Google Toolbar PageRank Update in Progress

April 30, 2008 | 19 Comments

Looks like it is that time again… Google is updating the toolbar PageRank! I saw it first VERY late last night over at Courtney Tuttles blog. Court’s site is another very good source of reading when you want to break into earning good money on the Internet.

If this is like any other PR update, it will likely be a 24-36 hour process of seeing some pages change immediately and others over the course of a day or two. Don’t make the mistake of checking ONLY your main page, check some of your deeper pages like your sitemap and any other pages you have linked into for ranking.

A few notables of my own thus far:

• This site gained to PR3 on the home page
• The HitMD .com Hit Doctor Resource Directory went from PR0 to PR3 
• Several of my Build a Niche Store sites gained PR, including one of the newest ones, Buy Cabinets, coming out as a PR2 in less than 60 days!

PR is only one small factor, but it seems to carry so much weight in the world of optimization! Congrats to all who gained!

Did you have any notable gains? If so, post them in the comments… lets have a look!

Mark

Popularity: 11% [?]

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When to Turn a Weak Affiliate Site into an Authority Site

April 29, 2008 | 11 Comments

In yesterday’s post about dumping some of my BANS sites, I purposely left out the complete opposite aspect of your Build a Niche Store efforts. You have to remember I am not a “visitors per day” person, but instead, I look at the pageviews/visitor as a better picture of how effective a site is working for me. For example, if I see 100 daily visitors and only 110 pageviews, that tells me real quick that these visitors are either not finding what they want, or they don’t like the site and what it has to offer! On the other hand, if the same 100 visitors return 700 pageviews, that tells me the site is not properly setup to get the visitor/cookie passed to eBay and they are browsing too much! My own preference lies somewhere in the middle… 2.5-5 pageviews per visitor is right in my sweet spot! Looking at the basic site metrics in AWStats brings up the next important question…

When Should You Take your BANS Site to the Next Level?

Let’s face it… most of us do not care about repeat visitors when we launch our niche stores. Our goal is, and always has been, to attract a search engine visitor… shake their hand and show them where they can find the item they are looking for, send them to eBay, and forget about them. Truly a middleman! I see several sites out there using social bookmarking code and a few other methods to attract repeat visitors, but what if… what if you found your niche was popular enough to turn into an authority site?  

I’m sure most of you are asking yourself… well Mark, what ISthe next level, I thought a BANS site was just an affiliate site I could build, optimize and walk away from?! Well, essentially it is… and before you decide to try and take it farther, you need to know that it also requires a bit more of your time, but the rewards will be five-fold in the longrun as your basic Build a Niche Store website makes the transition from a weak affiliate site to an authority site!

Since this is the first group of sites I am going to take to the next level, I want to outline my determining metrics and explain why. In tomorrows post, I will tell you all the changes I am going to make to those sites in order to get more “Targeted, Converting, Traffic”. It may have only taken 5-10 hours to develop the original niche store, but the next step will likely take a bit more!

