Ok, so here’s an update on how the site http://www.thebestburgerinbarcelona.com is going and some things I did to it. Read my previous post to see what it’s all about.
I found a cool plugin called Sexy Bookmarks. It inserts these nicely styled buttons I have at the bottom of every page allowing people to tweet, facebook, digg, whatever. You can choose which services you want to allow people to spread the word with. This is essential for creating a viral effect.
I also opened comments even though I initially thought I wouldn’t. Dialog is good.
Google analytics was installed. Naturally the stats are rather depressing at the moment but that’s fine.
My adsense account was approved after a few days, I think it was wednesday. Actually this might have been earlier but they didnt send me a mail to notify me. I immediately started google ads. I set up three horizontal blocks on my homepage. They were great in the beginning but now since I launched the multilanguage plugin the ads show up in different languages, not in relation to the language you’re reading. That’s pretty lame and I want to get to the bottom of why.
The coolest thing so far is that I reached the first page on google on first day for term “the best hamburger in barcelona”. This was immediately followed by the rather mood dampening revelation that hardly anyone looks for that. According to google’s keyword tool there are less than 10 searches per day for this term. WTF, maybe I should have checked that out BEFORE I started the project. Oh well..
In any case, here’s a link to the tool in case you dont know it. It’s pretty awesome. I found out that loads of people in spain search for humbuger. Not sure how to optimise my keywords for that.
Google keyword tool.
Keyword Tool - Google AdWords - Online Advertising by Google
Enter one keyword or phrase per line to see what related word searches your ad will show on.
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
I also added keywords to my template. They are hardcoded into the header.php file of my wordpress template for now and only in english so not ideal. I’ll get that fixed.
Re: Internationalization. I tried out some modules, have not found perfect one yet. qTranslate looked promising but autoconversion did not work. Global Translator doesnt allow me to keep some words from translating. E.g. it translates my number on rated restaurants name from Bacoa to Baccus. NOT ideal 
And I want to show up on the first page of google for “la millor hamburguesa de Barcelona” as well as “la mejor hamburguesa de Barcelona” just like I already do in english.
Bonus. I made 44cents for two clicks thanks to some friend clicking I suppose. Not bad. Only 9.50 until I break even. I invested around 10 bucks into the domain name. I read that to make 10 bucks a day i need about 10.000 pageviews. Per day. Right now I’m getting about 10. You gotta start somewhere I guess but I get the feeling this project is not gonna get me rich quick.
I really need to work on content!