Today I was checking my portfolio of niche sites to see how they were doing in the SERPs (search engine ranking pages) and much to my delight, quite a few new sites made it to the first page of Google. I now have 15 sites on page one, up from just 9 back on April 6, 2011. Oddly, I didn't do a thing to my sites between now and then, so I can only assume that the recent Google "Panda" update was actually good for niche sites with quality content. (all my niche sites are on exact match domains with 100% unique content). Off all of my sites, the one that really jumped off the page and grabbed my attention was site #3, WaystoBuildMuscle.net. Prior to today, this site was never ranked very well (it was 15th last week, and worse before that), but always got a lot of long tail traffic and Amazon affiliate sales. It was one of my earliest sites and I really didn't have a clue what I was doing back then. Apparently, patience can be key with some sites as I never would have guessed that site built to target a keyword with only 230 local exact searches per month (that it NEVER ranked for, until now) would ever get this much traffic (not that we are talking about a whole lot compared to many of my other sites) Traffic Stats As you can see from the analytics below, the recent move onto page 1 is not yet reflected in the traffic. Still it averages 36 visitors a day as it sits. I wonder what some more keywords and link building might do? Sales Stats As you can see from the report below, the sites earnings have been pretty pathetic. The problem is that the average sale is only about $16 worth of product. My Planned Experiment Now that I'm on page one I expect the traffic to increase (plus I think I might actually do some more link building again as I have not done a thing in quite some time) and given that this is a niche that there is some ClickBank products for, I think I'm going to set up an optin form, write a free giveaway, and then create a series of autoresponders to promote a product. To summarize, there are 4 steps to make this work: Choose the product you’ll be promoting Create a freebie to get people to opt-in to your list Create a squeeze page Load the autoresponder with messages that sell Watch commissions come in… After doing some research on ClickBank, the product that I have chosen to promote via my mailing list is shown below. I chose it because it is the number one product in the niche for body building, plus it has a very strong rebill component that I'm keen to try. There are a few other reasons what I'm going to try it as well. He's got pre-made promotional material so getting it all set up won't be difficult to do at all. The ebook cover is already made, the auto-responders are already written, and there is plenty of other promotional material available in his affiliate portal. By my estimate, setting up the opt-in form (I'll use a fade in light box from Aweber), pasting the content into the auto-responders and creating a squeeze page won't take me more than about two hours or so. You can bet that if this is a successful experiment, my VA will be doing this next time (or maybe even this time!). Nothing is Risk Free There are some risks to this experiment that I should point out. The first is that much of the traffic I'm getting is long tail traffic and the vast majority of the site's existing sales (Amazon) are for vitamins and supplements, so I cannot be sure if my average visitor really wants to pack on the muscle. If this product doesn't do well for opt-ins and conversions, not to worry though, I just try something else. Regardless of what happens with this experiment, rest assured I will share it all in a future case study on my website.
thanks a lot for sharing your success history. i am newbie in affiliate marketing and i am targeting clickbank. hope it gonna work for me. thanks
Google the term Niche Site Mastery and choose the first result. There are a ton of free videos there that will help you to choose better keywords, create content and build an SEO friendly site.