football.com Facebook Fan Page Growth
Unfortunately, it hasn’t translated into significantly increased traffic to the site as of yet.
Facebook traffic to Spartan-Football.com
Hopefully as we get into the season, and people get more involved in the football season, referring traffic from Facebook will start to increase.
Last time I updated, there were a couple of items that I wanted to put on the radar to work on. Figured I would provide a progress report here:
- Getting Facebook Connect commenting enabled on the site: This one still intimidates the hell out of me. There’s a tutorial that someone has put together to implement it in WordPress, but there are still some elements that are over my head.
- Maybe add fields to the contact us page: This one is really easy, I just haven’t gotten around to it yet. Maybe tonight or tomorrow.
- Put together the reporting that I want for the site: Again, haven’t gotten around to this yet. I’ve really just been checking the numbers on an ad hoc basis, which works fine for me, and is probably more effective for me than putting together reports.
- Drop down menu: well, I turned off the drop-down menu plugin that I was using previously and that was causing a lot of issues with the multimedia box that I was using at the time. Eventually I decided to drop the media box altogether, and added a featured content box in the left column of the site. I then found a dropdown menu tutorial that was based on CSS, and played with that until I got a working dropdown menu. The tutorial had a fix to make the menu work in Internet Explorer, but I didn’t want to take the time to implement it at that point. I still need to go back and try to get the menu to work with IE, especially since 42% of traffic is coming from IE (oh you poor, poor souls).
- Develop some kind of link building widget or badge: this is a low priority item right now.
- Finish putting together the content on those few remaining pages – Ethics, FAQ, Support, etc. etc. etc: Ethics and FAQ are done. Still need to do the support page, which means I still need to figure out how I want to give people the option to support the blog.
- Google Website Optimizer: last time I asked if it even made sense to implement at this point. I think it’s pretty clear now that this is premature.
- Add email subscriptions: this one was easy to implement. I want to spruce it up a bit graphically, but it’s functional.
The key at this point is to just keep writing content, having a viewpoint, and hopefully build organic link equity from other sites that are talking about MSU football. That should help to increase the traffic. And of course getting into the heart of the season should help, too.
