I have just analysed the performance on 17 of my Thirty Day Challenge-style microniche sites to see how the actual traffic stacks up against the estimated traffic that I got from Market Samurai or the Google keyword tool (it’s all Google data anyway).  I had read that often the actual traffic is less than the estimates, and from my analysis, it seems so.

Before looking at the results, I want to clarify that I calculated MY traffic estimates by starting with the actual number of unique visitors now, taking into account the site’s current ranking for its keyword, and thereby estimating how much traffic the site would get at the ranking that I reckon I could achieve (usually no. 1).  This adjustment is made by using the well-known table that I believe came from AOL in 2006 (it seems we still have nothing better!)  that shows what percentage of traffic a site is likely to get in each of the top 10 slots in Google:

This means for example that if I have a site that’s getting 50 unique visitors at no. 2, I can hope for, say, 175 when it gets to no. 1.

So, based on the numbers, adjusted using this table, I reached the following rather interesting conclusion:

On average, these 17 sites, ONCE THEY ARE RANKED AS PREDICTED, are estimated to get unique visitors for the main keyword equating to ONE THIRD of the exact match SEOT and ONE SIXTH of the phrase-matched SEOT shown in Market Samurai (whose numbers are in turn based on the Google Adwords tool).

Of course, 17 sites don’t make an in-depth study.  However, it’s based on real evidence and I will definitely be using this when it comes to estimating return on investment as part of the keyword research phase.  I’ll also recalculate the numbers each month to see how they change.

Well, I got a shock this morning when I tried to access the Google Keyword Tool from the Google KeywordToolbox, here:

http://www.googlekeywordtool.com/

because it’s all changed!

Google Keyword Tool Changes

It looks as if the local search numbers are now based on a 12-month average rather than the last month, and the whole GUI is all more slick than before.

You can also filter the results by categories.  Even down to product level if you like.  Could you do this before?  I certainly never did.   You can also limit the results to those that contain individual words from the keyword phrases.   Not only that, but there’s a handy link on each keyword to Google Insights for Search.  Now, maybe some of these features were in the old version, but I for one never saw them so either they are new or I’m only just noticing them now that they are “in your face” on the left of the screen.

All in all it looks great.  I am only hoping that everyone sees what I see and that this is not some sort of dream I had, because I had not read about it anywhere else.  Having said that, I’ve been off the keyword reaearch for a week or two.

One thing I haven’t got to the bottom of yet – and it could be important, is this sentence that appears just above the keyword list:

“Sign In with your AdWords login information to see the full set of ideas for this search”

I need to find out what more you get when logged into Adwords, or more to the point, what you DON’T get by NOT logging in…

Looking at my EzineArticles stats this morning, a flash of inspiration hit me.

I have submitted a lot of articles to EzineArticles now, but the success rate of people visiting them and clicking through to my sites varies a lot.  However, there is something of a pattern forming.

The first thing to say is that my rubbish articles do rubbish.  Few people read them, and virtually nobody clicks through to the underlying web site I am trying to draw attention to.  OK, fair enough.  I must not write rubbish.

It gets more interesting though..

The next class of articles are those that are what I would call self-contained, where you read it, and you have everything you came for.  A good example is the safety guide.  You know the thing “Steam Iron Dangers – Don’t Fall into These Traps”; or “Folding Snooker Table – Avoid These Hidden Hazards”.  The thing about these is that once a reader reaches the end, your invitation to “visit folding-snooker-table-today.com for more information and some amazing bargains” is pretty empty – because the reader found your article by searching for safety tips – probably.  He has all he needs thank you very much, and has no reason to visit your site.

This brings me to the third class of article.  This is the one I am aiming for from now on.  It’s the sort of article that’s a real “hook” or a “teaser”.  I have found that things like “Folding Snooker Table – A Beginner’s Guide” have worked well for me, assuming of course that the object in question is something that people are interested in.

The point is that this sort of article is giving people a start in the subject; giving them the information and confidence that they need before they can choose and buy a product that perhaps they have not bought before.  Having read such a “primer”, it’s a very natural step for the reader to capitalise on this new-found confidence and click on the link to see some examples of the product on your niche site.

In a nutshell, it’s about sowing seeds rather than giving a bouquet.  Seeds are a starting point; a bouquet is the end.