1. Site is MORE than 6 Months Old!
   This is important! If you take a newer site (less than 6 months old) and start building additions onto it, you really don’t have a “feel” for the market yet! I have had several stores that came out of the box like a freight train, only to fizzle out after 45-60 days and never really come back like it did in the beginning. My experiment on the BANS/Blog fine-designer-shoes .com site is an example of trying to jump right into a very competitive market and avoid the fizzle… so far, so good with the site, but it is still less than 2 months old!
2. Site receives MORE than 100 daily visitors and 250 daily page views!
   I know, it does not sound like a large number, in fact its not! For an affiliate site that you only have 5-10 hours of work into though, it is substantial when you consider ALL traffic is search engine generated!
3. Site is generating REVENUE TRAFFIC regularly!
   This is a given… if a site is not sending clicks and buyers over to the EPN tracking, why bother spending more time on it until it does? Just like the freight train / fizzle example above, I have had a few BANS sites that sent considerable traffic but still lacked revenue clicks. Before I spend more time getting more general traffic, I need to revise the site to get more converting traffic! This usually means narrowing the niche to a tighter focus first. Give the existing visitors exactly what they are looking for and get them to the checkout first! Once you increase the conversion rate, then you can increase the visitors!
4. Focus on higher Average Selling Price stores first!
   Again, this is one of those things that we don’t always think about! Like many of you, I have several stores that only generate .50 cents of affiliate commission per sale. The WebKinz site is a very good example of a busy site, hardly worth promoting further! The site gets about 250-300 daily visitors, 800-1200 daily pageviews AND generates daily revenue 99% of the time. Some days, it will show 15-20 sales per day, but the total earnings from the site are still less than $15.00 for that busy day! On the other hand… I have a few stores in a very focused an unpopular niche market that each generate about 100-150 daily unique visitors, 300-500 page views and only 3-4 sales per week. The difference is that these sites average $40-$60 in commission on every sale! Those are the types of sites you want to build more to attract a higher volume of targeted visitors! I know someone will ask what the niche markets are… and without coming out and saying it, I will just say… focus on things you would NEVER consider buying online! (I’m not talking about cars either!) You would be shockingly surprised at the things people will spend $5000+ on through eBay!
5. KeyPhrases Outnumber your KeyWords in awstats!
   This is one metric I have talked very little about, but provides one of the best indicators on how focused your Build a Niche Store website is! For example, if you look at your awstats and see that there are 50 keyphrases (left side) that generated visitors based on 250 keywords, (right side) it is pretty safe to assume your site has a very broad focus, and may be delivering unrelated traffic! I like to see these numbers very closely related or have the phrases outnumber the words! One of my most popular sites has a total of 1583 phrases on only 810 words! The main 4-word target phrase of the site has generated more than 1200 visitors alone! On the other hand, I have another site in a very broad market, that has 177 phrases on more than 1000 keyword combinations, which tells me the target phrases are too loosely put together. To correct this, I will take the top 10 WORDS and start building demand phrases out of them to increase my long tail traffic.

Looking at the 5 metrics above, I have a way to accurately measure my efforts to this point with a niche store. I know it has Aged beyond the Google age filter (more than 6 months old) and come out with a steady flow of visitors. (More than 100 visitors) I also know that the visitors coming to the site are actually interested in buying (mid-range number of pageviews and sending clicks to eBay) and most importantly, when they get to eBay, they are buying! Not only are they buying, they are generating higher amounts of revenue from my referral (higher average selling price) and most of them, found the exact items I created this site for! (High number of Targeted keyPhrases)

Now that I know which sites to target for further growth, tomorrow - I will outline a few simple steps you can take to attract more visitors! Between both Kim’s and my own sites, only about 15-20 (about 10-15% of our total store inventory)  are worthy of taking this next step! How many sites do you own that are worth stepping up?

Popularity: 9% [?]

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Back with a Vengence - Time for a Niche Dump!

April 28, 2008 | 11 Comments

After a much needed week away from working… I have made it back with a huge push to get some work done again! One of the hardest decisions I made over the past week, is to dump many of the non-performing niche stores I have, so I can focus more on the ones that ARE producing results!

Just like the trial and errors of developing categories for niche sites, there comes a point when you decide which categories to remain focused on and which ones to just let stay the course and die a slow painful death, with no further promotion. Whenever I look at one of my Build a Niche Store sites, I go through the logs and see which of the categories are producing the best results. In most cases, it is the old 80/20 rule… 80% of my income comes from 20% of my sites! This is definitely the case with many niche stores and the entire catalog of niche sites Kim and I have.

So, now comes the hard part… which metrics am I going to use to determine the winners and losers of my attention? Its actually pretty easy!

1. Is the site more than 6 months old (Yes/No)
   If yes, go to next question - If no, skip this site and revisit the dump rules next month!
2. Has the site paid for the domain name and any promotion (Yes/No)
   If yes, leave it alone and let it run - If no, move to dump review!
3. Did I make the site Unique (Yes/No)
   If yes, prepare for sale - if no, start over with site optimization
4. Can the Niche Site do BETTER with the addition of a Blog (Yes/No)
   If yes, add it and autopost content, if no… dump it!

