[Journey] ANOTHER QUIZ SITE JOURNEY

dork65

dork65

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Oct 8, 2018
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Introduction

Hi all! I have been following BHW for a while, reading some really great threads on here and learning a lot, but all my efforts have been focused on HTML5 games (making them, portal sites, etc). It's a very hard niche, and even though I've seen some small success, I'm starting to realize it's just not for me...

So I'm giving IM a try! As a CS student, I had a lot of fun doing some bot work (I made a custom Insta bot that I might use later in this journey) and it makes me want to dig deeper into IM.

I got really inspired when this whole quiz site craze started, but it's been a while coding the site. I've been thinking about starting this kind of site for a while, and I feel like I should focus on this since I'm not doing games any more.

What I've done so far
  • Coded the site. It is all custom, so I have a lot of flexibility.
  • Bought the domain and set up the site. (like $8 for the domain and $5/month for a VPS)
  • Set up a Facebook page.
Future Plans

Tomorrow, I want to start making quizzes and make some Facebook posts. I have a few ideas for traffic: popups, some "submit your article" sites, and FB groups. As I'm finding out what works, I'll need to put ads up. I only have an Adsense account right now, so I'll have to find some other providers.

Updating/End of Journey

I don't want this to be like a lot of journeys that just die out of nowhere. I'm going to update this journey at least once a week. I'll only stop IF:

-The site isn't going anywhere. There's no way I can stay motivated with no results for a long time
OR
-I reach a good traffic or $$ figure (I feel like journeys are 0-hero stories, once you're 'up there' it's less entertaining and informative)
 
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Good Luck for your journey!!!
Waiting for the next update
 
Congrats on taking action. With you the best
 
Update #1

Just realized I should mention: my quiz site only does "personality" quizzes, and I bought the domain around that premise. I thought it was a good idea, but I see most FB groups are focused around right/wrong quizzes. Maybe I'll have one of each in the future!

However, finding those type of FB groups is a lot harder imo. So far I've tried posting on Facebook and Reddit, but the Reddit post got taken down after a while and I seem to suck at FB lol. Never used Facebook but I've made some accounts to spam with, waiting a few days so they don't get banned instantly.

On the quiz site I've made a quiz a day and hope to continue, so far I have 5 quizzes up. I had an idea to write about 300 words explaining the personalities, traits, and how I set up the quiz (usually find a good source like a movie wiki or something) that goes before the actual quiz. It should improve SEO and hopefully be more interesting to the quiz taker.

Next week plans
  • Hopefully get approved for Adsense and put up ads
  • Add quiz-editing to site (was in a rush to get started and didn't code this yet lol)
  • Make 7 more quizzes
  • Make a Twitter
I saw someone with a similar "personality" quiz site and he had both a Twitter and a Facebook page. It looked like he was doing follow/unfollow on Twitter and he got more engagement on his Twitter. So I'm going to try that this week.

Week recap

Users this week: 34
Made this week: $0
Spent this week: $13 (domain and hosting)
 
I would advise you not to take adsense they pay peanuts and will slow your site, instead focus on raising organic traffic and join a display ad net or a video ad network
 
AdSense is trigger happy with bans whenever it comes down to irregular social media traffic spikes. Which is the case for you right now so I'd wait with them or skip them all together, AdSense is a great network and gives you access to even better networks like Mediavine and Ezoic so make sure you don't place AdSense yet and get your AdSense banned. I've read another quiz journey and they were enthusiastic about Hooligan Media, perhaps try that.
 
NightEmperor said:
AdSense is trigger happy with bans whenever it comes down to irregular social media traffic spikes. Which is the case for you right now so I'd wait with them or skip them all together, AdSense is a great network and gives you access to even better networks like Mediavine and Ezoic so make sure you don't place AdSense yet and get your AdSense banned. I've read another quiz journey and they were enthusiastic about Hooligan Media, perhaps try that.
Click to expand...

Oh, thanks man, good to know. Yeah, I saw that journey but iirc he had traffic before he applied. I already had Adsense on an old account and last time I added a site there was no confirmation. Doesn't matter too much, I'll wait until I have traffic to spend time on networks.

