Reading LogFiles and Adding New Content to your Niche Site

June 2, 2008 | 14 Comments

I recently had a few very good questions via email that deserve a post. Randy wanted to know:

Is there a Post for Understanding your LogFiles on an Affiliate Site?

… and Arthur asked:

How will I know when to Start Adding New Content and Make Changes to my Niche Website?

I have actually spent 2 days recording a screen capture for this post. I was unhappy with the results and deleted it, at least 5 times! Instead, I am going to write it all out… there is a link to the unedited video at the bottom of this post as well.

How can I Understand my AWStats Logfiles?

I tend to stick with AWStats for all of my references to the logfiles. The main reason for this is because EVERYONE has AWStats with their hosting package. There are several others, including the very popular Google Analytics, but even on my own sites… I do not use GA until the site has proven it can and will deliver steady traffic. IF you use Google Adwords to drive traffic to your site, well, that’s another story and you should use the advanced features of Analytics to help you determine the effectiveness of your campaigns.

One of my previous posts about Understanding AWStats and the Needs of your Visitors has quite a bit of info on how to read your logs very quickly to determine how a site is performing.

When do I Start Adding New Content to my Niche Website?
(All images are from 3 of my own, some neglected, niche sites)

Basically… Always! There is never a bad time to add new content to your niche website! In fact, regardless of the amount of traffic the site is seeing, you should always have a plan to add more content to your site!

In the image to the left, you can see a site that truly sucks! It rarely gets more than 1 visitor a day and honestly, I always feel like it is a waste of my time to do anything to these low traffic sites!

The truth however is that a site like this will NEVER grow if I dont do something about it myself! The website does not know it sucks… the pages dont know they stink… but the the search engines sure do know it, and its really my own fault!

If you have a site more than 90 days old, getting less than 15 visitors each day… forget about adding NEW content, focus on optimizing what you have already started!

For my own sites, I use the number of visitors as a guide to how often I should make changes! You have all heard me say this 1000 times… build it, optimize it, walk away from it! Revisit the site several days later and see what it is doing… are the spiders coming? Is it being indexed? If yes… then close the browser and move on to another project until it is 30 days old!

If you return in 30 days and your visitor stats look like those above, its time to revisit your WordTracker keyword researchand figure out what went wrong! If however you are seeing a steady flow or even trickle of 25-50 visitors a day… its time to start listening to what they want and begin adding new content!

So… you went into your logfiles and you found that 25-50 (+/-) visitors are coming steadily every day! First and foremost, congrats!! Your site is growing and gaining popularity! Whether this happens at day 30 or day 180, seeing a steady flow of traffic is always good and the reason you started doing this in the first place!!

That being said… having a site that is 6 months old and seeing 25-50 daily visitors is nothing to be TOO happy about! Sorry… its just the truth. If you had done your research effectively, made changes every month and fed the demands of your existing visitors, you should be seeing a considerable amount of traffic within the first 6 months! The only real exception to this is if you are in the rare niche market that only predicts a few searches each day.

The stats above are actually from the fine-designer-shoes site, which is about 45 days old. I have used a different strategy on this site from the blog to inbound links, and I am curious as to whether the “Sandbox” will have an effect or not…

If your Site has 25-50 visitors each day - Add 2+ NEW pages each month

The image on the left is another niche site, but as you can see… there is an average of about 125-150 daily visitors coming to the site. The domain and site have been live for about 3-4 months and it is a solid performer with clicks/conversions in the EPN.

Is it just insane busy? No…. BUT, it has steadily grown from 0 visitors on launch, to more than 100/ day in less than 5 months! While 125-150 is still not going to allow me to retire at 45 (my longtime goal) it does show the promise in a site that makes me want to invest more than just 1 hour a month!

On a site like this, I will actually go in and add 1-2 new pages every week, based on existing search engine traffic.

If your Site has 100-200 Daily Visitors - Add 1-2 NEW Pages EVERY WEEK!

How Can I Determine the Best Content to Add?

OK, I’m now a victim of my own posts! LOL I know I recorded a video in the past on one of my sites, GetARacecar. I talked about looking through your stats and capitalizing on existing terms bringing traffic, to make new terms. In that post, I referred to “Used race cars”, which at the time, I ranked #92 for the term. Since that post (45-60 days ago) the site now ranks #4 in G! Anyhow… In the video, (which I cannot locate) I talked about one of the most important sections of your logfiles… the search keyword / phrase section.

Ultimately, the site for this image is not doing that well overall. The domain is 4 years old… and has been a BANS store for about 7 months. Currently, it gets about 50-75 daily visitors… and needs to be worked on!

When I view the keywords/phrases portion of AWStats to locate some easy targets, I can determine that there are some words that are well saturated throughout the site already and what I need to focus on now are some of the longer tailed phrases that will bring more visitors/buyers!

“General Terms = General Traffic”

In this case… I see the keywords: ”wholesale, clothing, closeout, apparel, & merchandise” are fairly well saturated and come up very often in the search PHRASES on the left side of the image. “Mens & Hats” on the other hand, while high on the words list, are nowhere on the top 10 phrase list! Time to head to wordtracker!

