In my blog post at the end of December I talked about a little mini site experiment I was running.  Check out the post I linked to for the full details, but basically I tried creating a mini site for the BCS National Championship Game (college football) to attract sports bettors and get them to sign up at under me.

The terms I was targeting with the mini site were “BCS Odds” and “BCS Championship Odds”. I ended up getting ranked around 2nd-4th for “BCS Odds” in google, and just a little lower for the other term.  Initially I was thinking that I would receive well over 1000 visitors on the day of the game, and maybe like 3000+ visitors in total (just a guesstimation on my part).  I estimated that with that many visitors I could maybe expect 3-6 new sign ups that would be betting on the game.

The site didn’t do nearly what I expected, and I guess it kind of failed.  In the month surrounding the BCS game I got only 472 unique visits (mainly North American visitors).  Now the only problem with this experiment is that only 1 of the 3 sportsbooks I was promoting allows you to make individual trackers (so I couldn’t tell where sign ups are coming from on the other 2).  The one with separate tracking was the one I promoted mainly.  I had 65 banner/link clicks and 0 sign ups.  It’s possible I got a sign up at one of the other sportsbooks but it’s probably unlikely because of the differences in exposure.

So I am assuming $0 revenue from the site.  Now there is still an outside chance that one of the 65 people who clicked on my link might sign up with the sportsbook sometime soon and I would get credit.

Was this a complete fail and waste of time? Ahh no not really.. it was only one days work for me, the site has PR1 and can pass value to my other sites, and the BCS is yearly so I have the opportunity to grow the site more and try for a higher ranking to get some signups.

My next blog post will probably be a January recap + February goal post next week…