For those of you that missed last Saturday’s post, I have introduced a new Saturday theme for CourtneyTuttle.com. If you missed the original post, you can find it here: Saturday Theme - New Website Case Study

I started a brand new site that was created for the purpose of making money and showing the methods I use to get traffic and make sites profitable. You can find the site at HowToMobile.com. Here’s the update on what I this week with the new site:

Stats Recap
During the first week HowToMobile.com got 155 page views from 100 unique visitors. Most of them went over from this site, but a few found it through Technorati. Since there isn’t much there to find, the traffic was fine for the first week. If you’re interested in watching the traffic of HowToMobile, visit the site and look in the sidebar on the left. I added a link there that you can follow to the stat-counter. I’m going to keep the stats public for you guys, hopefully it will be fun and helpful for you.

Site Redesign
I wanted a basic, simple theme that wasn’t at all flashy. I couldn’t really find anything that was working for me, so I modded the theme I use on this site and used that. Most of you will probably think that the design is really plain - it’s mostly black and white. That’s kind of the point with HowToMobile.com.

I learned a long time ago that you can get more clicks Adsense by making the site in blacks, whites, and greys. Make the ads bright blue and you have a winning combination. The people that find HowToMobile.com will likely be trying to find a specific bit of information, which means that the traffic won’t be as residual as it is on CourtneyTuttle.com. Basically, I have to get as many clicks as I can on the readers’ first visits. Go to the site and take note of what stands out the most on the page.

The design will stay simple, but I will pay for a nice logo when the time is right. Right now obsessing over the design would be counter productive, it won’t help to bring anyone to the site. If you’re starting a new site, pick a theme you like and stick with it for a while, or you could do what most people do and waste 100 hours trying to choose a theme that you’ll scrap next week.

Installed Adsense
I always monetize from day one. I installed a 160×600 vertical banner in the sidebar, and a 250×300 medium rectangle inside the posts using this method: Get More Out Of Google Adsense - Insert Ads In Your Posts. That is all the ads I’m going to use for about a month, and then I’ll install Kontera contextual ads.

Installed Plugins
Any plugin that will add to the functionality and usability should be installed right away. This week I installed 15 plugins which are: Anti-Social, Google Sitemaps, Subscribe To Comments, Adsense, Akismet, Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam, Brian’s Threaded Comments, Dagon Design Sitemap Generator, Digg Button, Show Top Commentators, Related Posts, SEO Title Tag, Ultimate Tag Warrior, Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam, and WP-Contact Form.

Got Indexed By Google
The site got indexed this week, which I promised it would when I wrote this post: How To Get Indexed By Google In One Week. The method either worked or I got lucky, one of the two. All I did was link to it with last week’s post. That’s it! Get one link from a decent site and you’re in. I noticed on Sunday that only one page was indexed, which happens each time Google indexes a new site. By Wednesday Google had included the entire site, which right now has a whopping 8 pages.

Added An Alexa Widget
The Alexa widget helps to improve a site’s Alexa ranking because it helps Alexa to more accurately track the hits a site gets. I installed it this week, and even though the ranking is horrid, who cares? It will help me to monetize in the future.

Wrote A Filler Welcome Post
I needed something to be there when GoogleBot came around so I wrote a simple welcome post that basically says nothing and does nothing.

I focused mainly on getting the site ready. I now have it put together enough to start adding content. It’s ready to be turned into a make money online machine.

Recap Of The Week
Although I didn’t have a ton of time to spend on HowToMobile.com this week, I’m happy with its progress. I think that in a week’s time most people could accomplish everything I did this week and more. The upcoming week should be fun as traffic starts to trickle in. Who knows, the site might even get a click or two.