Mr Positive said:
I would advise you not to take adsense they pay peanuts and will slow your site, instead focus on raising organic traffic and join a display ad net or a video ad network
Click to expand...

I mean won't any ad network slow down my site? Very true though, I was hoping Adsense would be quick to add because I already have an account. Do you have any recommendations for networks?
 
Update #2

Happy 4th everyone! Just wanted to throw up a quick update since a fair amount happened. I don't like writing content and I got a bit lazy and only did 2 quizzes this week :(. But I worked on the site and my tools are a lot better now.

Mistakes

I made a lot of dumb mistakes this week. So here they are:
-There was a bug in my code that made the site crash 50% of the time for the visitor. It's very weird, but I must have been really lucky and not gotten it before. Fixed Monday iirc
-Forgot to submit my sitemap to Google. Really dumb
-Was using Facebook all wrong. Pretty embarrassing and dumb but I'll say it here for transparency. I was joining "quiz" FB groups instead of a niche that was passionate about the personalities in my quiz :eek:. Super dumb I know I know... fixed and posts are waiting approval

Misc Things

Twitter hasn't been so good. Follow-unfollow must not work there. Right now I'm making a daily post and following people that like tweets of a page in the niche I wanna target. It's still early though so I'll keep trying.

Adsense hasn't approved me yet. Doesn't matter too much, still essentially no traffic.

Facebook gave me $10 free ad credits. Used it all pretty quickly but this was before the site bug was fixed :(

My Facebook Page has been the best source of traffic, at least a few a day. I'm just posting a link a day there.

Not sure if it's low traffic or there's an actual issue but my bounce rate has been pretty high, around 75%, and usually those session times are 0 seconds long... most users from ios but I have an Android. Does anyone know how to preview the site in ios Safari?

Next Week Plans
  • Make 7 quizzes
  • Try to drive traffic with Facebook Groups or Twitter
Week Recap

Users this week: 72 (this is just mon-fri, mostly from Facebook ads)
Made this week: $0
Spend this week: $10 (Facebook ad credits)
 
Update #3

Been meaning to make this for a few days. It was only a matter of time, but I've definitely hit the slog. I don't enjoy making content or promoting quizzes, and tbh I would rather program a new quiz site if that was an option :/

What Happened

Like I said, laziness really hit me and I found out I really don't enjoy making or promoting content, so I guess this was a learning experience. I focused on other programming projects instead of content for the site, so I only made a few quizzes and promoted on only a couple of days. But traffic wasn't nothing, despite me almost not promoting the site at all.

No traffic from Twitter yet, but I still don't want to give up on it.

Adsense was also rejected, probably because of too much Facebook traffic, as @NightEmperor pointed out.

Looking Forward

Although I definitely don't enjoy the site anymore, I think it would be lame to give up now that I'm at least getting consistent traffic. Maybe I will apply to other ad networks so I at least feel like I'm getting something out of this. The dream would be to make enough money where I can hire content writers.

Week Recap

Users this week: 54
Made this week: $0
Spent this week: $0
 
DienBien said:
Hello! Can you tell us what other ad network do you want to apply?
Click to expand...

I saw Hooligan Media from another thread, but I hardly have enough traffic to make any good money with any ad platform.

Jammy0308 said:
I'm late but this 99.99% isn't the reason.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure, I was told they've found some "policy violations" on the site, which links to https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/48182?hl=en. Quizzes fall within Google's content policies, I'm playing this by the book so the only think I can think of is the "Traffic Sources" section.
 
Update #4

Another pretty unproductive week. I noticed that social media image previews (via the OpenGraph protocol) weren't working properly and fixed that recently. I added 2 more quizzes, but that's pretty pathetic compared to how I think I should be growing the site.

It's been pretty inspiring to me to see how the Facebook promotion has worked out, I'm still getting some traffic from the posts, however small. It's pretty lame to make excuses, so instead I'll try to make some progress for next week :p

Week Recap

Users this week: 51
Made this week: $0
Spent this week: $0
 
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