2011 is almost gone and it’s been a great year. The site launched just eight months ago and I’ve seen nothing but steady growth since the debut in May. Because this site is completely based around its readers, and only survives with your continued support, I feel it is right that you all know how things are going around here. So read on for a breakdown of how the site is doing, and for the chance to pick up a pretty cool piece of “holiday cheer” at the end.
Traffic Growth and Content Publication
The site is still pretty new, so traffic is expected to be slow for a while, but by the rate of growth I have seen around here, I have some very high hopes for the coming months/years. In its debut month, May 2011, the site saw just 329 views, and almost every one of those was from Code Canyon and people checking out the live demo of one of my plugins.
After the first month, traffic saw a steady growth. June saw twice that of May with 675 views, and July tripled that with 1594.
In the first month, I published 22 tutorials and plugin demos. A lot of those were for the initial content push, so June saw a lot less, with just three items published. I was also in the middle of getting married in June, so was not in front of the desk nearly as much. But in July I picked it back up with 15 publications. This was the month that community involvement began to take off on the site as well.
August took me completely by surprise with a huge traffic spike, as compared to the first three months. The month of August saw 9,276 views; more than four times as many as July. The publication rate for August was a lot slower, with only five items, but the traffic made up for it.
September was an even better month than August with 12,599 views and 16 items published. The content pushed in September was much better than previous months as well, because it was almost entirely tutorials, instead of plugin demo pages.
October saw another increase in traffic with 14,461 views. So between July and September, there was an average growth of about 2,000 views. There were 11 items published in October.
Then in November I was hit with another surprise. Instead of the 2,000 views growth I was expecting, I saw a growth of almost 11,000, with 25,295 views for the month. November had 16 items published, and was also the month I began asking for more community input, to get a better idea of what the readers wanted. I believe this was a huge success and very valuable. The site’s busiest day was November 25, with 1,412 views.
December was looking to be another record breaker, but then the holiday season struck, and traffic slowed down a lot. This was expected, however. It’s still looking to be a great month though, with more than 20,000 views and counting at this time. December has seen nine items published, with 5-6 slated for publication on New Year’s day (along with something else really cool).
If you’re not a numbers kind of person, and would rather visualize the site’s growth, check out the graph below.
Advertising
Since its debut, the site has always had ads on it. They were not sponsored or powered by BuySellAds, but were only adsense and personal affiliate ads. There was enough income generated to offset the cost of hosting, but I really hated them, as I’m sure most people did. In November, however, I was able to remove all of the nasty adsense ads and replace them with a single ad from Pressed Ads, a WP Candy venture. This allowed me to clean up the site a lot, and support an advertising model that I feel has a lot of merit.
A New Look
The site’s design had bugged me for several months. I didn’t feel it was clean enough, nor nearly easy enough to modify whenever I wanted to make changes. So last month I began hunting for a new theme. I opted to purchase one, instead of building one myself, simply because my design skills are . . . well, not exactly present. Quite frankly, I have no design skills whatsoever.
I found the Swagger theme by Jason Bobich, and loved it. With only a few minor tweaks, I was able to make it work exactly as I wanted. One of the great things about the theme is that it’s fully responsive, meaning it’s very, very mobile friendly.
Plans for the Next Few Months
There’s a lot coming in the next month or two, but the item I’m most excited about is the launch of my subscription model. As anyone knows who has attempted (and succeeded or failed) to run a tutorial site, one of the most difficult parts is coming up with new tutorials and getting them published on a regular basis, and maintaining a high level of quality standards.
By releasing a subscription model, which will allow users to signup for a premium subscription to gain access to paid members-only content, I will be a lot more able to push out high quality content on a regular basis. The plan is to release at least one subscriber restricted tutorial or plugin each week. I have 4-5 complete tutorials / plugins ready (or almost ready) to be released on New Year’s day. This is the day I will release the subscriptions, and I want to ensure that the first subscribers have good reason to fork out a little cash to get access.
The pricing for subscriptions is going to be extremely affordable. The goal of the subscriptions is not to provide me with a lot of extra income, it is merely to offset the cost of running / maintaining the site, and publishing content on a frequent basis. The pricing will start at $6 per month, go up to $16 for three months, and $60 for a whole year. Each user will have the option of paying for a single period at a time, or signing up for a recurring subscription. The longer the period you sign up for, the cheaper it is.
To celebrate the coming of 2012, and the going of a great year, there will also be a discount code available for all new subscribers to use that will give a 10% discount on any subscription level. If you sign up for a recurring subscription, you will also get 10% off of every payment for the duration of your subscription, not just the first period. Simply enter 2012 in the discount code box when signing up.
A Little Holiday Cheer
Since it is the holiday season, and t’is the season of giving, I have a little present for a few of you. In celebration of 2011, I’m going to give away three copies of my Restrict Content Pro plugin, which is not yet released, but you can see a little preview of the plugin here.
Restrict Content Pro is the plugin that will power the subscription system on this site, and it’s slated for release in about two weeks. Three lucky commenters will have the opportunity to get their hands on the plugin before it is released for public purchase.
It is by far one of the most complex and powerful plugins I’ve ever written, and I’m really excited to see what you all think of it.
