Happy Birthday Lingerie Brands! Well, it’s not the site’s birthday actually I just couldn’t think of any other way to describe the milestone it’s just reached. Lingerie Brands, a site which I often talk about, broke through the 50,000 monthly visitors mark for the first time ever last month.
I’ve been excitedly anticipating reaching this significant number for the last 10 days and have been continually footering about in my Analytics account trying to work out if I was going to make it or not during one calendar month instead of in the last “31″ days, which isn’t quite as satisfying for some reason.
In the end, good old LB came through on the very last day of the month and this mornings stat check was a very happy one.
The Most Satisfying Thing…
Is that this site was my first real foray into the world of Wordpress and I think it does demonstrate that you don’t need a big design and development budget to create a site which can ultimately have a good healthy traffic stream. Lingerie Brands only cost me £132.50 to build and although I’m the first to admit its now sorely in need of an update, it works very well as an affiliate site and is now contributing a good wedge towards our monthly profits.
The Only Way Is Up Baby!
This site has not even skimmed the surface of it’s long term potential. I’ve been paying a lot of attention toit in the last 6 months (after getting a bit disheartened when Figleaves started mucking about with their programme at the back end of 2008) and it’s become clear to me that LB can and will grow a hell of a lot further with the right input from me. My only regret right now is not working harder on it earlier. That said, despite me sometimes having neglected it, traffic has grown 40% since January last year – a VERY motivational result for me.
What Next?
There’s a few things I’m going to do to ensure the site keeps pushing on and fulfils its potential: -
- Redesign the feel of the site a little, and modernise the theme. I’m not going to dick around too much mind you, if it ain’t broke etc but there’s quite a few frustrations with the current theme. For example, I can’t get any of the pagination plugins for Wordpress to work on the darned thing which I know will be affecting my traffic.
- Do some restructuring of categories to try and rank for general lingerie terms, in the same way as I have done with my mens underwear site. I have to solve a rather frustrating issue to do with sub categories creating 404 errors before I can do so though but I think I have found something that’ll do the trick there.
- Redesign the shop section and look at creating a better and more compelling shopping resource.
- Make the homepage have more of a “shop” feel. The site is getting increasing numbers of people hitting that page first, and it needs serious improvement.
- Stay motivated!
I’ll be having a celebratory glass of wine this evening, and dreaming of my next self-congratulatory post (I learned my humility from Roger Federer). See you all again at LB’s 100,000th birthday bash 
P.S – Disappointed that Andy Murray didn’t win? Me? I don’t know what you’re talking about!
February 1st, 2010 at 11:59 am
What do you attribute that large number to Kirsty? (1612+ per day)
Was it the January sales, the link building or PPC?
February 1st, 2010 at 12:08 pm
Well you’ve just answered a question I’ve had lingering as I try and work out whether or not my next project would be able to work or not. I worked out I need 8000 (targetted) visitors to make a good return, and there’s me thinking that was a hell of a lot…..I know, how naive of me
Congrats on the milestone! This just proves the notion that having targets and goals is a good way work as it serves as a boost of motivation when you hit your specified targets. Take note everyone…
Ahh good, I’m not the only one bummed about Murray, poor guy
February 1st, 2010 at 5:49 pm
Well done Kirsty. What percentage of those visitors do you reckon land on your homepage vs internal pages?
February 1st, 2010 at 9:34 pm
@Simon – The January sales have had some effect re: increased demand but the site’s been hovering close to the 50k mark for 2 or 3 months now. I think it’s down to long term consistent content addition combined with the link building. PPC makes up very little of my traffic these days.
@Dan – I know, that game was tragic! 8k visitors sure does sound like a lot, but it can be surprising how quickly you can build this with a concerted push.
@Scott – About 7% arrive on the home page, a number that increases all the time as my more generic rankings improve.
February 2nd, 2010 at 12:27 pm
Hi Kirsty,
Well done on a fab result – I just hope the celebratory measure of wine is an appropriate Scottish big yin!!
Very motivational as always, thanks for sharing. If possible, would you be willing to share roughly how many hours a week/month you dedicated to achieve that great result?
Finally, with regards to Andy Murray, I am afraid there are times that as hard as it maybe, you just have to say they were too good. Personally, I think it will do Andy more good than harm – just like failures in affiliate marketing!!
Ta ta the noo,
Hamish
February 2nd, 2010 at 3:08 pm
Brilliant work Kirsty, delighted to hear it!
February 2nd, 2010 at 3:18 pm
I’m very impressed! It certainly proves what some hard work and sticking to the plan can achieve. I just hope I can show the same perseverance. I bet it won’t be long before we see your own line of branded underwear on the site!
Just a throwaway idea:
I’m not sure if you have a product-db in mysql (from various feeds). If you did, could you display 3 x ‘related products’ thumbnails that most closely match the post’s title?
I was just wondering (mainly for a project i’m working one)… if people had a few alternatives to see from a range of merchants, do you think that would that help with conversions when people hit the landing pages?
February 2nd, 2010 at 11:47 pm
@hamish – I probably spent about 300 to 400 hours of time over 2 years working on content for the site alone . Duncan has also contributed a good 200 hours tinkering about and posting some of the content. Beyond that I’m not sure as I’ve spent lots of time it’s hard to account for on PPC, reasearch etc.
@ian, that’s a good idea. I do know how to add thumbnails to the related posts already on the page, it’s just not been implemented on the site. In some ways that may work better as it helps cross linkage of posts. However, that is an interesting idea and one I’ll bear in mind… there my be something else I could do with that in terms of improving the current shopping resource.
February 3rd, 2010 at 9:50 pm
Congratulations Kirsty. That’s a nice site you have there with lots of content. You deserve to do well from it after putting in all those hours. Ian’s idea is very good and if you manage to implement it, I would be interested in hearing how you did it.