Niche Marketing Experiment Update
It’s been 17 days since I started my niche marketing experiment by creating a small website called ColossalTV.com. You can read about how it all started on my previous Niche Marketing Post. I’ve learned a few things in the past 17 days and thought I’d share a bit.
Traffic is King! I got my site together very quickly and Google accepted me into the Adsense program right away. If you have a decently layed-out site with relevant content, they get you signed up pretty fast. It was simple to insert the code for the ad units into my site. But, then I sat and stared at the computer waiting for someone to show up. I needed traffic and I didn’t want to buy it.
I searched around for ways to get my site on the search engine map. I used the site submission tools my hosting service, 1and1.com, provides and also manually submitted my site to Alexa, Yahoo, and the DMOZ open directory project. One of the things I learned was the importance of having a robots.txt file, a Google Sitemap, and an info.txt file in your site’s root directory to guide the search programs as they spider through your site to index your content. Even with all of this, it takes a while for search engines to get you listed. So, I tried a couple other things.
I did a websearch for “website traffic” and found a whole bunch of junk. One site that intrigued me enough to login was Traffic Swarm. They promised swarms of free targeted web traffic. The hype isn’t quite accurate. You sign up and they give you a bunch of free points which earn you displays of your ad in their system. You earn more points by paying for them, or by clicking on other peoples ads and looking at their websites. What you really have is a bunch of people who want free traffic looking at the websites of a bunch of other people who want free traffic. Nobody is surfing with interest. The system is also flooded with get-rich-quick and MLM type sites, but I figured people might be interested in looking at my site because it actually had content in it. They did send me a steady stream of visitors – not quite a swarm. (If you try it out, please click on this link to sign-up. I’ll get a few free bonus points toward traffic.)
I managed to get a few hundred page impressions and a couple of clicks this way, but decided I wanted to try to get more targeted traffic. I signed-up with Google Adwords and started a small ad campaign. I’ll write in more detail about this in the future, but the main thing I learned while researching this approach was how to use Adwords campaigns as a low-cost method of testing an idea. You set-up a page on your site to feature whatever you want to test, craft an ad campaing to drive traffic to the page and measure your results. No responses, bad idea! Flood of traffic, start developing the idea because you might have a winner. I’m planning to use this strategy as I develop content for my ReelHistories.com website.
As the traffic started coming in from multiple sources, I discovered that I couldn’t tell whether my clicks were coming from my ad campaign or the Traffic Swarm site. I realized the need for tracking and that’s what I’m working on now! I also realized about half of my clicks were coming from the Adsense ad units I put on this blog (a surprising side bonus.) The trackback tools and auto pinging of blog directory sites that are built into WordPress have made this one of my best promotional resources. If the experiment is a success, I plan to convert my niche sites to WordPress.
As of this moment I’ve raked in $3.27 in Adsense revue. Doesn’t sound like much and I spent more than triple that on the Adwords campaign. But, the majority of it came in in one morning (after 16 days of almost nothing) and it was pretty thrilling to realize that the work I was doing had some value. It’s not enough money to be deemed a financial success, but I’ve been learning an amazing amount of new ideas and strategies for building an online business and have a clearer understanding of the things I need to work on.
The experiment is far from over,
The Go-To Guy
P.S. I found 2 e-books and a website along the way that provided some useful information. The Adsense Mint e-book provides a surprisingly high value and low B.S. approach to finding profitable niches to build content for and tools to evaluate keywords and competition. The other e-book is called Ads of Gold. You get it free on your members page when you sign up at Traffic Swarm. This book is all about traffic tracking and analysis for your ads. It shows how to refine them and increase their effectiveness. I don’t know if I’ll use the service he recommends, but I am sure I can find ways to implement the concepts.
The website I recommend is PerryMarshall.com. He has a 5 part course on using Adwords. This is the site that got me thinking about using Adwords as an idea testing platform. Combined, these resources have really influenced my thinking.
Hello, I was wondering if you had any updates to your Niche Marketing Website Experiment?
Over the last few months I have been doing a similar project, creating about four (very small) niche content websites, using a unique marketing strategy. I am working on improving my Click Through Ratio of the websites, and a method/formula to gain a steady amount of traffic to the sites.
