Website Project – Some Background #1

If you have read the “About this Blog” page you will realise the first objective of this blog is to describe the project to monetise our website at www.human-resource-solutions.co.uk.  This commenced on 1st January 2011 with the publishing of the newly designed website. But first a little background….

The website is dedicated to providing free HR resources for small and medium sized businesses. I am a freelance human resources practitioner and consultant. Although I am fairly tech-savvy, I have no experience of doing something like this except for just adding Google AdSense adverts to a site – which is pretty easy.

The website

The site has been around for about 3 years. I initially threw it together fairly quickly using a web builder package, put up some free stuff, sprinkled some Google AdSense ads around it and left it with virtually no input for that time.  The Google analytics from that time (fortunately I set this up and forgot about it!) showed that it received from 0 – 20 visits per day with about 0-40 pages viewed per day. The site earned an average of £1.14 per day from Google based on 1.54% of page views leading to a click on a Google AdSense advert.

Towards the end of 2010 I looked at the site again. I decided it was old-fashioned and out-of-date and no longer a decent advert for the business. I therefore had to decide whether to remove it or upgrade it. I do firmly believe that it is a good thing to do to provide free help and support where I can to struggling small businesses and so decided that I should retain and upgrade the site.

However this is only viable if the site can cover it’s own costs through generating some income. These costs are related to domain name renewal & site hosting, software for site development, broadband costs for uploading files and also an element for content development so I can outsource some of the development work. Breaking down these costs, I came to the view that the site would need to generate £1000 per year to break even and be viable. In other words I would need to improve the income by around 300% by the end of 2011. So the site would need to average at least £2.74 in income every day to achieve this target. Of course we will do our best to maximise income and exceed this target if we can, however if we can’t manage to meet the target income figure then I plan to close the site down at the end of 2011.

How will we monitor performance?

As we make changes and undertake initiatives to drive traffic to the site, we will monitor performance using the following core metrics averaged per day and utilise last years data on the old website as a comparator:

1. Income  – the most important!
2. Number of visitors – so we know if we are increasing visitor traffic
3. Number of pages viewed – to see whether visitors are surfing through the site
4. Number of Adverts clicked through – which is what generates the income

All of the above measures will be monitored using Google Adsense data. I’ll also look at a number of other measures as we do things to improve performance.

In the next website project post I’ll look at what we have done so far…