Tutorial Magazine Blog

It’s been a tremendous start for TutorialMagazine. We’ve had almost 200.000 visits since we launched in February, and we seem to be getting more and more traffic. Another milestone reached today is that for the first time, over 1000 people subscribe to the RSS feed, that is staggering! It really does make me want to make TM even better for you. Thank you for all the positive comments on the blog and on Twitter.

Running this site, and finding new great tutorials takes a lot of my free time. To get a small break from it, I’ll be taking a vacation for the next two weeks. I’m off to beautiful Thailand (Kata beach, Phuket) with my girlfriend.

Tutorials will be posted as usual, but there might only be two or three per day, and not three or four, as I’ve ususally done. I hope you’ll have a lovely summer and I’ll see you when I get back. Possibly with some exciting news for new projects I’m working on.

Cheers!

Jørgen, owner/editor of TutorialMagazine.com

July is almost here, so let’s look back at some of the greatest tutorials posted in TutorialMagazine during June.

Visit 30 Best Photoshop Tutorials of June 2009

Too many things were bothering me with the old design, so last week I set out to redesign/realign most of the layout. The result is what I think is a fresher, more usable design.

Click here to see the new and improved TutorialMagazine.com!

Although the layout was originally based on a grid, I felt that the tutorials themselves were overpowering each other. I didn’t see a way to add balance..until I saw what moviefill.com had done, adding small grey bars between the grid items. With these grey bars in place, balance is improved. I’ve also cleaned up the footer, and removed some menu items. The blog, too, has gotten a facelift. I’ve modified the great Masinop theme to fit my blog.

There are, of course, some bugs still, so if you spot one please let me know.

Cheers, Jørgen

Last night 6000 people from stumbleupon visited the site in a few short hours, causing me to go over my bandwidth limit of 40GB. After that happened all visitors saw was a “bandwidth exceeded” message.

The site is thankfully back up now, since you’re reading this. It was a terrifying moment as a webmaster to see that the site was down.

I’ve taken some steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again. I’ve doubled my monthly bandwidth and also signed up for mediatemple hosting, we’ll see if I move the site there soon. They feature *unlimited* bandwidth and that might help me sleep at night.

It’s been about 60 days since I launched TutorialMagazine, and I want to take the opportunity to let you know what has happened in these first two months. I always find these types of posts fascinating when I see them on other sites, so I hope you’ll enjoy this!

Lets start off by looking at my google analytics stats since february.

I have to say I’m very happy with getting 31,000 visits in the first few months. I think the bounce rate of 48% is acceptable too.

When the site launched I had posted about 100 tutorials, so in the first few weeks I got lots of hits because people were going through all of that content.

I also got visitors by posting my site to several design news sites, like designbump and designfloat. After a while, the number of daily hits started to drop, as you can see from the graph.

I had good content but wanted more visitors, so I decided to make some compilations/roundups. I put together these four that gave me tons of traffic:

• The 30 Best Photoshop Tutorials of February (first green circle in the graph above)
  
• The 12 Best Design Tutorials of February
  
• The 9 Best Illustrator Tutorials of February
• The 60 Best Photoshop Tutorials of March (second and third green circles)
  

Especially the Photoshop compilations drew hits, and amazingly most of the traffic came from Twitter! A few awesome people decided to spread the word about my site via Twitter, and for that I am very grateful! You can notice the enourmous spike in the graph, and that was when someone posted a link on Twitter that got re-tweeted by others. It was quite amazing to look at the stats and see that there were 220 people online (even if it only lasted a few hours!)

Even though the traffic from the compilations hasn’t really lasted, after each spike I got an increase in RSS subscribers, which to me is an important measure of success!

The green line in the graph is the number of subscribers, it’s currently at around 225 and growing. If you haven’t subscribed yet, what are you waiting for?

Monetization

I’ve experimented with adsense and buysellads to see if there’s any money to be made. Adsense hasn’t really been that lucrative, and the ads can be a little annoying. I don’t want ads to take away from the user experience. So far I’ve sold one ad at buysellads, from the wonderful tutcandy.com. I think I sold the first one too cheap, because they seem to be getting lots of clicks for very little money! If you’re interested, you can advertise on TutorialMagazine.com for only $10/month. (one hug from the editor included, offer good while supplies last) The ads will likely receive around 50k impressions in a month, so I think thats a pretty good deal!

Motivation

I currently feature over 300 tutorials, and they have been viewed almost 60,000 times! I feel great about having given people access to that many good tutorials, and it’s rewarding to hear from people that they find the site useful.

Thanks to everyone who has been contributing feedback and tutorial suggestions, I really appreciate it!

Please let me know what you think of the site (and suggestions for improvements) in the comments section below.

Welcome to the new blog!

The old posts can still be found at the old blog.