Primary Phrase
I put one niche site up 8 days after day 6 (on day 14). The first full day of Analytics data was August 15. Today is August 23, so I have data up through August 22. 22-15=7. I have 7 days of data.
The Day 18 presentation was about looking carefully at your data, doing some analysis and deciding whether to continue on with your phrase or find a new one. Everyone on track with this year’s challenge put their sites up on Day 6 and their first full day of data collection was on day 7.
First: you need to track your data for 10 days before you make a decision, assuming you’re getting some reasonable amount of daily traffic, enough so you’ll have 200 unique visitors in a 10-day period of time. The magic number is 200 because even with the worst statistics, as long as you’re doing everything else right, you should be able to make one sale with every 200 unique visitors.
If you’re not making a sale every 200 unique visitors, it’s time to test a different product. If you test two products that should be attractive but no one is buying, you may have a niche of free tire kickers where nobody expects to have to pay for anything in that niche. That’s a big sign to find another niche. But I don’t have enough information to tell me that yet. Market Samurai and Google Adwords are telling me this won’t be the case also.
I currently have 7 days of Analytics data. I have 217 total visits and 189 unique visits to my niche site. By the time I have 10 full days of data I will have at least 200 unique visitors to my site. I have 189/7 = 27 unique visitors per day. Not bad considering my SERP:
- broad match SERP (Google) is #147 (page 15 on a Google search; stinkburger!)
- phrase match SERP (Google) is #78/31,600 (page 8 on a Google search; stinks less but still low)
My positions and traffic are pretty good for the competition I’m facing in phrase match searches. It’s showing the results Market Samurai and Google Keyword tool told me I should be seeing.
So if I’m number 78 in the SERP, where is my traffic coming from? Web 2.0 sites. I’ve been diligent about publishing new content, I’ve created a Squidoo Lens, submitted an article to Ezine, and I’ve been diligently bookmarking my posts. My Ezine article hasn’t been published yet and I put up a Hubpage in the last 10 minutes. That will help somewhat with SERP, but I don’t know how fast.
I have not made a sale yet. Even though I don’t quite have 200 unique visitors, I’m switching out my Amazon test product. At 189 unique visitors I have 76 clicks through to my product, or a CTR of 40%. That’s really high to not make a sale. The market may be more attracted to the second product I picked. I’m switching out my product now. I would really be shocked if out of 11 more people, somebody bought my current product. I’m not taking it off my site, but I am moving it down “below the fold”.
My next dilemma is I can’t seem to decide if I want to risk the money on an Adwords campaign. There is a lot of competition in Adwords for this phrase, but only one other Adwords marketer is using my exact keyword phrase, so I may be able to push a bunch of the other guys out by optimizing my Adwords campaign for my phrase and not have to spend much money to do it. I’ll make that decision after I see my traffic tomorrow.
Phrase Two
Just prior to the start of the TDC this year I put up a niche site I had researched back in May using the Wordtracker/GTrends tool from last year. I put that site up on July 23 and after a month, I have 153 unique visitors. That’s only 5 unique visitors per day. Here are my stats:
- broad match SERP (Google) is #14 (good position, page 2)
- phrase match SERP (Google) is #11/8630 (should be on page 1, but I haven’t been adding content and diligently social bookmarking it so that may be the reason)
When I repeated the research for this phrase in Market Samurai and using Adwords and Google’s Keyword tool, I didn’t find the same results at all. Wordtracker/GTrends was the best we had last year, but it wasn’t good enough. My research using this year’s tools showed what my data is showing me. This phrase isn’t that good, there isn’t enough traffic, but an Adwords campaign may bring in some visitors since there isn’t much competition for my phrase.
If I can make a sale every other month, it would bring in considerable money.