Here’s a couple examples… www.Wifi30.com The site is only 3-4 months old. It was launched and walked away from completely. I mean, I never even followed my first rule of development in making the site unique. (See, I can be just as guilty as everyone else developing niche websites) The domain name is great and one of the up and coming terms that will gain buzz over the next year or so as wifi at the pole becomes more widespread and popular… I stumbled onto the term (wifi 3 point 0) when I was in the airport flying home from my visits to my dad in January (along with several others) and regged it as soon as I got in front of a PC. My decision with this site is to finish the EPN update and spend a few hours taking it to the first level of development, unique categories. In 3-6 months, I will revisit the dump rules again on this site and decide whether to keep or toss at that time.

Next on my dump list is a site that actually did VERY well early on, but has really just fallen off the face of the earth! www.ColonFit.comactually did very well during the first 2-3 months of its existence. It earned the cost of the domain name and directory submission within the first 30 days and the adsense clicks on the site, when actually clicked on, COULD produce fairly high EPC due to the topic. The site has been active since last September and is well indexed with a pagerank of 2 in the Google toolbar. My decision with this site is to add an autocontent blog (aka Splog or spam-blog) and spend another month or two seeing if I can turn it around again.

The two sites listed above are just a very small example of MANY sites I found during my EPN updates. In total, I figure I have about 25-30 sites that will be listed for sale over at eBay for the domain name itself. If they sell… great, if not… I just won’t renew them.

Do you have a strategy for determine which of your sites are keepers and which are just taking up server space?

Mark

Popularity: 9% [?]

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Thoughts on the EPN…so far…

April 27, 2008 | 55 Comments

How’s everyone doing?  After what felt like a pretty long hiatus from BANS and the Niche Store Empire Series (due to my daughter being born), I feel like I’m getting back in the game a bit.  In actuality, it’s only been about a 2 week break!  I’ve put two more stores up in the past week…which is quite a bit for me since I like to take my time and put up quality rather than quantity.  Just trying to play catch up at this point!  Hopefully Mark won’t cut me from the Empire Series for my lack of progress. 

In any event, I thought I’d post this while Mark’s been away and see what the rest of you people think about the new EPN.  Good, Bad…ugly?

I haven’t been to the BANS forum in quite a while, so I decided to take a peek over there and there has been some discussion about the EPN and how people feel like “something’s up” with it because no one seems to have gotten any signups (ACRU) since the EPN took over. 

Personally, I thought the EPN would be great and that CJ was missing things that the EPN would pick up and give us credit for…hence, better commissions.  I have had the opposite happen….and that’s discouraging.

I have had ZERO signups since the EPN switch…and what’s worse is that my monthly commission is suffering also.  I started BANS in December 07…my commission for the month of January 08 was $385…February was $199 and March was over $400.

This month, I haven’t cracked $100 yet!  I was under the impression that BANS gradually gets better and it’s more of a “long haul” type of affiliate marketing.  I have checked all of my campID’s to make sure things are in place correctly.  They are, and I am getting clicks…but I have had ZERO sales for about 5 days now, when I was averaging AT LEAST a sale per day leading up to the EPN switch.

One more reason that I feel things aren’t right…my best site, just shot up to #3 on Google (page 1) for my main search term after hovering around page 4 or 5 for two months.  This site has made probably over half of my total commissions in 2008, but looks to be “struggling” to make sale with the EPN even though it’s gotten hundreds of hits this month.

I’m wondering what others are seeing in their EPN stats.  Am I just freaking out for no reason?  Has anyone seen any signups and gotten commission for them?

If you guys would post your feelings about the EPN so far, maybe we can all draw a conclusion about what’s going on…if anything.

Thanks,

Eric

Popularity: 13% [?]

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Add a ‘Contact Us’ Form to Your Site

April 25, 2008 | 14 Comments

Gosh, it’s quiet here without Mark. To help fill the void I decided to add this post.

To give your site more credibility you can add a ‘Contact Us’ form. You can read, ‘How to Add a ‘Contact Us’ Form to Your Site,’ located on my blog.

This mod is super easy to do (compared to other methods of adding a contact form), uses the email address you already entered in your site’s Admin, and helps protect you from having your email address harvested by spam collectors because it uses captcha.

Rochelle

Popularity: 9% [?]

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