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According to WordPress’ stat plugin – JetPack, gospellyrics.com.ng reached the milestone of 1 million views yesterday afternoon. I’m sure you don’t know how that feels, let me tell you.
The whole idea struck me towards the end of my tenure as the Music Director of my fellowship early 2014, that if we search online for lyrics of Gospel Songs by people like Deitrick Haddon, Tye Tribbett, Israel Houghton etc and we find them online on sites like Azlyrics and MetroLyrics, what’s up with Nigerian songs esp. Gospel genre? I didn’t know any Nigerian site dedicated to Gospel lyrics apart from popular blogs like Gospogroove, Gospelcentric etc
I bought the domain and started with the 0 page views and 0 visitors on May 31st, 2014. LOL!
MY GOALS
My intentions for starting the site were quite simple, I wanted to
- make Nigerian gospel lyrics accessible to the world with a simple Google search. Bing? Who uses that?
- and build a community of gospel music lovers.
And I can say I’m achieving these objectives with dedicated Saturday mornings and support of friends (like Mr Gbade Adetisola, Femi Okaseun, Wale Akanbi, Olude Ajibola, John Maduforo etc), family and of course, gospel artists and fans of the website.
You were expecting my third motive to be “making money” abi? Nah, I believe spearheading something thousands of people use and appreciate is more rewarding than that.
A FEW NUMBERS
Enough of all the stories, let’s dig into statistics a bit. In 2 years and 2 months, the site is having a total of
- 1, 001, 881 page views
- 592, 768 unique visitors
- 345 lyrics and articles
- 5, 589 followers on Facebook, 11, 180 on Twitter and 3, 119 on Instagram.
- 2, 625 Newsletter subscribers
- Wonderful wonder by Nathaniel Bassey is the most viewed lyrics with 58, 000+ views, 489 shares and 32 comments.
And according to Alexa, gospellyrics.com.ng is ranked 204, 704th in the world and 1, 424th in Nigeria, with 47.80% bounce rate. We all know this is an estimate, but a good one at that.
I added Google Analytics quite late in 2015.
WHAT THIS MEAN TO ME
I know this might not be a big deal to you but let me enjoy and savour this moment of ecstasy ‘cause
- Running the site and managing the social media accounts is nothing but serious hard work. I tried bringing friends on board in 2014/2015 but it has not been a smooth one.
- It’s been thrilling to see people appreciate something I started and give encouraging feedbacks and recommendations.
- I’ve learnt a lot about social media & digital marketing in the past 2 years. I was even invited to speak about Church, Music and digital media back in June.
- This has been like my major personal portfolio, where I showcase my skill. The site is the first source of traffic to my site even before search entries for my plugin.
I usually dedicate Sunday afternoons to schedule submitted lyrics and make the site better by making some adjustments here and there (codes of course). There should be a difference between a site managed by a Web Developer and just an ordinary blogger. You don’t agree with me? That’s fine - It’s pretty cool dealing e-directly with popular Nigerian artistes and being able to help budding artists. It’s really rewarding emotionally.
ADVERTS?
With an average of 70, 000 monthly visits since March, I’m sure you’ll be expecting to see Ads all around. So sorry to disappoint you, I believe too much Ads makes site dirty and cheap. #MyOpinion
I applied for Google AdSense once in 2015 but it wasn’t granted. Even added affiliate marketing mid-2015 but I took it out 3 months later when I was rebranding (big thanks to Precious Madubuike and Evans Akanno) the whole site.
So, I’m not sure I’ll be adding adverts esp. Google Ads anytime soon. I’m currently working on other ways of generating funds for the site upkeep and expansion though.
WHAT’S NEXT?
Nothing more than making it better and dedicating more resources to the site. I believe this is worth every time, effort and resources I can put into it. In fact, I’m currently developing a mobile app for the website which should be available on iOS and Android before the end of the year.
I won’t rest until
- every gospel artiste in the country sees the site like ReverbNation and submit their lyrics willingly, without being tweeted at
- and Nigerians home and abroad know the right place to go for the lyrics they are looking for.
Anyhow, I know making the next 1 million visits isn’t going to be difficult like making the first, it can only get easier and better with support of people like you.
Do you like what I’m doing? I can use a little encouragement by sharing this.
Or you think there is something I can do better? Let me know by commenting below.
Gracias
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