Question

I wonder if I'm doing ok... I set up an organic gardening questions and answers site on the stackexchange platform http://organicgreenfingers.com about 6 weeks ago. I have put some money (an average of 3 euro per day into google targeted content ads). for this I get about 9 clicks. I have asked about 20 of the main sites that come up in searches for my niche links and so far have 3 that I know about. I have posted on some of the most popluar forums related to my niche. I have seeded a lot of content through asking people to ask a questions and then answering it myself so the content is doing well. For the terms "organic gardening", "organic gardening qestions" and variants thereof if people look for "pages from Ireland" on google I am on the first page. I am in Ireland so this is pretty good I think. The same aplies to many other specific terms that are in the content like "controlling slugs" etc. I have posted on related websites and left links back to my site in my signature,. I have put a few "come and have a look" posts on groups on facebook, google groups etc. I have fed the rss from the site into a twitter account. I have asked friends and family to log in and spread the word.

The following are my stats so far. 697 Visits 401 Absolute Unique Visitors 4,255 Pageviews 6.10 Average Pageviews 00:04:24 Time on Site

So the bottom line after doing all of this I am getting about 30 visits per day at the weekends and about 10 per day during the week. I have about 40 users, 20 of which I don't know. There have been about 10 answers from pepople I don't know. I'm pretty dissapointed with this. Do you think this is good or bad? Maybe the demographic for organic gardening isn't right for this type of site, maybe it will take off in the spring. I am still trying to build up the content and wait for the spring! At the same time I am starting to wonder if I'm doing something badly wrong. Ideas?

Answer 1

Ciaran, great question.

Hopefully you take my answer as reassurance rather than become further disappointed! Personally I think your numbers sound pretty good, not because they show a large community, but because you have:

1. Identifiable growth in response to your 'marketing' to-date (ie. forums, adwords).

2. A good fraction of your users are active. (ie. 40 users, 20 'organic' users providing 10 answers — so 50% of users who are not your friends/family/colleagues have actually posted an answer. This is awesome!)

For a 6 week old site with a very small question base (30+ questions) you're actually doing really well. If your current marketing methods continue to give you the same steady growth, then ideally it's only a matter of time until you reach an inflection point where your user base is large enough to both sustain the community with new content and continue to grow (faster!) through word of mouth.

The reality is that growing a community is a very slow and laborious process. StackOverflow is an exception, as they started with a beta testing user base of 3,000! (I also recall Jeff et al. mentioning that they see a 60:1 ratio of passive to active users on SO — so you're also doing really well on that count. The cold, hard reality is that the vast majority of your page-views will be passive consumption of content.)

Good luck — and thanks for posting the info. Interesting stuff.