my website success story

[Sadam22]

some of you may recognize my name, i've been banned from OOT a few times but figured i would share my story of my success with a website.

i started a blogger site almost a year ago. i started it because i have been riding bmx bikes for almost 10 years now and noticed that there were a lot of high quality internet videos being posted of relatively unknown riders all over the internet. on one forum in particular i noticed like 5 great videos and realized that they would all just fade away and be forgotten, but that if i made a website to post links to them that they would be saved.

also i realized that a lot of people didn't have time to search through messageboards to find dope videos, but that if they knew of a one stop place to find them, that they would probably check it all the time.

anyway i started it and it went well. i didn't have tracking software at the time, but a lot of kids told me that they enjoyed it and it got me talking to a couple of company owners who had gotten an extra 100-200 views of their online videos from me posting them.

i sort of fell off for a few months and stopped posting on it much. i don't know why, i just wasn't really interested. then i went to see a girl i met online ( now my girlfriend ) and it gave me a lot of time to get away from poker and think about other things i could do. i realized that my website was an even better idea than i originally thought and that i needed to put more time into it. i also had a big idea for a magazine that i could start which would focus on the hardcore, underground aspect of bmx street riding.

i got home and started working hard on my blog. i made it look better and started really looking for good content on other messageboards. i also started a myspace for it and added probably 2000 friends myself.

i also started writing emails to owners of well known bike companies and riders that i admire to get interviews done for my website. everyone was very cool for the most part and i got some great stuff.

by this point i had tracking software and i noticed that my hits were getting up there. they really spiked up one day after a very big contest/jam happened in new york city. my friend steve who is a pro rider wrote a summary of the event that got everyone talking. another pro rider who goes by the name of "blackman" got his ass beat by some local kid for a bunch of crap. my hits went through the roof because i had the full story and a video of the fight before any of the most established sites.

by this point i realized that the magazine idea was a bad idea. magazines are a dying breed and it was going to take a ton of time and energy that i didn't want to use, plus i was going to have to learn how to do pretty much everything from scratch. so i took all my content for the magazine ( which was just going to be a 100 or so page black and white photocopied zine to start ) and started using it for my site. people loved it. i really realized that my site was big time when i posted an interview with a guy named greg walsh and he told me that 20 people in the industry emailed him about it within the next few hours. he gave me a great compliment when he told me "i'm not naming names, but you have a who's who list of bmx checking your site every day".

at this point i had gotten banned from the bmx messageboard that got me started for posting too many threads advertising my site, so i decided to start my own board. it has a pretty good flow of traffic, not as much as the one i was banned from, but it's not bad and it's growing every day.

my site traffic has continued to grow significantly, from being linked to by pretty much every other prominent bmx site. i now get as much traffic as most of the big bmx sites and i'm pretty sure i am only behind 1 or 2 of the big guys.

i had my site redesigned at some point in this too. it looks like crap in my opinion now but it made things a little bit more official. i have a new site going up any day now which is 1000x better.

oh yeah, this is out of order but i've had google adsense on my site for 3 or 4 months now. it's not optimized on my current site and i don't feel like correcting it because my new site is going up any day now. anyway when it was optimized i was making over 100 dollars a month. not horrible, but not great.

i decided to get really serious a month ago when the owner of the largest bmx shoe company IMed me and told me that he would like to advertise on my site if i wanted to. i was flattered and decided that if he was willing to, i needed to get a really good site design. he told me that my site and another site that his friend runs are the only sites he'd consider advertising on.

i paid my friend chuck to design my new site for me and it's close to being done. it looks really good and i'm proud of it, it's got a lot of room for ads and i think kids are going to love it. so far i have 3 sponsors on board. they are each paying 150 dollars a month to have their ads rotate on my site as soon as it launches. i am especially excited about this because they are all companies i really respect and have always been into. my goal is to make 1000 dollars a month. i plan to do this by getting 2 more sponsors ( i have a bunch of them in the works ) and then working something out with a large bmx mail order that will be a little bit more broad than what i'm doing with the other companies and charging them 250-300 for that service. i'm pretty optimistic about this working.

anyway check my sites out and feel free to ask me questions.

www.thecomeupbmx.net ( awful design i know, don't worry i'll let you guys know when my new design is up )

www.thecomeupboard.com

www.myspace.com/the_come_up

thanks.

[Ron_Mexico]

That is a realy cool story thank you for sharing that. Why did you change your name in this forum? Did you get banned. Anyway I would think that you would make more from adsense than $100 a month with that kind of traffic, but I wouldnt get discouraged. I would trade my $300-$400 a month for what you have. You have a real asset that may be built into something big.


Keep up the good work. Im glad to hear that you are doing good with your website.

[Sadam22]

bmx kids do not click on ads, that is one thing i've learned. when i hear people talk about +1% click rates i'm always amazed. mine is super low. i'd like to find a way to implement adsense onto my site and forum while also keeping my advertisers happy. i still don't even have my new site up yet, but i am so excited to.

oh yeah i had 160 long sleeves made too and i'm in the process of getting these listed in the most popular bmx mail order catalog/website along with another design. 15 dollars including postage if anyone is interested haha ( paypal: heyshutupman@hotmail.com ):



also i did the girl in the photo haha.

[Sadam22]

also i have previously posted as Adam22, Violent Bill, Paul Wall and Lloyd Crumlish. i've been banned from all of those names because the OOT mods don't seem to appreciate my sense of humor.

[rjp]

Have you posted this site before? The forum looks familiar. Don't be surprised that your CTR rates are low, as they're not going to be that high for a forum (I assume this is where most of your impressions are coming from).

Does she come with the shirts? :P

[Ron_Mexico]

I wanna know if I can order her without the shirt?

[rjp]

Oh and definately let us know when the new design is ready, because that frame crap is terrible.

[Homer]

I hope you are IP banned soon, you degenerate piece of [censored].

[dc_publius]

You started by focusing on good content, got rewarded with traffic because of it, and you are now monetarizing that traffic. Too many people approach their projects backwards: trying to monetarize a handful of POS articles they put together just to have something on the site.

Adsense is good if you have a ton of nontargeted/general traffic. IMO, you should stay away from adsense. Your traffic is very targeted traffic. You know your audience. You should drive your traffic to people who want your audience, namely related affiliates and specific brands. I would focus on testing different affiliate programs instead of adsense.

[Misfire]

Isn't it SaDDam?