List My Five Update

In Mid April 2011, I thought I would give List My 5 a try. It suggested there may be some income potential for producing lists of five items.

So after two weeks on the site, here are my stats.

10 Active Lists

384 Views

$0.00 Income

Income is dated as of the twenty-fifth as List My 5 do not provide daily income updates, nor do they provide any stats other than page views, so no way to trace where viewers come from. I suspect they may be from within the site though . I have no evidence for this, but coming to the site and over three hundred views not clicking one advertisement seems to be something an insider would do rather than someone seeking information.

 Reading a list by another member as to "How to Increase Traffic" I decided on April 23, to try his suggestions.

One was to include the word breast in the tag list. I wrote a list on the European Robin Red Breast, so a bird watching list but with a suggested high search engine rating.

Two was to use Google Search data for the Hot Topic of the day, on April 23, the hot topic was "Hard Boiled Eggs"

I also created a control list about the five inventions which changed the world since ancient times.

One week into the experiment the robin ( Breast) tag has a slight lead over the hard boiled egg recipes 34 (Robin) ,31 (Hard Boiled Eggs). The leader of the group is the control with 37 views.

At the one week stage, the above figures suggest to me, that it pretty much doesn't matter how much research one does as to what brings in the traffic.

Using the hot topic of the day is probably not abad thing, but it won't get you seen from the start. By the time Google tells you the Hot topic of the day, it is ALREADY the hot topic. I can see hard boiled eggs being hot on the Saturday before Easter, with egg decorating and wanting recipes with eggs but I do not think this brought in much traffic to my list. As we want regular long term views to convert to clicks, this may not be a good long term strategy for income, unless the hot topic might also be an evergreen topic.

Using keyword tags as "breast" is difficult in many areas. I admit even my Robin Red Breast list did stretch it a bit. But the bird is called that and it was an experiment to see if the theory worked and it hasn't seemed to so far.

The final and control was the old favorite of picking an evergreen subject. People may argue what are the five inventions which changed the world, but including ancient history does seem to bring in some traffic. It will also be there when the hot topic and hot tag changes. So one to bear in mind for all subjects.

 I will admit to being a little disappointed with my results on List My 5.

Even one penny of income would have been something for the several hours spent researching and writing my lists.

I will continue however to expand my numbers of lists, it is fun anyway. I will also keep updated with my experiment, the one week time frame is a little short to come to any real conclusions at this time.