I'm playing around with some projects and would appreciate feedback as I go. Before I get into it, I want to make a few things clear: 1) I won't be posting the domains I'm using. The main reason is I don't want to dilute the stats, which would happen if people started going to the specific domain name. 2) I'm not going to be 100% transparant in this. I will give out what information I can that doesn't directly identify the specific sites that I own. I will try to post detailed sale stats as I go (some programs have problems with this though, I won't violate any affiliate program terms). 3) I'm not going to be spamming some kind of BS digital product at all in this thread. I'd like this thread to serve more as an information and help thread rather than a 'buy my bs ebook thread'. 4) I will try to keep this thread alive, but if it doesn't generate any interest/replies over time then I'll just let it die. This is just going to be several experiments that show their results. If any of them work and make money, cool. If not, no big deal as I'm not investing money into this, I'm only using free traffic methods. With that being said...here's what I've started with. Project #1 Niche: Very competitive, I'm not saying what it is right now but just assume it's extremely competitive. Concept: Free Traffic Sources => Redirect => Merchant Site The goal of this project was just to see the effect of article marketing and clickbank. After a bumpy start, I had 50 articles posted to ArticlesBase.com. If somebody clicks a link in the article, they go to a domain I own which then bounces them to a clickbank product. When they hit my domain I've put in some special code to track their stats and generate a unique tracking ID based on their referrering URL and fire them off to clickbank with a tracking ID for the specific URL they came from). So in the chart below you'd see a number for each tracking id. Each of those numbers corresponds to a specific referring URL (the different articles that I posted). One of the id's is blurred out as it reveals the domain name I'm doing this on, which is the default tracking ID that gets assigned (I use it for testing purposes). I'm not giving out the domain name as I don't want to flood it with requests which would dilute the stats and make it harder to analyze. As you can see, some articles did extremely well (i.e. 3, 4, 16, 15), and the rest did very poorly, 1-2 clicks each so far. With the simple tracking system I built, I can lookup tracking ID #3 in my database and identify exactly which article was the source so I can try to duplicate it's success in the future if it converts sales. There's 21 different tracking ID's that have been recorded so far. 2 of those are generic ("Not Set" and the blurred out one). So that's 19/50 articles that have generated at least 1 hop so far. You can see 162 hops since I started this, no conversions. I'm assuming this is mostly due to Black Friday and how it always screws ecommerce. The company I work for got nailed really hard last week, so I don't feel too bad that this little experiment didn't work great yet. EDIT: After I posted this I added 31 new articles to ArticlesBase. Will post the results in a few days. Project #2 Niche: Weight Loss (yeah...that's only a tiny bit competitive). Concept: Free Traffic Sources => Landing Page => Merchant Site This project is going to be ready soon. Same idea as the first project above except it will have a landing page in-between the article site and the merchant site. I'll post more on this when it's actually ready to go (hopefully shortly). If anybody has suggestions I'd be happy to hear them. I do have a few other little experiments I'm setting up that I'll be launching and will try to keep this thread alive for now, but I would appreciate constructive feedback as I go.
Project #1 is using articlesbase, which is bum marketing. Project #2 will start with that, but will expand into other areas shortly after launch.
conversions are what matters. I can drive hundreds of hops... in a day with one simple trick. But the volume doesn't convert as well as a few quality links. Hops are just traffic until those magic dollar signs light up. Spend some time figuring out how to convert what you are doing before you try and scale or replicate it.
