How I made a space based news site and got 1 million unique views
You can do it too, but it’s hard work
I’ve been making Wordpress templates for clients for about 10 years and have had a few successful startups based on Wordpress that I’ve sold. I had just signed up for a WP Engine account for one of my other sites to test it out and was impressed by the speed.
A few days later I started Space Industry News with the intent of updating the site every day after work. No big deal, I’ll find some press releases on the NASA site and re-work them a little so it would be easier for people to understand. I wanted to do this, not because space will make me a lot of money, but because I truly love the unique, crazy engineering and science ideas that take us to the farthest reaches of time and space.
My first story to hit the “big time” was about the Mars Curiosity Rover and how to watch it land. The site was getting barely any traffic at that point, a few hundred hits a day via Google so I took it upon myself to submit it to Slashdot and see what would happen.
The first day it was hit hard, by my standards at the time, with 3500 unique users. I was really excited. The next day was even better with ~5k uniques. Then the traffic died down to 400+ uniques on the 4th of July. That’s expected because everyone in America is cooking hot dogs and drinking beer, no time for science, right?
I was on a role, the traffic gave me a huge confidence boost to keep doing what I was doing and to turn it up a notch. I spent every waking hour after work tweaking my templates for speed. There wasn’t a night that didn’t go by that I wasn’t hacking away at the CSS trying to get it to perform just a little bit better or rewriting some of the templates code to speed up rendering.
Space Industry News got a decent amount of traffic in the next few months and went over the allowed hosting usage. I signed up for a CDN and upgraded my WPEngine account to the Professional level. I did this out of my own pocket. It was all or nothing at this point, an extra $100 per month. I had to make it work.
I was posting every press release from NASA, ESA, SpaceX, Boeing and whoever I could find that had some crazy space news. I was also posting some of my stories to Reddit which gave me a pretty decent bump in traffic.
I hit the front page for about an hour and it gave me a large amount of new visitors to the site. People were starting to take notice and follow on Twitter too, which was nice.
At the end of the month I got my first payout from Google Adsense. A whopping $100, I paid for hosting! I was on a high and continued down the same path as before, rifling off articles left and right, filling the site with as much content as humanly possible.
272,263 PAGE VIEWS
On December 7th 2013 I had the biggest traffic day in the life of my little space site, 272,263 page views. I submitted the story to Reddit late at night, around 11PM, and didn’t think it would catch on. 10 minutes later GA told me otherwise, I had 40 concurrent users already. I got excited! The counter kept going up, eventually stopping at around 2500 concurrent users.
I had reached over 1 million people. I was so proud of myself. All of my work had paid off. I got a million people excited about science and technology.
I’m just a small town guy, these things don’t happen to people like me. I grew up on a farm and started slopping the hogs when I was 8 years old. I’ve always had an interest in space, but never thought of it as an industry that I could be an influencer of.
I was now getting invitations to big press conferences at NASA and ESA. I sat in via web meetings with some of the brightest people in the world and owned it.
People started to pay attention and contribute to the site. I had “employees” now, no one got paid, including myself. But, nonetheless, people thought what I was doing was useful. So I keep doing it, not as much as before, burning the midnight oil and pushing myself and the site to get better.
Currently Space Industry News is getting decent amounts of traffic daily and is stable. I have no plans on growing it more than it is now because if I did, I’d probably lose my mind or have to quit my day job. Both things are not in my future.
Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this journey into my mind please hit the recommend button.
If you have any questions please send them along to my twitter @littlesparkvt and I’ll do my best to answer them.
If you’d like the latest space news on twitter follow @spaceindnews or visit http://www.spaceindustrynews.com