To put your name in the box (for a chance to be chosen as one of the lucky three), simply leave a comment below and tell me what you might use the plugin for. If you have no plan of using it on a “premium content site”, that’s fine too. Saying that you just want to “explore the code”, or just let it sit on your hard drive for a long time, is okay too.
You Tell Me
Now it’s your turn. Since you, the users, are what keep this site growing, please tell me what you would like to see in the coming months. If you have something you’re unhappy about around here, tell me that as well.
Congrats pippin!! Was great working you and your products too! Can’t wait to use them in 2012 again! Keep it coming and thank you very much!!! And Yeah, I want to restrict some content like à pro! Greets, Jeroen
Thanks Jeroen, you’ve been a huge source of input around here and with the plugins in general.
Nice to see you have a growing audience. All the best in 2012!
Thanks for stopping by
Looking forward to seeing “Restrict Content Pro”!
Me too
Congrats Pippin! You are an active developer who loves to take input from others, one of the few WP developers who will actually take an idea and have it come to fruition quickly. Again congrats on your traffic growth, which hopefully correlates to financial growth.
Thanks Travis. I just saw the tut you pushed out today. Great! Especially because it answered the question that was bugging me for several days.
Congratulations Pippin! Man, that is some growth! You have great ideas for plugins, and are very responsive to suggestions. I’m in the process of putting up a large membership site, and might check out the Restrict Content plugin.
Good luck with the new site, and future plugins.
Thanks! I hope Restrict Content Pro works well for you!
Hi Pippin, loving the way you are taking your site. I think the subscriptions for tutorials sound really interesting and are very reasonably priced. Your existing tutes are very professional and are very informative, so personally I am looking forward to signing up to see what will be on offer.
I am also very interested in your Restrict Content Pro plugin because I have a project which I can use it on straight away. I need to be able to create private sections of a care home site for family members to be able to access and see restricted content relating to the particular care home their relative is resident in, and it looks like your RCP pluging will fit the bill perfectly.
Here’s to continued growth for the site in 2012.
Thanks, Craig!
For your site, would you need to restrict access to certain user groups, or just “subscribed” users in general?
Hi Pippin,
I would like it to be certain user groups if possible, but I could probably get by with just creating one “subscribed” user per care home.
The way it will work is there is premium content, and non premium content. Active subscribers will have access to all premium content. You can also restrict content active subscribers of a particular user role, such as Editors or Authors.
Congrats on the growth and the direction you are going. The membership of WebDesign.com watches your progress regularly due to the fact I’m constantly referencing your work and plugins as solid resources. Looking forward to getting my hands on RCP.
Thanks! I look forward to seeing what you do with RCP
Can I be entered in the draw….
Not sure about what exactly going to use it for yet.
Of course you can
I am going to use Restrict Content Pro on a site for Child Themes. The cost of a membership will be directly proportional to to the quality of my offerings. Low!
Not sure if my previous comment got hung up in the spam folder, but I’m really looking forward to seeing what you produce (both plugins and tutorials) this coming year. Can’t wait for the RCP plugin to get released.
Yep, looks like it got caught by spam. Approved now.
Nice plugins! Keep up the good work!
I really like what you’re doing with your site. Your tutorials are some of the best I’ve come across and they’ve already helped with a couple of projects. Looking forward to learning more from your work in 2012. Have a great New Year.
Thanks Bill.
Keep it up brother – I see nothing but great success for this site.
Thanks for stopping by buddy.
I can’t wait to use Restrict Content Pro on my website. BTW, I love the new website!
Good stuff Pippin!
What factors do you think led to your traffic spikes in August and November?
See any clear trends — which posts / post topics are most popular?
August I believe was caused by several plugins being published on Code Canyon. Their demo pages were here on the site, so a lot of the traffic came from their.
November’s traffic spike was likely caused by a couple of things: 1. a post about my Post Types Column Editor went up on WP Candy; 2. I switched my (broken) newsletter to Mail Chimp, which resulted in emails about the site’s updates actually getting sent to subscribers; 3. I wrote a tutorial on Front End Login / Registration forms that was very popular.
Looking at the stats, howeve, those three things above don’t account for the entire spike, just some of it. Hard to tell for sure.
Just an update for everyone. The plugin is complete and now I’m just writing the documentation.
As you may have noticed, I’ve released a subscription system here on the site; it is powered by Restrict Content Pro. This has allowed me to really test the plugin in the “wild”. I can confirm that it works very, very well
I expect to have documentation done in about a week. Once it’s done, I will be choosing the winners
Hi Pippin
Thanks for a great site and providing such great content. I’m keen to see Restrict Content Pro,as I’m slowly developing a tutorials site of my own and would like to be able to make it pay in the long run! I think your plugin will be awesome for that when there’s enough content to make it worthwhile!
Thanx for all your work, Pippin – very inspiring!
I have no specific wish here, I just want to learn from general plugin development and I am open for tips and tutorials in all areas!
Thanx, Dave
Thanks for your continued support, Dave!
Okay everyone. The plugin is complete and the winner have been chosen (via random number generator). I will be contacting each of the winners via email, so watch for an email from me! You might just be one of the lucky ones
Pippin, will you be posting who the lucky winners were?
Sure! The winners were:
Thanks everyone!