Vottling

Today it is new month again - it is hard to believe how fast this year is going !!!

And speaking of speed, let's get you up to it on the Vottle front. February was the first month in which our new custom Google Adsense had the opportunity to run for a full month, and we did pretty good from the click-throughs. We secured a decent number for a local site (South Africa) and it provides a very nice base for us to benchmark our future growth. Google also recently approved a small but significant 'feature' for us that allows Google ads to open into new browser windows. This may sound trivial but it's not a standard feature for Adsense customers, and is valuable for us in that Vottle doesn't 'lose' a user to another site - once a user is done browsing the site they clicked through to, the Vottle window will still be open, encouraging them to explore the site further.

We have also embarked on a new SEO strategy this month. Previously our Adwords spend was primarily targeted at increasing the number of postings on the site, ie, targeting users wanting to *place* ads. Now we are changing direction a bit and looking to drive more users to the site who are *looking* for goods or services. This should increase our Adsense revenues with an increase in searches on the site. This should also mean a reduction in Adwords spend, and while we are incurring SEO consultation costs, these are not recurring. While several SEO changes are already in place, we now play a waiting game and wait for the traffic numbers to start increasing!

We have also attracted some more good advertising on the site with VW Mastercars buying two more campaigns from us, and we are also close to getting a peel-back banner campaign with Cell C.

On some other news, have a look at www.compreus.com (Wantitall.co.za for Brazil - due to go live sometime this month), and www.sonicspaza.com (still to be officially launched but already trading and doing some good business in music licensing).

Posted by Ronnie Apteker