Oh dear.

Back in November I wrote a post entitled “I Really Don’t Know Life At All” – and since then I have received a lot of people here who are looking for the lyrics of this great song by Joni Mitchell, properly called “Both Sides, Now”.

So, if that’s what you’re here for – there’s a link to the lyrics below so you don’t feel cheated, but why not have a look around while you’re here?

I Really Don’t Know Life At All / Both Sides Now Lyrics

…to quote the Barbara Dickson song.

Well, to be honest, January was OK and February only brought a small dip in the TV sales, so can’t complain really. Total commission down to £68 from £73.

So, February was the first month of my self-imposed challenge to ramp up my Thirty Day Challenge-style web site production.  How did I do?  Well.  Pretty well, actually.  My target was 20 web sites in a month, and I did 19.  So that’s 19 on top of the, erm, one successful microniche site I had at the start of the month (we won’t mention the eight failed ones).  Of course, I also have the long-term project – the yet-to-rank-for-any-keyword, no-traffic travel niche site..

But I have more exciting things to report from February:

When I took my month-end look at sales and traffic, I found that of these 19 new sites, nine were already receiving some traffic.  More than this – of these nine, no fewer than FOUR sites had produced a sale – and this within a month of going live in each case.  On analysing the conversion ratios, all four sites have had around 50 unique visitors each, of which about 50% clicked on the affiliate link and one bought!  So that’s 1 in 50 visitors buying – and on each of four different sites.  I only hope that ratio continues!

So, I have to consider the first month of my “90 day project” as I’m calling it, pretty much a success.  I’ve made a slow start in March, with just one more site added so far and it’s already 3rd March, but I am committed to adding another 15 sites this month.

There are also other pressures coming into play now.  My other half has just come to the end of a temp job which was not even paying the bills as it was, but now there’s nothing coming in apart from the affiliate commission.  Let’s hope for more than February’s £68 in March then..

Well, I’ve been pretty busy lately.  In the last week of January I decided that I needed to really go for it; to just do more of everything in the same time – to ramp up my productivity, as you may have read in my last post.

The plan was to produce four microniche sites per week, each with six posts scheduled for release over a few weeks and also some web 2.0 articles to support the sites.  I am pleased to say that, give or take a few hours, I am on track so far, with 12 sites up and running since the start of the project three weeks ago.

It really IS difficult.  I read the other day how someone who shall remain nameless reckons you can get one of these sites up “in a couple of hours”.  Well, it takes me nine.  There’s keyword research (average two hours per site); product sourcing (30 mins); domain, hosting and Wordpress set-up (30 mins); content creation (four hours); social bookmarking and setup in Google tools (30 mins); and finally web 2.0 articles (2 hours).  Total: 9.5 hours.  So as you can see, doing four a week is hard work when I have to fit in all my other stuff.

The other thing is that I will have to wait and see what results I get.  I’m taking, broadly speaking, the Thirty Day Challenge approach to these sites – they are all on “test” to see if they are viable.  I will be somewhat gutted if I get to the end of the project and find I have only a small number of sites that “pass” the test and are worth continuing with.  It could take a few months to reach the decision point on all of them – we shall see.

Right, better get ready for site number 13.

Following a review over Christmas, I have decided that I will continue with my bigger, longer-term, niche travel site, as was planned all along, but that I will recognise it for what it is – i.e. longer term, and now concentrate on doing things that will get some cash in during the shorter term.

So how can I do it?  Well, my most successful site is my Thirty Day Challenge-style microniche site on TVs.  In December it earned about £55 I think it was, and looks to be doing similarly in January.  OK, I know it’s a seasonal one, but it proves that the methodology can work.

SO, I reckon that it’s worth some commitment from me to try to do the so-called “rinse and repeat” and ramp up the number of attempted microniche sites.  To this end, I have this week published four new sites, each with one post now live, and five more scheduled in Wordpress.  They also all have Ezine articles, Hubpage hubs and Squidoo lenses, and I’ve done some social bookmarking for each one too.

My plan is to publish four sites per week, for 13 weeks.  Judging by the workload this created last week, that is a hard target for me.  Hard, because I write quality, value-added content, and this schedule means I have to do it FAST.

