Ask HN: Went from $30 a day to $300 with less traffic. Um...now what?
Hey Mates,
So I relaunched (tiwyr) thisiswhyyourock.com literally 48 hours ago after concluding 3 weeks of grueling gui & contextual ad testing. Fast forward to today and my earnings are looking promising.

I actually went from a modest $30 a day to $300 a day with less traffic!
How did I do this? Well I poured over countless layers of data....data that I discarded initially. I really built this site just to put a smile on some friends faces that were going through a depressing life change, but I'm now looking at ways to build and develop it in 2011.

For example I put A/B testing on steroids:
Alot of times we think of testing, especially A/B testing as this singular way of constructing an analysis of two possible outcomes or variables to consider. But in fact the possibilities are endless. So my first order of business was to extract the variables I wanted to examine moving forward.

Step #1
Understanding the relationship ads should play in your interface.

Making sure as the first order of business that they don't seem like ads at all...
Now make sure their easily accessible...
Check good...ok I'm going to fastforward to 60,000 visits from over 120 countries what I did after 9 days changed everything.

I stopped caring about us, uk, & canadian traffic and focused on Eurpean nations with a large social presence...you'll see why in a moment, once I had that data from the 60,000 visits; compiling from that a list of 50 countries I then created 3 unique web pages for each testing placement colors and time of day to display those variables.

After a few days I had some delicious data from facebook insight, google analytics, reinvigorate, statscounter & adsense...this coupled with creativity and ingenuity to really take this simple idea to the highest possible level allowed me to find my cAnC (what I call my Contextual Ad Niche Countries) these (5 in total) were the countries throughout my data analysis that pose the most virality and revenue earnings out of the 120.

What did I do with this info of 5 countries that gave me $0.28 a click and they weren't US, UK or Canada? With a 3% ctr and a high facebook sharing rate?
I marketed just to that audience!

Ok step #1 & a half..How to make this thing viral?!
VIRAL LOOPS...yes their is a one click like this button initiative on the main page and a sarcastically humorous one liner urging you to do so; but that's not the loop I'm talking about.

On the back-end I built a small app that showcases a attractive young seductively sad female asking one question "Do I rock?" their are two buttons with an answer...YES & NO clicking on either well let's just say I was able to get 1,200 facebook likes in 2 hours....ok so I can make this thing viral at my choosing...CHECK.

Oh and the php page was geo targeted so only certain users from a particular country that I believed had a high Serp were seeing that squeeze page.

So the question I'm posing to you guys is this...the data is great fantastic even I'll probably be at over $400 today and the goal is $1k daily but how do I keep users coming back but still maintain a intuitive and very simple gui? What social elements could I add to get users more engaged? I know their are some brilliant people on here that can give me some insight and illuminate my perspective to move forward in 2011.

P.S. If anyone needs any advice or specifics figures of data I'd be more than happy to talk further with you.

Looking forward to reading your replies.