Traffic Reviews

January 28th, 2008 | by Scott

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This is part 7 of 10 in the Niche Network Marketing with LAMP series.

Traffic Reviews

While it’s always crucial (and fun) to watch your site stats climb from day one, you really won’t get a valid sense of how your efforts so far are paying off until your primary site has been live for about 3 weeks.

By that point if you’ve done a good job of creating quality on-site content, written and submitted quality articles and responsibly promoted your site and articles across social platforms you should be seeing a mixture of traffic coming into your site from the social networks, the article directories you submitted articles to and also some natural traffic from search engines.

The majority of your traffic at this point will be from social networks. That percentage will eventually drop as the search engine traffic increases over time. Also keep in mind that the natural search engine traffic will be more highly targeted, so if you’ve only made a little bit of revenue in the first 3 weeks with your primary site–or even no revenue at all in some cases–that’s not something to panic about yet.

You’re building a niche network here, so the goal is to position yourself for the long-haul and it’s really the search engine traffic that’s going to bring you revenue, so you can’t make any honest financial assessments of your site or niche based on this very early data. You have to wait until you have a steady and significant amount of search traffic to do that.

What this step is about, and you can do effectively at this point, is looking over your traffic and trying to visualize your visitor trends.

How long are visitors staying on your site? Do the majority seem to be spending enough time to read or scan some of your content–or are they leaving almost as soon as they arrive?

If they’re leaving too fast that may indicate that your site is taking too long to load, or maybe your titles and H1 headings aren’t “grabbing” their attention. It could be that your layout isn’t well suited to your content. There’s an unlimited number of things that can account for fast click-aways, so if you see this as a trend in your visitor stats you need to take some time to review every aspect of your site and try to pin-point where the problem is and correct it. This may take some trial and error but with diligence you should be able to sort it out.

You should have a number of pages for your primary site created at this point, are visitors hitting multiple pages or leaving after only seeing the page they entered your site on?

Again this can indicate that your content or writing style isn’t compelling enough, or it could be that your navigation links aren’t obvious enough… if there seems to be a problem with visitors bouncing from the entry page you’ll want to spend time on figuring out why and correcting it.

Keep in mind however that the fewer pages you have the lower your “pages per visitor” numbers will be just based on averages. I’m assuming by the 3rd week you’ll have a dozen or more pages for your primary site online, but if you don’t then you should expect to see lower page views.

At this point, and before you can really move on or begin to assess the profitability of your site and marketing copy you’ll need to have at least 400 click-thrus to the affiliate product you’re promoting–and be averaging at least 50 visitors per day from search engines.

Until you reach those benchmarks you should keep repeating steps #6 and #7 (this one) over and over again to increase your site pages and search engine reach.

Finally, conversion rates. Once you’ve had 400 click-thrus to your affiliate product you can make a fair assessment of your conversions.

Is your conversion rate at least 2%? That would be 8 sales out of 400 click-thrus. If so you’ve got a great position with a buying niche, a solid product that converts and your primary site is seemingly doing a good job of pre-selling the traffic you send to the affiliate sales page. At this point it’s wise to move on to step #8 of the LAMP series.

If your conversion rate isn’t at least 2% is it at least .5%? That would be 2 sales out of 400 click-thrus. If so then odds are the niche is fine but there may be an issue with either the product you’re promoting, the product sales page or your site copy that everything isn’t working in harmony to convert better.

I always look at the product and product sales pages first when this happens. Sometimes, even though everything looked good in the beginning it can turn out that once you’ve created your site content and become more familiar with the niche and the people who would be buying in that niche you may realize that the product you picked to promote, or the sales page it uses aren’t as good as you originally thought.

Now is the time to go back and review it to see if there’s anything obvious that you may have missed earlier when selecting it that might be working against converting sales with the traffic you’re sending.

If you spot something there’s 2 things you can do. First, you could just dump the product and find something else. Or second, if it’s something obvious in the sales page copy you can always contact the product supplier/creator and discuss it. I’ve done this in the past, pointing out something obvious in a publisher’s sales copy that was turning away people in their market simply because of the wording, and been pleased to find many times they’re open to suggestions for improving conversion rates. And why wouldn’t they be? After all, the more sales you make the more sales they make, right.

Of course not everyone is going to listen to your input, or be willing to test your ideas, so you may still be forced to drop the product and find something better. But if you think the current product is good and that you’ve spotted something obvious in the sales copy that’s bad it’s worth contacting them first.

If you don’t spot anything obvious with the product or sales copy that would be hanging up conversions then it’s likely something with your site.

Either your site content isn’t making the case for how people in your niche benefit from using the affiliate product, or you’re not doing a good job of sending the right visitors through to the affiliate sales page. I see that one a lot. Usually it happens when someone puts the affiliate link too high up on their page.

What happens then is that you send through a lot of “blind” traffic. These are visitors to your site who haven’t yet been shown the benefits of owning the affiliate product, they just came to your page because they’re interested in the niche, and since your affiliate link probably used niche related keywords in the anchor text they clicked it thinking they were heading for more information rather than a place to purchase the benefit at.

In my experience the best affiliate links work when provided after you’ve shown the visitor that they’ll benefit from owning/using the affiliate product. This may mean placing the affiliate links way down in your content, and that may seem counter-productive at first but you have to keep in mind that you’re not trying to send the highest volume of traffic through to an affiliate sales page, you’re trying to send the highest qualified visitors through.

And by showing them the benefits of the product (pre-selling it) first, you actually create more qualified visitors for yourself to ultimately send through.

High up on the page or in your content is good placement for contextual ads (like Google AdSense) where you’re being paid per click and not a commission on the actual sale, but for affiliate products it’s far better to bury them deeper in your content and after you’ve show the benefit of the product to a visitor. That way they’re already thinking about how the product will benefit them when you say “click here to get it”.

What if my conversion rate is below .5%?

Then there’s something really wrong in the chain. Odds are there are multiple problems existing between your site, the product, the product sales page and perhaps even the niche you selected.

My point is something is really broken and there’s far too many variables that it could be for me to try and address them.

All I can suggest is go back to step #1 and retrace your steps along the way to see where things went wrong.

Something–and it should be obvious to create this much havoc–hasn’t gone according to plan and you’re going to have to find it and fix it.

If you can’t figure it out, or you find it but can’t figure out how to fix it feel free to contact me with any questions you may have. I’m willing to help as much as I reasonably can, that’s why I’m publishing this stuff after all, but please make your questions as specific as possible if you want anything useful back from me. I can only provide help based on the information your supply to me in your questions.

Part 8 of the series should be available in a day or two so please check back, or better yet subscribe to my RSS newsfeed and be sure to get it as soon as it gets published.

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