So good news and bad news. Yesterday I posted another 30 or so articles to articlesbase for Project #1, giving it a total of 82 articles on that site. Yay me. Now the bad news...right after I started posting them some kind of bot seemed to crawl articles base and then proceeded to hit my site about 700 times. I can tell it was automated because at one point I was getting a hit every 60 seconds precisely (this is why it's important to have some kind of tracking program in place so you can see what the hell is going on, the reports that clickbank gives you are extremely limited in figuring out problems). You can see the results of this bot here: That was extremely distressing when I checked my stats, but there's nothing I could do about it. But I did realize I don't have any kind of error checking and I need more data on every person that hits the redirect site. Right now it tracks the following for everybody that comes to the domain: -Timestamp (the date/time they hit my domain) -Referring URL (where they came from) -Page Requested (the exact url they requested from my domain) -Redirected To (where my script bounced them to and what tracking ID it assigned to them when they went to clickbank. At the time of writing this post my script has 88 different tracking ID's setup. 82 from the articles, 6 from miscellaneous sources and me testing the system as well as type-in traffic). After looking at hundreds of hits coming in without identifying who these clicks were, I've added 2 new columns to the table that stores all this information: -IP Address (so I can tell if it's the same computer if I see hundreds of hits again) -User Agent (tells you what browser the computer is using, or whether it's a search engine spider). I'm going to let this project site for a day or two as the traffic has gone back to normal and I'd like to see how the infusion of the new articles has done. Now that I've got IP and User Agent tracking, I can identify any other stupid bots that hit the site and send that traffic somewhere else instead (I love PHP, it's amazing what you can do with it). So if I see another stupid traffic spike I can redirect those bots to some dump site (maybe a porn site? lol). I'm also contemplating switching the redirect from PHP to Javascript. The reason being that PHP renders instantly before the browser does, so it doesn't register any traffic/hits in the server logs. Whereas Javascript renders with the browser, so using a JS redirect will enable the server to track information as well as the tracking system I built. The downside it that it's much slower and prone to error, which I want to avoid. Any thoughts on this? On a positive note, somebody hit the order page finally (that's the page you go to when you click the 'Buy this Product' button on the merchant site, it's where you make your payment). So that's a step in the right direction...a very small step lol. Project #2 - No progress in the last 24 hours. I'm probably going to work on this site a bit today, but I don't expect it to be online for at least a few more days.
Thursday, Dec 3/09 Update Project #1 175 hops from articles to the merchant site yesterday. I've been checking the log system that I built and I can see that several of them are from Wordpress sites. People have been taking the articles and posting them on their wordpress blogs, and since they include the link in them wordpress has been pinging my site. No biggie. I've also noticed way more legit clicks to the merchant site with the batch of 30 articles I did yesterday. I'm guessing people just liked the content more, I wrote them in a different style and they seem to be getting more attention. I'm planning to let this sit for a few days and will submit more articles possibly over the weekend. If I don't see any sales come in by early next week I'm going to try changing the merchant program that I'm sending the clicks to (which takes about 5 seconds with that code I've done). Project #2 I haven't posted much on this project except that it's going to be in the weight loss niche and will use article marketing, but it's going to have a landing page on my domain instead of a simple redirect. The main reason for this is to test which is more effective (redirects or having a landing page that presells the products). It will have the added bonus of appearing in the search engines and getting organic traffic since there will actually be a website, not just a redirecting domain. After some keyword research I found a really good domain name. It looks like xxxxx-xxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx.info. Yes it's very long winded, but it's very keyword friendly and if you search for the 4 terms in a keyword research tool it actually says that phrase generates over 4,000 searches/day according to Aaron Wall's keyword tool (one of the best free keyword tools). "weight loss" is included in the phrase, which itself gets a massive search volume but I'll never be able to compete for that term. As a bonus, I searched for the specific term on Google and there is very little competition, so I don't see it being overly difficult to rank for it There's also dozens of variations of the phrase that I'm going to chase after. I spent some time searching for a template this morning and didn't have much luck. I originally looked for a nice weight loss wordpress template, but couldn't find anything decent. There were 2 that actually peaked my interest, but one of them isn't downloadable (the site offering it is offline), and the other one has a corrupted zip file when you download it. So for now those are no-go. So I turned to a few of the affiliate networks that I'm on. Some independent networks provide their affiliates with templates. I'm a member of MoreNiche, which has a few interesting weight loss templates. After playing around with one in particular I'm confident it will work, but I have to modify the hell out of it so it won't suffer from the duplicate content penalty as hundreds of sites use the template. This template in particular also has the advantage of offering a few nicely written product reviews for their weight loss products already, I just need to put in my affiliate code and it will work properly. I'll post more tomorrow, hopefully I have part of the weight loss site built.