As many of you know, I launched Carbon Fiber Gear back in December of 2007.  For over a year it stood fairly stagnant, not really getting much attention or updates from me, and then I started to take it pretty seriously.  So how has it grown in that amount of time?

It’s not the biggest site in the world, but it has been growing pretty rapidly lately, and I haven’t had one month where the amount of search engine traffic hasn’t grown.  The site has been ranked on Google’s first page for the term “carbon fiber” which has definitely helped things move along.

With the site I’ve tried to have at minimum 2 new posts per week on the editorial schedule.  That way my readers know to expect new content.  This has surely helped drive traffic, and gain more SE visibibility.  Take a look at this chart which shows the amount of traffic from search engines on a monthly basis since the site started:

Lately, I’ve been seeing a good 15-20% growth per month.  When the numbers are starting to get this high (20,000 uniques/month), it’s really starting to make a huge difference on the bottom line.

To help capitalize on this newfounded traffic, I’ve recently redesigned the site to better promote older content (since the content mostly is not time sensitive), as well as promote other sections of the site (like our store).  In turn I’ve found that our pageviews per visitor has gone up, and our bounce rate has come down.  Huge wins!

My main point of this post is that while I’m nowhere near the amount of traffic I’d like to ultimately bring to the site, they are decent numbers…but look at how much time it took to get there.  Don’t give up if you don’t see results over night.  It takes time to build up a site and really generate a loyal userbase, if you keep pumping out good content, things will happen.

I just launched an ecommerce section of Carbon Fiber Gear, and one of our first products is a carbon fiber wallet. To celebrate the launch, I’m giving one away for free, all you have to do is post a comment with your three favorite carbon fiber products I’ve written about on the blog.

For complete details, and to enter, check out the contest page.

I’m using this contest to not only promote the carbon fiber wallet and new ecommerce store I launched, but also the content in the blog. The content is very viral in my opinion, people like to see what kind of products are made out of carbon fiber. By making the requirements that a person has to go through the content and pick their top three choices, I’m hoping to generate some new dedicated readers as well as RSS subscribers.

We’ll see how it works out!? Right now there are only about 20 submissions, so your chances of winning are quite high!

Carbon Fiber Gear originally started out as an experiment for myself in affiliate marketing. The idea was to highlight carbon fiber parts and products, some that utilized affiliate links, and others that did not. Through the time that I’ve had the site launched, I’ve taken it into a few different directions.

Originally it was just a blog, powered by Wordpress, using a free template. I then later launched an eBay store on the blog utilizing the phpBay script. Afterwards I created a custom design, and converted the phpBans script into BANS. Now I’ve hired my first contributing writer, and the site is really starting to progress into its own real brand.

In the past I hadn’t really taken advertising too seriously on the site. I had run some AdSense, and it brought a few dollars here and there. I wanted to start selling some real advertising, so I had to setup a plan.

At first I created a 300×250 spot on the top left sidebar, and wanted to offer it up for $150/month. The spot was to be exclusive, so one advertiser would fill it, and would run on 100% of the impressions for the month. A couple of days ago, I decided to change that 300×250 spot to 2-4 125×125 spots that will cost $25/month each.

This will allow me to sell a variety of spots and not count on just one advertiser. I also will only be accepting month to month contracts as opposed to multi-month contracts at a discounted rate because the site is growing fairly quickly…and $25/month is more like an introductory price to get advertisers in the door.

Once I had everything setup, I wrote up an advertising page with information advertisers would need. All of the advertising is served using Google Ad Manager for tracking and trafficking purposes. Google Ad Manager is fairly complex, but once you understand the system it’s very nice. Shoemoney has praised it as well.

While I don’t expect advertisers to come knocking on the door, I suspect if I actually go out and try to sell the spots I wouldn’t have too much of a problem considering the low cost, amount of traffic, and very targeted carbon fiber niche. I’m still not very driven to work on the advertising at this point in time, but the opportunity is now out there. I suspect this will be a big part of Carbon Fiber Gear in the future, and I will continue to create new opportunities as the demand progresses.

As you may know, I’ve been pretty busy on a few new designs (This blog, Carbon Fiber Gear, and dpitMedia). All of these designs were custom created from the ground up by yours truly. Many many hours of work is spent on these designs, so it’s always nice to get any sort of recognition for the work. All three sites were just featured on a couple of design showcases:

We Love WP

We Love WP is a showcase site that features the best Wordpress powered sites on the net. They recently featured both this blog and Carbon Fiber Gear!

One Page Love

One Page Love is another showcase site, but specifically features sites that are only one page. dpitMedia was a perfect site to fit that need.

A buddy of mine owns FullSingle, which is the same idea other than the fact that they only feature one site at a time (although you can see the archive of sites)…except he hasn’t added yet

In January of this year I started a little bit of an experiment in affiliate marketing by launching a blog called Carbon Fiber Gear. The blog covers a variety of “cool” products made with or out of carbon fiber. To give you an idea, some examples I’ve written about are:

• Rob Diamond Carbon Fiber Belt Buckle
• Blackbird Rider Carbon Fiber Guitar
• Carbon Fiber & Aluminum Tissue Box
• Carbon Fiber Wallet
• Bell & Ross Carbon Fiber Watches

While the site isn’t making a ton of money, I’ve started to really see some potential in it. I have plans to further expand it out, including a possible direct store, and maybe even our own branded products…but that’s all down the line.

When I initially launched the site, I was using a pretty basic Wordpress template that anybody could use. With the new custom design launched on this blog, I really had the itch to give Carbon Fiber Gear its own unique look. On top of that, I wanted to try and tackle doing everything on my own. When I re-did this blog, I designed it myself, but then worked with Suffolk Software to code it up and integrate it into Wordpress. If anything, re-doing Carbon Fiber Gear would be a learning experience in Wordpress and HTML/CSS…and great practice…both of which are needed.

I managed to do everything from the design in Photoshop to the blog being integrated into Wordpress in about 3 days (Although I did work on it pretty much non-stop). I still have a few things on my to-do list, but the majority of everything is completed. I’m really proud of the work, and feel fairly comfortable integrating a site into Wordpress now.

I have some really interesting articles I plan on writing for this blog in terms of the entire process behind re-doing Carbon Fiber Gear. For those of you interested in what it takes, it will be a must read. In the meantime, I’d like to give a thanks to these two people:

• Mubs from Suffolk Software – Mubs was extremely helpful in answering a few questions here and there when I was stuck on either some stupid CSS quirk or trying to get something to work correctly with Wordpress. I was also able to recycle some code that he had done to create the theme on this blog…which saved me a ton of time/work myself. An example of this is the comments section on a post, that was restyled and rehashed on Carbon Fiber Gear from this blog.
• Collis Ta’eed from Eden.cc – Collis has been on fire lately in the web scene. He owns quite a few sites that you may know of: PSDTuts, NetTuts, FlashDen, AudioJungle, and FreelanceSwitch. While he didn’t directly help me, he (and his work) has been a huge source of inspiration. Enough of it is visible in the site that it definitely deserves some props.