Be careful what you wish for... 890 impressions...

... in 14 hours, according to my banner manager (Google Analytics code).

Had my site picked up and talked about by a couple of people on Facebook and Twitter today.  Already have 2 interviews this week with local media outlets, and a ton of people expressing interest in the site.

Guess I kind of knew this was all coming, and though I thought I was ready, it's obvious now, I am, well, not so much...lol

Thanks Boonex and everyone here for putting out a great script.  My evil little plan is beginning to finally come together!

We're also getting approached by allot of different people lately as well, even some a bit more well known to many.

It's kind of scared me, to be honest. Mostly because I don't yet feel Dolphin 7 is near ready for any kind of displaying around.

Well are you going to post a link so we can see what you did right, or did you just want to blow your own horn with no benefit to us?  890 impressions is respectable, but how many unique visitors is that?  I generate hundreds of impressions just testing sometimes.

Our impressions are also contributed to just refreshing the page allot to test a recent change in layouts or a language edit. I'd imagine since advertisements for Toyota arn't thrilling and people love adfree browsing (Adblock Plus, etc), the revenue from this is... nothing.

There's nothing different from our Dolphin community, but it's the other person I'm working with that's doing all the "PR work." He's been contacting allot of people and has managed to even gain some light sponsorship. Still, how he's managing to do all this is what frightens me the most, because I fail to see what's so fascinating about a Dolphin community, at least to such a degree as this.

Now up to 1218 impressions.

For now, I am going to just toot.  Not real comfortable yet linking to my site from message boards or other non-relevant sites.  I am also not ready to really commit to presenting it in it's current state to anyone but a select group (if that offends anyone, sorry, but these first few days are critical for me for certain reasons).  I don't even have my official logo or design integrated...lol.  But seriously, there's a method to my madness, and I don't want to be to public about it yet.

The reality is, what I did "right", has nothing to do with the look and feel of the site in it's most basic form, it has everything to do with how I let it leak out, and the coverage it'll get (as well as the buzz being generated because of that).  It also has a lot to do with the sponsors and other technology partners I have in play, and the little things they are doing behind the scenes as well.

For those of you really interested, I am keeping detailed notes, and will be publishing a blog with specifics and other more general ideas to grow a community like this, and more importantly, how to profit from it :-)

Looking through my GA admin I am showing 61 visits.  Not huge, but for just being dropped and not officially "live", not to bad for one day of our public beta period.

61 unique visits isn't huge, but I am not that worried about that number being so low right now.  I am averaging between 7 and 9 pages per visit, and that's the number I am really the most interested in.

That's telling me people are clicking around, and not just bailing.  It's also making me feel a little better about the speed of the site to other people.  I have a 29% bounce rate after the first day, and I have to say, that's also making me feel a little better.

These are the kinds of numbers important to advertisers and other media outlets when making deals, etc., and that's the stage I am in right now, finalizing current offers, and generating new ones as I can.

More later...