The other difficult thing is that I have no clue whether the microniches I am trying will work.  From August to November, I built seven microniche sites, and only the one has “worked” so far.  I am very concerned that even if I somehow keep to my gruelling schedule over the next 13 weeks and produce 50 sites, only, say, five of them will “work”.  It makes my heart sink, that thought.  On the other hand, if I end up with, say, 20 successful sites out of the 50, I will be over the moon. So, I am applying the Thirty Day Challenge methodology with blind faith, suspending all doubts and giving it a proper test, with a decent volume of sites, to see where that takes me..

So far, week 1, four sites up.

You may not know this, but 10 days ago there was an almighty gas explosion in the town where I live, Shrewsbury in the UK.  A building was destroyed in the town centre, and several people were injured.

http://ijumped.net poppy

At the time, I was at home a few hundred yards away, and to cut a long story short, I was on the scene just after the emergency services arrived, with my trusty camera in hand, and got a few shots.  I posted these on my website as fast as I could, and I was indeed the first person to get any photos of any quality on the internet.  More to the point, I used my Twitter and Digg accounts to call attention to the photos.  Within minutes, my page was indexed and getting hits.

What I didn’t think about was the bandwidth that these full-size photos from my five mega-pixel camera would consume.  Within an hour I was up to 1,350 unique visitors and 2Gb of bandwidth, at which point the site was closed down!  Fortunately, I use a reseller account with tentahost.co.uk, and set my own limits on individual domains, so it was only my own limit that was exceeded, not the overall account.  Tentahost were great in helping me to sort it out.

The point of this post is to say that never before have I managed to get any meaningful attention from social networking sites, yet with this hot story, I got attention, and lots of it, almost immediately – and it felt sort of special.  I was even contacted by BBC news.  For a while, my web page was at number one, with the Digg submision and the Tweet also in the top five on Google for “Shrewsbury gas explosion”.  (Later, the BBC and Sky took over at the top!)

Unfortunately, as many people have mentioned is often the case, the traffic I got was not interested in buying anything from me or looking at my website, apart from the explosion photos.  I really am starting to wonder what the business value of sites like Twitter is, for me anyway.  After all, nobody using Twitter is looking for my products or services, and nobody is interested enough in my web sites to follow me, and why would they?  What can I say in 160 characters that’s of any use to someone booking a holiday or buying a TV?  If anyone has any ideas, I would be interested to hear them.

I’m still not sure how my one Digg submission and one Tweet caused my web page to be indexed within minutes, when normally it can take as long as a few days.

Meanwhile, I moved the photos over to Flickr and the traffic on my site is back to normal.  My only reminder of this episode is the big bump in the middle of the Google Analytics graph, as big as the one in the share price graph during the dotcom boom and bust!

Well, my income for November is in.  A grand total of £44.40.  It’s up a little on the previous month’s £39 and September’s £16, and is about 2.5% of what I need to pay my bills.

However, much of this month’s commission was down to one person who went on something of a demented spending spree on Amazon!

I had another little frustration this morning.  I set up an account at my.telegraph.co.uk yesterday and made the mistake of spending about 15 minutes setting up my little blog there and completing my profile.

I must have broken the terms and conditions, because this morning the account is suspended.  I had a link back to my website, and this must have been deemed too commercial.  It was in context, and the blog post with the link was alerting readers to a series of safety articles – something that added value in its own right and was not selling anything although it is on one of my commercial sites.

Who moderates these things?  My contribution was in no way spammy – any fool could see that.  Why delete the whole account?  Why not just remove the link or delete the post and send me an email?  Sometimes, it’s hard this business.  No harder than cold-calling in the offline world, though.  And I should know, because I spent a year doing that when I was in my 20s.

Right, thanks for lending me your ear while I had a moan.

Back to work..

Hello again

As you may know if you read this blog regularly, I am building a niche site about holidays in the sun.

When I started, the intention was to have categories under the main site that would be based around longer-tail keywords, because with the travel niche being so competitive in internet marketing, I realised I would have no chance on the more popular keywords such as “hotels in Spain”.

So, I picked a few keywords that looked less competitive.

