James Mandy stops by 45n5.com occasionally and when I saw some of his recent success I got quite excited, interested, and thought you might also like the details of how his feedburner count is sitting at just over 10,000 subscribers in about 1 month.

James was nice enough to indulge us with the answer to the question “How did you take leopardtricks.com from 0 subscribers to 10000 subscribers and over 30 authors in just 1 month?”

The technique is interesting and advice is great. Here is James’ story in his words:

www.leopardtricks.com was started on the 11th of Nov, very quickly after Apple released their latest operating system “Leopard”. I figured I’d start a blog-style site with tips and tricks on it. Sure there are already lots of similar sites out there, but the domain and name I wanted was perfect. I had to do it!

I set the site up with a clean install of wordpress on my own dedicated server, found a suitable “apple-like” theme and started to add content. I added a lot of tricks that I’d discovered myself and also searched for content to put online.

In 26 days I have 38 contributers (all contributers, a handful of authors that were once contributers which can now post live to the site, etc). Unfortunately a lot of people sign up as a contributor and only submit one trick. There are some members who submit info regularly however.

I figure the key to an easy-run blog or site is to have others submit content. Even if you have to approve the content before publishing live to the site, it’s a load off your back!

I got to work throwing a 468×60 adsense banner at the top and bottom of the site. A square ad on the right menu, and some 468×15 link ads embedded in every second (roughly) posted article.

Being an Apple related site I had the opportunity to create a “dashboard widget” for the RSS feed. For those that don’t know what a dashboard widget is, it’s a cool little app that springs up on your desktop that lets you see whatever information the widget is designed to display. I used the built-in-to-leopard dashcode software to make an RSS widget using a built in wizard. It was fast, and easy. I submitted the widget to my site with a little blurb about subscribing to the RSS, and then submitted the widget to Apple’s official website (apple.com) It made the top 50 straight away and even headed to about #14th at one stage. It’s slowly dropped but is still actually in the top50 list. This is excellent exposure, and a great way to get subscribers to the site, because widgets “are cool”.

Three days ago I setup feedburner, out of interest. It lets me see how subscribers are reading my content, and a few other things. It’s pretty cool.

I would have to say that most of my subscribers (11,000+) are Widget users (9,000 of them roughly). In December alone there has been over 3,000 downloads of the widget from my own site, I have no idea about apple’s site! (more I’d say).

A popular magazine’s editor contacted me recently about having my dashboard widget included in their next magazine issue (on their CD)… I jumped at the offer and the mag should be released in a few months time. It will be interesting to see what happens with subscribers and how my little server copes with the new traffic.

www.leopardtricks.com:
serves approx 5-8k uniques a day
servers approx 1Gig data a day
4% of readers are non-apple users
40+ contributers
11k+ subscribers

I’m even considering selling the site. I don’t know at this stage. I cant discuss how much income the site brings me, but lets just say it’s not that much probably due to my lack of SEO and monetization skills. Perhaps I can say that it’s enough to put fuel in my car, or buy a carton of beer now and then… hehe

some little techniques I’ve used to get hits

sign up to relevant forums and contribute (with a link to your own site in your signature). help others, be involved.

I also use the “onlywire” link dumper thingo in my browser (your idea). I don’t know if I benefit from this or not.

I haven’t really learned enough to learn to properly monetize and work on SEO…

Cheers, James

Thanks James

Thanks for the awesome details on how you achieved your quick and amazing success with
www.leopardtricks.com.

Does anybody have monetization advice for James and his site?

(note: I haven’t used onlywire in awhile)