When to Turn a Weak Affiliate Site into an Authority Site

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?

Previously Published Articles You May Like to Read:

• Build a Niche Store Empire – Turn on Your Sitemap and Find a Few Links!
• Build an Authority Website Based on a Knowledgable Topic!
• Days 10 & 11 – Rewarding your Visitors with Authority Content!

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