1 Billion Internet Users as of December 2008

According to comScore, the total Internet users exceeded 1 billion in December 2008 or about 18% of the worldwide population. 41% of the Internet users are from Asia-Pacific, 28% from Europe, and 18% from North America. Latin America, Middle East and Africa accounted for the remaining 12%.

By Country, China had the most Internet Users with 180 Million online which is about 20% of Chinese residents. The US ranked number two with 163 Million users. This is very significant since the measurement was done for home and work locations without counting access from public computers (such as Internet cafes), mobile phones, or PDAs. Japan, Germany, UK, and France round out the top 6. India, the 2nd most populated country is currently ranked number 7 with 32 Million users online. It is expected the future growth will be dominated by new users from China and India.

Source: eMarketer.com

Plum7.com - top 3 on Google Search within a month!

We started 'plum7.com' as a family project during the 2008 Christmas break and beta launched on Jan. 22. We are slowly building traffic by word of mouth and basic search engine optimization. At this point, over 50% of our visits are coming from organic search results (meaning not paid traffic) and referrals from sites like StumbleUpon and Digg.

Today, two weeks after our beta launch, we discovered that we have already achieved the top 3 position at Google search for "top 10 pop songs" for the weekly top 10 music page (with official videos, funny parodies, lyrics, karaokes, and line dance videos), beating big names like Apple/iTune, Google/Youtube, Time.com, video.aol.com, and about 22,100,000 other web pages!

We have helped CadPointInc achieved the top organic search results at Google, Yahoo, and AOL in 2007 -- it remains on the top today, and it's great to know that we can still do it! Of course, our work have just begun, and there are still a lot of things we are planning to do (and we are having fun!). We'd like to do a checkpoint and share with you the tools we have used so far (they are mostly free):

• Content Management System (free): Joomla with php and mysql database with basic template.
• Analytics (free): Google Analytics for tracking and analysis
  
• Revenue (free registration): Google Ad Sense, Amazon Affiliate, and many travel affiliate programs from Commission Junction (We have only gotten a few dollars from Google so far, and we need to seriously consider either optimizing the affiliate conversion or drop those programs... any comments?)
• Search Engine Optimization - keywords: very basic stuff like put meaningful keywords in page URLs, page titles, page descriptions, keyword sections, title of links, and title of images
• Search Engine Optimization - search submission: submit new pages to Google, Yahoo, MSN, StumbleUpon, and Digg. (We have not even submitted to the big directories yet!)
  
• Word of mouth: Email to friends/family, put links in signatures (email and web forums)
• Hosting: Servage.net $6.45/month for hosting with 510GB and $14.95/year Domain registration (with free Privacy, better than Godaddy.com)
  

Even though this is a very new site with a few weeks of history, (and pagerank of zero), we think our weekly top 10 music page was able to get to top 3 organic search ranking because:

• It's a content/information rich page with official video, funny parodies, lyrics, karaoke, and line dance videos,
• It's a keyword rich page with meaningful keywords in page URL, title, description, images, links while not 'spamming' or stuff keywords with density that's too high.
• It's a timely page with weekly top 10.
  

Page performance:

• 27% Home Page
  
• 31% Music Section
• 19% Travel Section
• 18% Dance Section - this is a new section with almost no promtoion
  
• 5% Recipes - we will probably drop this section
  

Here is a distrubtion of current traffic sources:

1. 47% from direct link and email - presumably primarily friends and family, a large perceentage came from Yahoo Mail referral.
   
2. 34% from search engine referral - 95% from Google, with one or two from AOL, MSN, ASK, Kvasir, and Live. Surprising even though we religiously submit every new article to Google, MSN, and Yahoo, we have zero referral from Yahoo Search so far.
3. 18% from StumbleUpon, Digg, Facebook, and other forums/blog referrals.
   

Concentrated yet wide range of international visitors. The picture on the left is a Google Analytics map showing distribution of visitors in Janurary. So far, most visitors are from California, but it is very interesting to find out that we are already getting visitors from 31 US states, and from 28 other countries ranging from all continents (ok... except Antarctica!).

Ok, that's it so far. We'd like to know your thoughts, suggestions, and questions. Please go ahead and click on the comment and provide your feedback. Thanks!!