A news and opinion website:

http://mensnewsdaily.com

I would love to see it reviewed!

The site has been online since 2001. Current traffic: around 20k page views per day. Contains over 5000 articles - about 10 added each day. The site is indexed constantly by news.google.com. The site has been reviewed by The Washington Times, UPI, and on C-SPAN.

The Drudge Report makes millions of dollars every year - so I know news can be big. But websites that are based on advertising need traffic to thrive, and 20,000 page views per day is not enough.

Here's a tidbit about an expensive learning experience:

I hired an SEO company last December to help me get my site optimized for google and other search engines. At the time my site was ranked 6/10. By about April, the company's efforts were beginning to pay off - I jumped from 6/10 to 7/10, and then to 8/10.

On Sunday night, my google ranking dropped to 6/10.

So the $3000 I have spent so far on this SEO company has resulted in net zero as of today.

The site looks okay. What you probably need is interaction testing. This would test things like desirability factors of content, ad placement and other factors. Tricky stuff.

For example eBay decided on a certain change to the layout of the site. If I remember correctly they broke the change down to eleven steps, instituted over something like three months. This was after proper methodology with test groups.

Where the site is essentially working, caution is best. However, you are at the limits of what "looks good," and "you need to make your logo better" can do for you. In other words, while admirable trying to get free casual tips in a forum, it is time for the next step. You'll have to institute a series of experiments and adopt some research and development methodology which makes sense for you. And I don't think simple usability testing is going to do the trick.

Intriguing. The main problem for me is that I am an individual trying to 'bootstrap' this entire operation - I don't have unlimited resources to pump and tweak my business. I have made economic investments in the site (eg., $3000 for SEO), but I'm not convinced that I can identify the best ROI. My strength is in creating and building things - but I am not so good at managing growth.

Making these investments is not too big a step from a budget. Budgets can be big or small, but they should have some purpose. This is the realm of strategic planning operations.

One strategem would be banding togther with others who are logical venture partners. This, to my mind, is building -- just not building code.