In wordtracker… I will join the very common saturated words with the words “hat” and “mens”, to find some longer tailed keyphrases and add 3-5 pages to the site in less than 30 minutes! Lets walk through it real quick:

1. Go to your Wordtracker keyword research account.
2. Type the following terms into the seed box:
   1. mens clothing
   2. mens wholesale
   3. mens closeout
   4. mens apparel
   5. wholesale hat
   6. closeout hat
3. Click on Research, then Click on evaluate.
4. Delete EVERY Term with less than KEI of 1.0, and less than 10 daily predicted searches.
5. Sort the terms by Google KEI and the BEST target phrases will be listed at the top of the page.

What we have done, is VERY QUICKLY found a list of long tail phrases that should be easy picking for quick rankings and visitors! Once the KEI sorted, we have the following list of terms:

From here  - I Login to my Niche site and added the three new main store categories (pages) listed above in yellow. If I really want to get them indexed quickly, I will talk about the three new categories: Carhartt Mens Clothing, Wholesale Men’s Cologne and Camo Hats Wholesale in a post like this. :-)

In less than 30 minutes, I have 3 new categories that should be easy to rank for and bring a fair number of visitors for each. I will return to this same site next week and continue my expansion of the categories based on the same methods.

Lets revisit this post in a few weeks to see how this went… Incidentally, if you STILL want to watch the 15 minute, unedited video… its right here!

Mark

Popularity: 8% [?]

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Build a Niche Store Empire - Marks Site Performance

March 16, 2008 | Leave a Comment

I have decided to dedicate a Niche Store Performance category that will track the performance of my niche stores used in this series. The listing below represents a time-line of benchmarks and results.

Niche Site 1 Hybrid Golf Clubs For Sale Online (Hybrid Golf Sitemap)
Date of first inbound link: 02/23/2008
Date of last Performance Update: 03/16/2008 Read more

Popularity: 14% [?]

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Sean’s Performace - Update 1

March 15, 2008 | 1 Comment

This is an update to my performance in this workshop series.  I’ve been having issues with my PPC campaigns and performance lately (that’s a whole series by itself), so I wanted to check in and post my new stores and an update to those prior stores.  It has been about a month now since I created my first 2 sites.  I have created 2 more websites for this series.  All of these sites, except for Overstock Jewellery (V3) were built on V2.

Side Note:  Are we using V3 or V2 stores going forth?

#3  Fashion Neckties 

Developed:  2/24/08

Cost: $7-8 for the domain name 

Revenue since inception: $ 1.86 = 2 sales

Clicks:  12 

Promotion:  Submitted to SE’s and added to about 5 directories.  I have this site scheduled to be submitted to more directories, which I have now scheduled a day each week to do nothing but directory submissions and link exchanges. 

#4 Overstock Jewellery  (Overstock Jewelry) 

Developed:  3/12/2008 with BansV3.0

Cost: $7-8 for the domain name 2 months ago.

Revenue:  0 = site is new

Received about 15 visits a month parked, so I decided to develop the name.I am still working on the product categories for this site. 

Update on my prior 2 sites below since my first post (about a months worth of stats - time flies when your having fun).  BassBoatAuctions is a new registration, JeepBumper was an expired domain name. 

Niche 2

Bass Boat Auctions

Revenue:  $ 26.80

Clicks:  680

Before all I did was submit BassBoatAuctions to the SE’s.  This past week I have submitted it to a few directories and will continue to submit to a few directories each week.  One side note about this niche – I thought it would be competitive because of the KEI.  Surprisingly, it has performed quite well in one month’s time. 

Niche 1

Jeep Bumper

Revenue:  $ 11.99

Clicks:  125

Not bad, but I believe that I should bring in more keywords and increase the sites popularity with some promotion and link building.

Popularity: 4% [?]

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Rochelle’s newest site statistics

February 29, 2008 | 10 Comments

Niche Site 4 Tools For Ghost Hunters (Sitemap)
(Dynamic Sitemap)

Date of first inbound link: None yet

Pages indexed in Google: (as of 02/29/2008) 0

Created BANS site on 02/26/2008

Submitted dynamic sitemap to Google’s WebMaster Tools on 02/28/2008

Costs: $7.15 total

$7.15 +/- domain name at GoDaddy

Earnings: $0 total (As of 02/29/2008)

Timeline: First spider on 02/28/2008

Robots/Spiders visitors (Top 25)   -   Full list   -   Last visit
1 different robots* Hits Bandwidth Last visit Googlebot 4+1 7.19 KB 28 Feb 2008 - 14:33

Rochelle

Popularity: 6% [?]

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Niche Store Performance - Kim’s Sites

February 28, 2008 | 2 Comments

Well, I’ve jumped all over the place this week because I get bored doing too much of one thing - I haven’t concentrated on one site at a time (like Mark said to do) OOPS!  But…I have put up 7 sites this week with main categories and pages, keywords, etc. I have not put much work into the content or articles - that is one of my goals today.

Niche Site 1: Buy Crib Bedding 

Cost:  $7.50 for domain name; $15 for inbound links

Earnings: 

Submitted to: USFreeAds, Directory Submitter and paid someone $15 for links (yesterday)

I’ll get the robots.txt file done today. Read more

Popularity: 6% [?]

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