We just launched a new site: Symfony Experts. The site is identical to WP Questions, except the focus is different. WP Questions was built using the Symfony framework, so this is a technology that we use every day.
In the next few weeks we be launching similar sites focused on MySql and Javascript.
We’ve had a few questions that needed more than 3 days for the asker and the answerers to figure out the perfect solution. So I’ve added a link that makes it easy to extend a question. If you are the person who has asked a question, and your question is about to expire, feel free to go to your question, click the “edit” link, and then, on the edit form, click the link that says “Extend Question by 3 Days?” I’ve circled it in red in this screenshot:
I’m looking in Google Analytics. Always a treasure trove of information, some of it surprising.
Traffic this month is up 58% over last month.
Our most popular page is our front page. This does not surprise me. What does surprise me is that our “About” page is the second most popular page. On most sites, I think the “About” page never gets read. On our site, it is important. People are trying to figure out what we are about.
The 3rd most popular page is the page that lists our experts, and how much they’ve earned.
This is especially interesting:
Avg. Time on Site: 00:09:19
That’s up 178%, a huge increase over last month. I assume that is partly because we opened up our archives, and partly because we’ve had more questions. (Our current plans for our archives is to keep resolved questions up for 30 days, then hide them. We will eventually sell access to the full archives.)
Our top 3 sources of traffic:
Referring sites send us 53% of our traffic. More than 225 sites have sent us some traffic (Google Analytics counts 233 sites, but some of those are our own, such as TeamLaLaLa or blog.wpquestions.com.) Some are Twitter-partners, I think, http://yamm.hu/. One thing Google doesn’t do is consolidate the whole Twitter universe into one metric. For instance, we got links from here:
It would be interesting to know what percentage of our traffic comes from the combination of Twitter plus all of the 3rd party Twitter sites. Does anyone know how to calculate that? Is there a convenient list of all 3rd party Twitter sites, somewhere?
All in all, we are happy with the trends. If traffic increases 58% every month, we will be very pleased with where we will be by the summer.
We will also be launching some new sites next week, which I assume will lead to a pick up for all of our sites.
Last month we rolled out threaded answers, which we think help facilitate the conversations between the askers and the answerers. One feature we should have added then, but did not, was automatic emails that let an answerer know when an asker has responded to their answer. This is one feature we just rolled out today. From now on, if you post an answer, and the asker responds to you (perhaps clarifying what they want, or giving you more information) you’ll be notified of their post via email.
There was a bug in our code that occasionally miscalculated what an expert’s cash balance was. That is, if they’d earned $100 and withdrawn $75, then their cash balance should have been $25. Sometimes it was $0. During the last month, on 4 separate occasions, I had to log into the database and fix people’s cash balances by hand, resetting the balance to the correct amount.
I finally tracked the bug down, to a line of code that I’d put in to prevent hackers from being able to hack their own account info (I didn’t want anyone to have the power to assign thousands of dollars to themselves). The code, as I’d written it, was a bit overzealous.
I’m fairly sure this bug is now fixed. I appreciate the patience everyone showed regarding the problem.
One of our regular users just wrote to us and complained that the site has been coming up slowly for him. I’m curious if anyone else is having problems?
I’m pleased to see that the various experts on WP Questions have now collectively earned over $1,000. And our top 3 experts (Utkarsh Kukreti, Darfuria and Japh) have all earned over $100. I look forward to everyone earning a lot more from this site during 2010.
Registered users can now log in to their control panel and click the “Affiliate Info” tab. There you’ll see your custom affiliate code, plus a list of users who registered via your affiliate page and the questions asked:
Affiliate User page
Using the new affiliate code, you can earn a percentage of each new question at WPQ for everyone who signs up from your site. If you sign up someone on WP Questions, and they ask a question, we’ll give you half our profits from that question.
So, if you sent us 100 people who all asked questions with $30 prizes, you would get $90. If they all asked follow-up questions worth $30, you would get another $90. You will keep earning money from the people you sign up for as long they keep asking questions.
I’m pleased to read these 3 tweets about WP Questions.
Oliver Schlöbe earned some money:
Wee, earned my first prize money (40$) with @wpquestions . Nice! And, I’m on the Top 5 Experts list now heh.
Jordan Miskowicz learned some things:
I like @wpquestions not because I want to answer for money but some of the questions asked/answered are stuff I’ve been curious on myself.
And 1000watt Consulting had their bacon saved:
Great site to get your WP problems answered by true WP experts http://www.wpquestions.com/ Just saved out bacon.
Today, WP Questions is 1 month old. We’d like to say a big thanks to everyone who has written to us with feedback and to everyone who have reported bugs. We also like to say a big thanks to the many people who have asked quesitons, and a big thanks to those who have offered answers.
So far $689 has been paid out to the people who’ve answered questions. I feel that our site is a true partnership – our customers only think we are as good as the experts who answer their questions. And so, a very big thanks to the 20 individuals who have so far posted winning answers. Here they are:
Utkarsh Kukreti$135 earned
Darfuria$106 earned
Japh $85 earned
Brandon Dove$44 earned
Oliver Schlöbe$40 earned
Tim Holt$40 earned
Max $40 earned
Brian Richards$33 earned
Justin Tadlock$25 earned
Ron Rennick$22 earned
James Tryon$20 earned
Gilbert Pellegrom$20 earned
Michael Fields$20 earned
transom$19 earned
Meredith Marsh$15 earned
Ben $5 earned
scribu$5 earned
Cristian Antohe$5 earned
Rebecca M$5 earned
Tony Geer$5 earned
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