The problem is that the training I got during the Thirty Day Challenge taught me how to evaluate keywords but did not take into account any regional targeting.  Trying to apply the same criteria to the UK market just does not work.  Whereas, for example, in the 30DC we are taught – go for a keyword with traffic at no. 1 of 80 a day or more, and phrase-matched competition of 30,000 or less – these criteria are not right for targeting the UK, and the problem I have is that I cannot find any information on what the UK criteria should be.  Maybe I should email Dan Raine in Manchester?

Meanwhile, until Dan Raine reads this or until I find the answer somewhere else, I just have to muddle through as best I can, testing this and that strategy and finding through my own expenditure of time and money what works and what doesn’t.

There must be many people new to Internet Marketing who are targeting the UK market who are in the same position – it would be good if there were a central resource for our experiences.  (Maybe there is – if you know of one, PLEASE let me know!) The problem with Internet Marketers as a group is that they are all so cagey about what they do, I mean exactly what they do, in case someone “steals” all their business or spams them up.  Or something.

Anyway, back to the long tail of travel.  In the travel industry, this means something like the process whereby suppliers bring an ever increasing choice of micro-niche holidays to the market, aimed at an ever-decreasing number of customers per product.  In Internet Marketing, long tail is similar, but based around keywords, using an ever-increasing number of micro-niche keywords, aimed at an ever-decreasing number of web page visitors per keyword.

As I understand it, the reasons we go for long tail keywords are:

• they are highly targeted to visitors who searched for something very specific, and are very likely to buy
• there is very little competition even in a competitive industry

The big problem of course is that you still need some minimum amount of traffic in order to get some sales.  evaluating that traffic is very difficult using the standard tools like Google’s Adwords Keyord tool or Search-based Keyword tool, because the numbers just are not there for the really low volume, focused keywords.  The only way I know of really assessing the traffic is either to make a test site (a la Thirty Day Challenge) and get it to number one and see for yourself what the traffic is like, or to do a short Adwords test.  The 30DC site build takes time – and if you are aiming at a low volume keyword, you could spend a couple of days on the site and all its initial promo only to find that there is no traffic.  Ever.  This has happened to me several times now.  So, I am moving towards using Adwords as a test as this costs less than £10 a time; usually less than £5; and saves about two days work.

So, my plan for the travel site was to build categories where I could go for longer tail keywords, yet have everything under the umbrella of a strongly-branded site, a site that in time would earn reputation and authority and where the sum of all its microniches would be greater than if they were all separate sites, thanks to the domain authority.  This was always the plan, but what has changed recently is that I have found a few travel affiliate blogs and had an interesting dialogue or two with some of the authors.  It seems that in travel, you basically have to go long tail – and then go looooonger.  It is just so competitive that you can ONLY go for the low traffic, long tail keywords.  Attacking “hotels in Majorca” will leave you, even after quite a lot of work, in a very long queue behind Expedia, TripAdvisor, Holiday Watchdog, Thomson, ulookubook.com, sunshine.co.uk, Alpharooms, Thomas Cook and the rest.  Because in travel, these big boys are on the ball when it comes to the internet.  It’s not like engineering components.

I am changing tack, therefore, to go even longer tail.  I am also thinking more laterally about the travel keywords – seeing what I can come up with that does not just include the destination in the keyword, but could be based around a specific attribute of travel, say based around  travel advice, travel tips, safety etc.  Whatever – it has to be long tail, and I think I will need to verify the traffic via Adwords, if I can.  As you can tell, I am learning as I go.

So why am I bothering with travel at all given that it’s so competitive?  Why not just go for low hanging fruit instead?  Well, I am INTERESTED in it for one.  Secondly, a customer is likely to generate at least £15 and as much as £100 in commission, so you don’t need as much traffic as if, say, you are selling DVDs (also ridiculously competitive – but without the commission levels – why would anyone do that?)  Mostly, though, it is the interest thing.  I have already spent too much time over the last few months trying desperately to inject humour into my writing about really dull topics, and I can do it, but it’s a killer.  Here’s an example:  Oil Filled Radiators.  See what I mean?  I tried..

So on I go with the travel niche.  I will keep on with the microniche sites too, but there are only so many hours in the day and the travel site, now at 50+ articles since starting on 1 Oct (and no traffic), takes a  lot of work!

***** If anyone reading this would like to offer advice to me and to others on succeeding in the travel niche, please leave a little comment.  Go on, do it now..