Is there any advice you can give based on your experience (what works and what doesnt)? Also, could you please send me any e-books you have? (especially “ads of gold” that you mentioned)? Thanks!
Phil,
I’m glad you liked the article. I haven’t had a lot of time to devote to this project recently, so there isn’t much to update right now. But I always have advice!
One important thing for improving your click-through rates is to experiment with both your ad placement on the page, and the colors and formats you use.
Google’s Adsense Heat Map will give you some ideas about placement, and many people suggest choosing colors that make the ad units blend in with the rest of your site. Also good to know is that most people scan a web page starting at the upper-left side. They linger on titles and subtitles. Images grab a lot of attention and seem to work well in the upper-right portion of the content area.
The only way to know what works for your site is to start testing. Make one change (it’s important to test one change at a time) and let it run for a little while. Check your results and see whether the change helped. Keep doing that until you optimize the ads for each of your sites. It’s tedious, but that’s how it is done.
Make sure you are getting good traffic statistics. I use a service called http://www.statcounter.com and another called http://www.mybloglog.com. These let you see where your visitors are from, how they move through your site, what they look at, and lots of other useful stuff – if I’m reading my logs right, you are from Australia, read my ‘Niche Marketing’ article first, went to my homepage, read my article called ‘A Seed Planted’, then ‘Placing a Rock in the Stream’, and finally this article. You have a pc running Windows XP (like 89% of my visitors) with a screen resolution of 1024×768 (like 39% of my visitors), have Javascript enabled (like 100% of my visitors), and your browser is Firefox 1.0 (like 6% of my visitors – 57% have upgraded to version 1.5). That is a lot of useful stuff to know.
If you know where visitors come from, how long they stay, what they look at, what they click on, and how they move through your site, you will get a better idea of where to spend your energy.
For increasing traffic, writing short articles and posting them on free article databases is a very good strategy. I get regular traffic from a few of the articles that I posted. Each one you submit will also have a small place for an author’s note and link at the end of the article. You will benefit from the traffic building efforts of everyone who uses them.
These articles are used by ezine and website publishers, so it is a good strategy to write articles that are indirectly related to your website. That way they won’t appear on sites that are direct competition for you. You may even want to find a few related sites of high quality and offer to write an exclusive article for them – with a link to your site included. I’ve written an article about this, so check my archives.
Another excellent way to get noticed is to participate in online discussions that deal with topics related to your website. Put your site’s address in your signature. Commenting on blog posts (like this one) will also help generate traffic. Don’t abuse this strategy by posting when you have nothing to add to the conversation. You will get more responses when people are impressed with the content of what you say. I wrote an article about this too.
In the future I’m planning to experiment with creating ‘sticky content.’ These are features like mortgage calculators, games, videos, and other content that will keep people coming back to your site over and over. A great one I came across recently was for a press release generator. You answer a few questions by typing in your responses, click a button and a properly formatted press release pops up ready to cut, paste, and send to all the media. I’ll write more about this when I’ve finally had a chance to test the idea.
This all takes some work to get going, so hopefully your sites are on topics you find interesting.
This link is for the page where I have links to all of the free e-books for downloading: http://www.andrewseltz.com/my-bookshelf/free-e-books/. ‘Ads of Gold’ isn’t there because I don’t have the rights to re-distribute it. Sign up at TrafficSwarm.com and you can get a free copy from them.
This is turning out to be more of an article than a reply, but I hope I’ve made good on my claim to be your ‘online information consultant!’
Regards,
Andrew Seltz, The Go-To Guy
Hi Andrew,
Wow. That is absolutely by far, the most informative, detailed, and useful reply to a request for advice I have ever received online.
Yes, I will definitely be following your advice with the “testing” of various ad placement strategies. It is often interesting of note that I have 2 sites of the same domain name, exact same template, and similar traffic stats, yet 1 receives 4 times more CTR than the other – and I am in the process of finding out why.
I am also following your advice about posting in bulletin boards – though this is more of a SEO strategy.
Thanks for the ebooks links! I will be bookmarking your site and recommending your information to my friends as well.
Cheers!
Phil,
I’m glad I was able to exceed your expectations with my response.
Thank you for the kind words. Please let me know how your testing works out and if you discover any helpful techniques or software along the way.
Good luck!