AOC Readers Get Respect, Great Content No Attack Ads

Many web owners and webmasters are reading The Pummeling Pages, a damnation by Brent Simmons of the current state of so much web content and typical websites.

The site has good writing. But the pages do everything possible to convince people not to try. “Don’t bother,” the pages say. “It’s hopeless. Oh — and good luck not having a seizure!”

They’re filled with ads and social-media sharing buttons — and more ads. And Google plus-onesies and Facebook likeys. And also more ads. Plus tweet-this-es. Plus ads. (And, under-the-hood, a whole cruise-ship-full of analytics. The page required well-more than 100 http calls.)

While we, too, struggle to be creative in developing a revenue strategy, the fight against this invasion of our brains has always been front and center in my relationship with the ‘advisers’ who have called me crazy and lacking strategy in my web vision.

Having built a core group of 250,000 high-quality readers — and climbing quickly — 2012 will be our year for revenue. We are launching a goddess-inspired jewelry collection, to support our telling of women’s history. We have obtained a nonprofit arts sponsor with Fractured Atlas and will be expanding AOCCares.org. Several publishing projects are on the drawing board; and we are focused on finding high-quality sponsors.

We’ve been consistent around a single idea at AOC -- and it is YOU, our friends and readers. We’ve never played games with readers, never chased them around the page with ‘attack ads’, never participated in link farm games and avoided web relationships that define our own character, with their strategies.

As a result, our website growth is organic and for real. Our web stats are heavenly and readers appreciate our not trying to co-op their brains with pure clutter.

AOC & Sensuality News Compared to Vogue.com

I took note today that Business Insider writes that Conde Nast’s new Vogue.com is working, with traffic exploding by 500%. Most impressive is the 30 page views per unique visitor, with unique visitors now at 1.2 million.

Folks at Vogue.com noted that much of their page view credit is coming from fashion shows and party slide shows, a factor not pertinent to AOC’s page views or Alexa.com’s ranking of our websites. (We do not use slide shows, finding that they waste viewers’ time.)

Alexa.com puts Vogue’s page views per user at about 2.5, not counting looking at slideshow images that are part of the same article. Amazon’s company Alexa.com doesn’t measure slide show page views — which are sort of misleading, as acknowledged by Conde Nast.

People constantly tell us that they come to AOC and SN as a true portal or home base for learning, but even we refuse to believe that our incredible page views some days. We know that we have people who come and spend 3-4 hours on the website each week. We’ve counted as many as 250 page views with those types. Our time on website stats and also page views have held constant as our traffic has tripled in the last year.

The Alexa.com graphs have AOC and SN generating higher total page views than Vogue.com, when we’re counting pages.

Admitting that AOC and SN combined are about 20% the uniques of Vogue.com currently and without an ounce of marketing support, we’re proud to share some stats that compare the three of us. We are the little engine that could, the one ready to soar even higher in cyberspace with funding and person power.

In these graphs Vogue.com is the blue line; Anne of Carversville.com is the brown one; and Sensuality News.com is yellow. Is this one heck of a performance up against Vogue.com or what!!! Anne

Daily Page Views Per User

Click to read more ...

Alexa Updates on AnneofCarversville.com & SensualityNews.com

We share good news that May 5 was no fluke. Our momentum remains unchanged and should continue to increase-although summer always promises a slowdown with our reader. As of last week, we cycled out of our two biggest weeks of 2011, when Lea T was on Oprah and the digital world got informed about transgender topics. Those two huge weeks from Feb. were dragging our Alexa.com improvement somewhat. No more.

We will continue to go green with many new ideas in the pipeline. We also have substantial increases in directs, which are moving to 45% on AOC. Simply stated, our retention of new readers is killer.

Above is AnneofCarversville.com; below is SensualityNews.com as of May 24, 2011.

Our US Alexa Reaches 14,745 a 40% 7-Day Increase

When we say that Anne o fCarversville is on fire, we’re not kidding. In one week — with no marketing or major article just Anne’s hard work, 18 hours days, good writing, a keen eye and fierce attitude — our Alexa.com rank has moved from 83,000 to 75,237.

We fully expected to be crawling our way to 50,000 after dropping below 100,000. Instead, we’re in overdrive, jumping over other websites at breakneck speed.

Our US rank has moved from 17,364 to 14,575 with page views holding at 28.5.

These stats don’t include Sensuality News, which is also in overdrive, with an Alexa.com increase of 90% in a month.

AnneofCarversville.com & SensualityNews.com April 2011 Alexa Updates

Both AnneofCarversville.com and SensualityNews.com continue to grow at a blistering pace. AOC cracked the 3-month 100,000 mark on Alexa.com and SN cracked 200,000.

Our current week Alexa.com rank at AOC is 52,710 and SN should be 100,000. We will not do a thorough comparative review right now, but today’s Alexa.com updates confirm that our page views, time on site and bounce rates are holding, making us the leader amongst our competitors on every measure.

AOC loves our global audience but we’re particularly happy to report our current US ranks of 17,364 for AOC and a surprising 29,032 for SN.

Anneofcarversville.com is ranked #83,626 in the world according to the three-month Alexa traffic rankings, and it has a bounce rate of roughly 36% (i.e., 36% of visits consist of only one pageview). The fraction of visits to the site referred by search engines is about 19%. We estimate that 61% of the site’s visitors are in the US, where it has attained a traffic rank of 17,364. Anneofcarversville.com’s visitors view 28.3 unique pages each day on average.  Alexa.com 4/28/11

Sensualitynews.com is ranked #182,804 in the world according to the three-month Alexa traffic rankings. The site has attained a traffic rank of 29,032 among users in the US, where we estimate that 79% of its audience is located. This site’s visitors view 13.4 unique pages each day on average. The fraction of visits to the site referred by search engines is approximately 8%. Sensualitynews.com has a bounce rate of roughly 27% (i.e., 27% of visits consist of only one pageview). Alexa.com 4/28/11