PROGRESS THREAD: GymJunkie (36Pounds.com)

[Gymjunkie]

One visitor left a comment yesterday that he has gained 15lbs in less than 2 months using my advice and thanked me!!!! Feels so freaking awesome!! I responded back to him asap, asking to do an interview with him on how he achieved it. He agreed and I will send him questions soon.

I really hope sharing this success story will inspire other visitors to seriously take action and gain muscle successfully (and of course I hope this will help 36Pounds.com grow).

I'm excited, gotta go eat my breakfast and then send over questions to him.

Updates coming later on!

 

[wildambitions]

Evaluate the goals of each of the sites.

Is 36 pounds making you an income? If not, can you convert it to making an income somewhere? If yes but not enough, can you find a routine and continue to post regularly but perhaps not as often? Can you let others promote the 36 pound site for you?

If you have found something that is working well as just a feel good site, there is nothing wrong with that as long as you know that is what it is.

As far as your other project... All of the above AND can the new site compliment or be a spin off of the original 36 pound site?

Personally, I like the best of both worlds and unless something is blatantly successful and really moving, I am all for finding a routine to split my time, outsource, combine efforts and learn more in another area.

 

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[wildambitions]

That being the case, I would find a monitization to support that site's cost, get guest contributors to add content and you add your ebook and maybe a weekly article or topic. Continue it but let others do it for you. Have the happy guy write a progress report each week and which article of your on the site inspired him the most that week. What did he learn. Write some easy $7 reports and then sell them on the site AND give them to people who contribute to the site. Hold a monthly challenge (gain "x" amount of pounds) send proof with photo of scale to your email, all entries into a drawing for some report or small useful appropriate gift.

So...
Post monthly challenge and requirements (first post for the month).
Collect entries via email on site (be sure to collect names and emails for your mailing list)
Post results (second article for the month)
Guest Writer (anyone who has benefited from the site - one a month) to write about an article you posted and how it effected them personally - third article for the month)
One $7 report per month (sell on the site and hold other interactive participations on the site to give one away each month)
Spin the report for the last post of the month.

You now have weekly postings and interaction, and list building, etc.

 

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[jportz]

Tim Ferriss just released some info on his next book titled

From Rapid Fat Loss to Strongmen: A Guide to Becoming Superhuman

Maybe post about it? See if you can get a share in some of the traffic this will surely generate


I also suggest you check out getting-high-google-page-ranking-backlinks

 

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[jportz]

I was poking round your site purely just to see if there was any advice I could provide as a fastlane member, not actually caring much about body building.. Until I came across your before and after pictures - wow I'm very impressed!

That alone, has motivated me to follow your blog. My recommendation (as well as change hosting!) is to put those pictures with a "X months" caption on your home page. In my opinion, nothing will be as effective at provoking the interest of your target market.

 

[LightHouse]

The first step is the hosting. Your site is down now I hope that it because you are changing hosts right now. :smug2:

haha, well yes that would be a good idea as well.

getresponse has a free trial and YES you do you it NOW! Why would you wait to get potential customers? I really don't know either. Put it up ASAP. The sooner you put it up the more people you will have to market to. I am not sure why you don't need it now...

What host are you going to use?

You need to do this in the following order.

1) buy host
2) change template
3) set up autoresponder
4) finish the free ebook and possible put links to clickbank products or other products that you could be an affiliate of and get a percentage of commission from
5) set up the autoresponder in which if you sign up you will get the free ebook.
6) content content content
7) SEO, Traffic, (times 100)

Well, lets see... if you are not making any money..... why would you be spending what you have on something that is not going to show good returns in a reasonable amount of time. You can put a simple submit and save the emails in a sheet or text file. If you have no traffic or readership guesswhat your not going to have anyone buying/downloading/signing up. and if you do have a trickle of people, you are going to send an email blast to 30-40 people? remember that sending emails and selling books doesnt not mean garantee sales. people have to trust who you are. you write and release an e-book with no readers now you will not sell many, you wait untill you get a reader base then hype up the book and sell it then. More return for the time you invested writing it.

Sucessful sites take patience and planning... Can you show me some sites that you have made good income from using your methods please?

 

[maximus20895]

here are some links that show you how to transfer from one host to another.

How to move WordPress site to another server with zero downtime

How to Migrate your Wordpress Blog from One Host to Another | PCs Place

 

[maximus20895]

i might read it lol..how long is it?

 

[maximus20895]

I'm editing it now bud. I'll make it a PDF and send the whole thing to ya.

 

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[maximus20895]

And DP is?

DP = forums.digitalpoint.com it's kidna like the warrior forum, but they sell different stuff too

It's official, Maximus20895 is an incredible guy! He's given so much help he should have more Reputation! I own him a favor!!!

Thanks. I'm glad to help.

Ok, the guide is up. With huge help from Max, he edited it for me, since there were mistakes in grammar... I'm not fro USA or UK..so this is very important... Phew... Gonna see how it does now!

