It’s now week 4 of the case study.
I have originally intended to make this little experiment last for about 6 weeks, but I did a quick evaluation of the statistics, reviewed my strategies, and realize that there isn’t much of a point carrying on with this experiment.
It might take abit more time and tweaks to make this site achieve its $1 per day goal, which I thought was a fairly easy goal to hit for.
I think there is a very important lesson from this case study; so important that we can stop right here and we will already have learnt alot.
What is the main reason that this case study didn’t fail to hit my goal?
Lack of RESEARCH.
Duh, right? If you think you’ve heard this all before, hear me out.
The most critical mistake I made was this: I took the gist of the content right out of Content Goldmine, and simply assumed that since the niche and articles were well-researched, it will work with any business model.
Wrong. Dead wrong.
Does this mean that Content Goldmine is an inferior membership site? Far from it; it’s excellent.
What could proper research have done for me?
If I checked out the average cost per click for adsense ads, I would probably have chosen to do away with adsense as the core business model of the site.
The site is too niched; I am getting laser-targeted hits from search engines; all my visitors are probably indeed looking for content I have to offer. The thing is, the number of visitors is simply too low for the business model I have chosen.
My keyword research wasn’t done carefully. I should have targeted a broader, but yet manageably competitive term to optimize for, for the search engines. Instead, I chose a very niched keyword which I indeed was able to do well for, but the search count was simply too low. 3 Way Links did provide the site with many valuable links, but I used a different anchor text from what I was originally targeting. This resulted in a diffusion of methods, and I didn’t manage to rank as well as I could have, simply because the content wasn’t targeted to the correct crowd.
In summary, in this past 4 weeks, the site has netted me a grand total of $1.35 from Adsense. The affiliate products weren’t a good fit for the site, because I couldn’t find any on Clickbank that is niched enough to obtain a good match.
Again, poor research. I’ll probably add some CPA ads to the site to aid in the monetization. I should probably remove Adsense ads because the payout from the clicks are way too low.
Okay!
I hope you learnt some stuff from this case study, even though it didn’t turn out to be as successful as I envisioned. There were many lessons to be learnt though!
My better half and I thoroughly enjoyed doing this case study though; it was good insight for her. She finally knows what I’ve been doing in front of the laptop all the time.
In the spirit of giving, and to thank you for supporting the case study..
If you’re interested in looking at the actual niche site to further aid you in your education, just drop me a personal email, and I will reply you with the URL. You can find my email address at the sidebar, in my bio.
Hope you enjoyed this first case study! More to come for sure.
Do drop me some feedback as to how I can improve the case studies I do in future!
It’s been 3 weeks since this case study started.
Here’s a brief recap.
Week 1: Posted 5 articles on the blog, and then submitted one article to EzineArticles. Once the article is approved, it is then submitted to Goarticles.com and then posted on the blog.
Week 2: About 5 articles have been submitted. Stopped all activity because at this point of time I wanted to add the site to 3 Way Links to demonstrate the power of it.
Week 3:
This was quite a passive week. We stopped almost all activity on article submissions and just wanted to get our site onto 3 Way Links as soon as possible. Unfortunately, an upgrade was being done to the server and I couldn’t get my account going. We submitted the site right after 3 Way Links came back online, and we got approval in a day; very efficient.
Here’s a summary of our traffic stats.
52.90% Direct Traffic
34.19% Referring Sites
12.90% Search Engines
Of course, direct traffic mainly came from me and the better half as we edited the sites, added posts and made changes to it in general.
34.19% came from our article submission efforts at Ezinearticles.
12.90% came to out site while searching for resources on our niche. However, because ours is quite an obscure niche, our traffic was on the low site.
Earnings-wise, we’re still far from our aim of a consistent $1 per day; we’re getting the hits, but not the clicks. The affiliate programs aren’t converting as well.
So far we’ve mainly had $0 days, and peaked at $0.46 cents, with a total of 3 clicks.
Up until now, things aren’t looking very positive, but maybe 3 Way Links still needs some time to take effect. Afterall, we’ve only been on the network for about a week.
CY provided some useful information about article marketing to me that I’d like to share with you as well.
1. Don’t write a summary of your article in the article body. Instead, include the summary in your bio box.
2. Write a Part 1 article, then link to part 2 article from your bio box.
3. Write a how-to article, then link to a presell page where you presell a tool that can automate the how-to process you mention in article.
4. Write a product review, then link to a page from your bio box, where you offer extra bonus and discount if they purchase via your affiliate links.
If you have any comments/ideas at all, do not hesitate to drop me a comment!
How time flies!
We’re now in week 2 of the case study.
We’re starting to get visitors from the search engines. 6 today, to be exact.
Traffic from ezinearticles are still coming in, even though it’s been about 3 days since we last submitted.
As described in the original post, we’re now at the stage of witnessing the power of 3 way links.
Unfortunately, 3 Way Links has been down for the past few days, so we’re experiencing some lag time here. It’s been fully functional as of today, and our site should be accepted by tomorrow.
Earnings-wise, things haven’t been very pretty either. Mostly zeros, and some 1 cent/4 cent days.
And yup, no affiliate sales.
We’ll see how things go when 3 Way Links comes into the picture.
