Well it’s almost the end of the year so I thought I would let everyone know how all of my sites have made it through the year. This was a big year for ThinkComputers and also a proving year as I proved to people and my parents that ThinkComputers could be a full time job and it has become one!
Income
As I have said before ThinkComputers is my biggest source of income. I have learned a lot this year about tweaking google and I have seen the increase in income because of that. Although google in not my biggest income on ThinkComputers, Shopping.com is. Shopping.com offers product matching for reviews where I can put in ad in to buy the product that we are reviewing. This works on a CPC rate which is very good and makes me around $30-$50 a day. This can explode if you get a digg or Slashdot on a review.
Traffic
Traffic on ThinkComputers has been good. We average about 2-5k uniques depending on what is reviewed, which is good, but it could be better. I have not noticed the increase in traffic around the holidays, which was huge for us last year. Although I am not the only one, a lot of tech site owners have said the same thing. Hopefully after CES we will get a big boost in traffic.
Sponsors
We have been able to hold onto a good amount of sponsors throughout the year and pickup some really good ones as well. Here is the list of sponsors I want to thank for helping support us through the year, Geeks.com, OCZ, Logitech, Saitek, Cooler Master, Thermaltake, Corsair, and Antec. These sponsors have provided us with products throughout the entire year and we really appreciate it!
Work to be done
Well no site is perfect and there are always things to work on so here are some things that I want to make better at ThinkComputers. New forum layout, the forum layout matches the site, but I would like to clean it up a bit and maybe add in some ads for non-registered users.
Reviews listings, when you go to a specific review section there is just a list of all of the reviews. I would like to change this up a little bit because if you are looking for a water-cooled CPU cooler in the cooling section you have the scroll down the list until you find one. What I want to do is in each review section have it separated into mini sections (on the same page). So for cooling it would be like Air Cooled CPU Coolers, Water Cooled CPU Coolers, notebook coolers, Video card coolers, etc. I think that would help a lot of people navigate the site better.
Mailing list, I used to have a good sized mailing list to mail out a newsletter whenever we had a new review, but it is very outdated. I want to add a small input forum on the side of the page where users can put in their e-mail address and it automatically adds them to the list. If anyone knows of any software that will do this, please let me know.
More reviews! ThinkComputers is a content based site so if there is no new content there is no traffic. I have been trying to do 4-5 reviews/articles a week, but my bad time management sometimes impedes that. Recently I just hired another reviewer and he seems to be working out very well. So we should be posting a lot more reviews a week!
Marketing! I have wanted to put some money into advertising for ThinkComputers this will definitely help traffic out and hopefully increase income. I’m looking to do some text advertising as well as well as some banner advertising. If anyone knows of any good ad agencies (besides google) to advertise with please let me know.
That’s about it for ThinkComputers. Thanks everyone for the support throughout the year!