I have not had the time to devote to Bingo Card Creator that I would have liked for several weeks now, so I’m largely operating it like a vending machine — I collect the change at the end of the week and, once and a while, write out a two-paragraph email to somebody with a question. My sales for the month of November have been rather limp (10 so far at the moment, roughly 1/3 off my comparable stats from October and significantly under my goal), largely due to both ceasing all active promotion and not fixing problem with current promotions. I hope to fix that after I get a wee bit less busy with the job/real life, and I also hope to get version 1.05 shipped at some point, hopefully in the first week of December or so. Christmas parties seem to be a good opportunity to play bingo, right?
But enough kvetching. Here’s something interesting: I’m now fairly consistently getting 100+ hits from Gooogle per day, accounting for a full half of my traffic, without increasing Google AdWords expenditures (although I did tweak my account settings a bit two weeks ago). The biggest mover is my Dolch sight word list page, but that search string only accounts for 10% of the hits per day. The rest are looooooooong tail. My best guess is that as my website ages its way out of the sandbox and the incoming links folks put up age, I’m slowly gaining in the SERPs pretty much across the board. 5% of my traffic comes from that extremely common query with me being at number 9/10 on page one, and the rest of it comes from very uncommon queries (“How do I teach dolch sight words to first graders in Korea”) which I’m an insta #1 on.
I think this reinforces the importance of writing natural language articles for SEO. You can spend all the time in the world optimizing for a certain phrase and fight for every additional place in the rankings you climb. Or you can write stuff which is useful to your target market and rank naturally over time. Not instant and not easy but not complicated, either.
Sidenote: My new-found prominence on SERPs has resulted in me getting more downloads and confirmed downloads the last 48 hours than I did in some weeks. Given my usual sales cycle, I’m hoping that means I get some serious order loving come this Friday. The Wii is coming out and while I’ve got the money sitting in an envelope I would love to buy an extra controller and game for it.