I'm excited to see your success. This should motivate me to start working on my own stuff lol

Edit: I think you messed up on giving the link out. just make a folder called downloads and put the pdf in there. Give a link that links to 36pounds.com/downloads/basic.pdf or w/e I named the PDF lol

Edit once more: just change the link to:

http://36pounds.com/nutritionguide/Basics of Nutrition for Gaining Muscle.pdf

 

[maximus20895]

yay! It worked. I'm so proud of you!!! Haha

 

[neverfastenough]

I forgot to mention an alternative to your feedburner for email. Checkout MailCheat(Chimp). They have a Wordpress plugin that should integrate seamlessly, as well as, an RSS to email option. The great thing about it is it provides a lot of analytics and statistics.

 

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[maximus20895]

Thank you so much for changing your theme. Loos 10 times better.

 

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[ricby]

go to google do a search for body building affliates there are lots and sign up with one of them.

The first one is a bodybuilding store.

If their ads stink, make your own. Somehow this is an often overlooked solution to ads. It they like it they may buy it from you if it generates enough activity and income.

It would work better with your niche. You can keep the other but make it smaller. Think about what you would want to see to get your wallet opened within the scheme of the site you are building. Focus on what the customer wants and you will get some activity and hopefully some revenue.

Images ads, my opinion, are more 'vocal' then text ads. So you are on the right track.

 

[neverfastenough]

I've tried selling books or gloves from Amazon..didn't work.. I'm gonna test this and see how it works. I'm pretty confident a lot of guys are interested in what I'm advertising now.. Honestly, when AREN'T guys interested in getting girls...:smxB:

Gymjunkie,

As you get more and more into this, you might want to read up on A/B testing. For instance, your comparison of the clickthrough rate for the google ads vs. what you have now is probably a good one. But what about between two different picture ads? What about between two different ads for the same product? Every percent increase helps.

Here's a video for wordpress a/b testing. it's a tad long but should help.

How to do A/B Testing with WordPress on Vimeo

and a link to their blog post on it: Carsonified » How to do A/B Testing in WordPress

Hope this helps

 

[Gymjunkie]

I've just sent out first edition of 36Pounds.com newsletter. Phew.. I'm a bit nervous and excited at the same time. Hopefully, guys will like it!

I got an opportunity to get post on some blog next week. Gonna write a post tomorrow and send it to the guy. Hopefully he has a lot of visitors daily (although I suspect his blog is as small as mine is). But either way it's good to get opportunity like this.

 

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[LightHouse]

Even though current traffic sucks (about 70 visits last few days) I want to do a statistical update of how my blog is doing:

Total Visits: 13524
Bounce Rate: 59,23 (after reading one post about bounce rates I now know that blogs tend to have higher bounce rates than sites, I'm gonna be happy when my bounce rate settles at 50 percent!)
Pageviews: 36349
Pageviews per visit: 2,69
Average time on site: 3:29
New Visits: 79,81 percent
Unique visits: 10804
Visits per day: 115,59
Returning Visitors: 2685


Might hit 14000 visitors by the end of 4th month of blog's existence, but it's a small chance to do that.

Also, yesterday I finally decided to post that I'm gonna write an Ebook for Skinny guys. I want to share Phoenix Method (my creation from experience and testing other people's stuff, combining it to make it great). I expected to get criticism from unhappy visitors about it but I didn't, yet. I will pour everything I know into that ebook and it will help me achieve my goal of helping 1000 Skinny guys getting great looking, strong and healthy Beach body.

Cheers

Try working on some things to increases the pages per visitor and time on site. Things like interlinking related posts and tying links and image links into parts of the blog posts. anything to captivate the reader to read more thus increasing your stickiness and hook with your blog readership.

 

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[jportz]

I'm a fan of your site Gymjunkie and you've got some great content so I hope these suggestions come across as purely constructive!

It's been raised on this forum in the past that often we can make (false) assumptions about someone's gender by the style of their writing, or others have admitted to being "ageist" at times, despite the poster having great content.

While these are not your concern, I think there's a much larger group (myself included) who judge the authenticity and credibility of someone's work by their writing proficiency, independent of content. Attention on spelling and grammar, proper capitalization etc...

While you have excellent content and I will be continue visiting your blog regardless, I can't help but point out that on your landing page alone, in one reading, I picked up: a missing apostrophe in "wont", "subscribed" with the wrong tense, and a few mid-sentence capitalisations where the web-convention is to use bold/underline.

I suggest you spend an hour or so just surfing some famous bloggers. Notice their writing style, you'll find that posts from the really successful ones are so polished they could almost be straight out of a magazine.

I think if you cleaned up just your landing page, irrespective of your "must-read" posts, you would increase your credibility with a lot of would-be one off visitors.

"The effortless, conversational tone of good writing usually comes on the sixth rewrite." Paul Graham

 

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[neverfastenough]

How are things going?

 

[Gymjunkie]

Blog has hit 51000 pageviews and it hasn't been online for 6 months yet. Total visits are approaching 20000 as blog has about 19000 hits so far.

