Up to now, we’ve done, and are still doing, a bunch of testing to tell us if we have a “phrase that pays”.
We’re measuring whether our traffic is actually there, and whether people are actually pulling out their wallets and making a purchase.
So, the game plan is to measure our traffic and conversion rates using tools like StatCounter or Google Analytics (traffic) and then the affiliate products to measure conversion (clicks vs clicks that turn into sales). You can’t manage what you don’t measure, so these measurements are important. Suggested to keep weekly totals in a spreadsheet for each phrase.
Traffic: the magic number is out of every 200 or so unique visits to your sales page, you will get 1 sale. Where the rubber meets the road is how long is it taking you to get 200 unique visits to your blog page, and then 200 clicks through to your product affiliate page. Then you’ll make one sale, worst case.
If you have a great phrase you’ll make more sales than that. People are looking for the reason of the exact phrase match search. Give them what they’re looking for, and you’ll make sales. Mislead them, and you will annoy them. They won’t be back.
Once you find a phrase with great traffic in a small niche and see what the conversion is, then start clustering sites around that product page and putting links back to your main blog page as well. The more back links to your page, the higher your page rank will end up being, but the back links have to grow naturally. Meaning, don’t go out and create 20 other pages today that point back to your blog. Create one or two a day.
“Cluster” around your main page that is working. You will eventually want to provide your own product. You don’t always want to make a % of someone else’s sales. Eventually, you want all the sales for yourself, and that means developing a product, which we’ll discuss later.
1. Market research – do it, it works
2. Traffic – measure it. Are you getting 200+ visits over a certain number of days consistently? Are you getting at least 50 visits per day? Remember, only the #1 ranked site on Google Trends is the one getting the GTrends and Wordtracker traffic. If you’re not #1, you’re getting proportionally less traffic per day, so be sure you have the tracking code installed and are measuring traffic carefully.
Once you hit 200 visits, are people buying at least 1 time? Yes, keep going. No, move on to another phrase and be thankful you didn’t spend anything but time on the whole thing.
If you are selling, then it will become time to develop your own product. Affiliates make a max of 50% of the sales price, and usually less than that. But keep using the affiliate until you do product research and develop the right one for your niche. Affiliate product money is still an income.
Have 20 phrases making you $10/day and you gross $6000/month. The more phrases the more income streams you’ll have. How much you’ll increase earnings on a given phrase will depend on further development of that phrase – content, products, improved traffic.
Action List:
- 3 more pieces of content for each phrase
- Add at least one more piece of internet real estate to your phrase and point it both to your blog and to your affiliate product. Squidoo and Hubpages come to mind immediately. (See Ed’s pdf presentation slides on the 30DC training site).
- Use social bookmarking responsibly. Don’t bookmark to every social site. Bookmark only to those sites where your content will add value. Don’t bookmark TV shows on a social site that caters mostly to web developers, for example.
