I sat quietly in the chair, number six or seven on George’s agenda of young hopefuls. The on campus recruiting process was a brutal cattle call. On the positive side, we had a large number of great companies coming to visit. Unfortunately, the vast majority of my 1500 classmates were tipped off about their arrival. Moo!

His eyes skimmed down my resume – and locked onto a phrase halfway down the page.

“Combinatorics Problems? What the heck is that?”

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Driven by a passionate desire to “scratch our own itch”, we released the first draft of a little project we’ve been working on this weekend. As our regular readers are aware, we built our first public website earlier this year. We started running ads earlier this summer (just to pay the server bills) and wanted some perspective on “what good looks like”. This is where things get furry: there aren’t any reliable and comprehensive public sources on revenue benchmarks for a small website. So we decided to build our own data set and create some benchmarks around how much a small website could earn. Here you go…

As you can see below, profit-per-visitor numbers vary widely. More after the jump…

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Editorial Note: I don’t talk normally talk about pricing and coupon strategy on this blog. But I’m going to bend the rules. I’m not in the restaurant business and the story is too good

A Discount Coupon Finds A Customer

We have a little tradition in our household – we go out to dinner on every Sunday night as a family, regardless of whatever else is going on. My wife and I started this in our younger years. There was a good chance of weeknight plans being disrupted by drama. And we always go to the same place – an upscale Mexican restaurant in Alpharetta…

The story starts at the Windward Kroger, where my son saw a $7 off coupon. Having learned recently about coupons and saving money, he points it out to Mom. She promises to use it that Sunday. We chuckle and have a “good parent” moment. The lessons we are teaching him seem to be sticking.

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If you love your visitors, should you set them free?

In a word – yes. Because one of the most valuable pieces of information you can get is understanding what fraction of them return.

Most folks are familiar with the concept of bounce rate – what % of the visitors to a site bolt after looking at the first page. If they bolt in under 30 seconds, you failed to engage…

This other metric goes a level deeper. Think about the process of selling a house. A certain % of the visitors take a polite (hopefully) 5min walk through the building and leave. BOUNCE!

But just because they didn’t flee the facility on sight doesn’t mean you have a sale…..

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After a brief vacation from active SEO work for the past couple of months, due to the demands of my day job and a couple of new adventures, I’m back on the case.

We’re trying to navigate a shift in our product space (online word games), for which our site provides a derivative product (“player assistance tools”). It’s actually been going on for a couple of months but was a secondary priority since our traffic was building steadily (we went from #10 to #3 in original target search). However.. since that game is declining rapidly (total # queries down 70% since January), this will clearly limit my expected 2013 traffic from that keyword. The underlying dynamics of the niche are attractive, so I’m not exactly interested in pulling up stakes and moving on.

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