I haven't been active in guest posting but I have a few sites already targeted and one guest post in the works with one blogger from bodybuilding niche. Hope this will work out and I will see some more traffic coming in.

I'm also learning about my style of expressing myself which sucks a bit. I need to be a bit more down to earth and less teaching. I also come across as a jerk a bit because I like being straight-forward and am not afraid to offend someone a bit if I know this can help them improve themselves!


I'm also gonna be adding another topic to cover on my blog as secondary one (or even more). I believe adding topic that solves other skinny guy's problems not only weight issue will just make the blog better.

Cheers,
Adrian

 

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[maximus20895]

is 2500 hit per day? What do you do now to get traffic? What is your plan with this site?

 

[Gymjunkie]

I feel like I just got second wind of motivation with 36Pounds.com...

As I talked about the success story of one visitor, I was getting a lot of traffic from StumbleUpon and in two days I got more than 1000 visits. Yesterday was a record day with 963 visits!!!! Wow... not a 1000 but still, very close!!! My old post got Stumbled..

Now I hope that a lot of people will come back to the site and to leverage it I just posted the Success story of a visitor. Hope that will attract more readers

Next I'm gonna be reviewing some books about training and hopefully, 36Pounds.com will be growing successfully!

Cheers

 

[MonTexan]

One visitor left a comment yesterday that he has gained 15lbs in less than 2 months using my advice and thanked me!!!! Feels so freaking awesome!! I responded back to him asap, asking to do an interview with him on how he achieved it. He agreed and I will send him questions soon.

Congrats!! Have you thought about calling up and recording an audio interview with folks like this rather than just emailing your questions over? Generally speaking, "Video > Audio > Print" in terms of perceived value to your readers/subscribers. Getting some audio and video interview success stories would add another dimension to your blog. Good luck!

 

[TC2]

If helping people building their muscle and make other people's life easier and you are feeling great, stick with that.

It's like doing charity works. You won't see the result right away! Keep the good spirit flow.

 

[Kinsey6287]

Doing a great job brother! I say leave the 36pounds.com how it is and still work on the other project. Its helping people and impacting lives. The more it grows the faster it will grow. Awesome Job!!

 

[Gymjunkie]

Now the blog is 10 months old... wow.. a year anniversary quite soon!!

Email subscriber count has climbed to 101 today. Cool! First triple digit number!

And another visitor left a comment on the blog saying that he gained 18-19 lbs since July by using my advice! Another life changed a bit by my effort!! I contacted him to do an interview and hopefully he will agree to do it. It would be another success story of 36Pounds.com

 

[Gymjunkie]

Some good and some bad news!

Bad news is traffic took a dip without any marketing..

Good news is I still made 139 dollars from affiliate sales last in last 3 weeks. It took me by surprise actually. It will be great if the buyers wont refund products. This is big thing and first real earning from the blog. If I had this much every month, well, thats a nice addition for saving up.

On other note, I'm saving up money for two things - Personal Training course in October to get some qualifications and also for tickets to Chicago this July.. I hope I can save up for both

 

[jportz]

Exit strategy

As someone who has subscribed to this thread since the first post its sad to see you're throwing in the towel.

That said, if you're commited to this path - have you considered selling the site on flippa.com or similar?

 

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[Gymjunkie]

Cheers everyone! I decided to start a thread to keep notes how my blog's progress goes and maybe get some advice from others

First, this is a blog for skinny guys who want to gain muscle. I created it to share info with other skinny guys on my path to gaining muscle and help them get buff too (not to look like huge walking walls though). It is more then 2 months old now.

2 months stats:

Visits per day: 103,45
Uniques: 5292
Total visits: 6414
Bounce Rate: 58 percent
Pageviews per visit: 2,68
Total pageviews: 17163
Returning Visitors: 1091 (17 percent)

A week after I have decrease in traffic, because of less marketing in forums, no new guest posts on other blogs Which sucks. Right before this drop I had a nice spike of traffic from Stumble Upon, had new records on those days but now it's gone.

I am writing a free guide on Nutrition that will, I hope, go viral and bring in more traffic for some time and it will add to my blog's trustability.

Long term Goals of a blog:

1.Get 50000 visits a month by the first birthday of the blog
2. Create a great system(training, nutritional, motivational knowledge) for helping visitors to gain muscle - write a great ebook!
3. Build a trusted brand
4. Most importantly, help 1000 guys go from skinny to buff (1000 thank you emails)
5. Start paid online coaching


Short term goals:

1. Finish the Nutrition Guide to give out for free
2. Achieve 150 visits per day at the end of 3rd month of blog (14th of July)
3. Get a nice theme for a blog for free

That's it for now...

 

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[Gymjunkie]

A small set back - I was supposed to finish writing the free guide on nutrition but realized I need to do more research and have to delay it for two weeks. I'm sure my visitors will be mad.. Made a list of articles and books to read about nutrition that I have to read, this gonna take some time...

I had another weak traffic day, not even 100 visits and sucks balls...