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Day 24 - Traffic - Go Or No Go
By Mike Mindel | August 25, 2007
This is content is summarized from the Day 24 Training for the Thirty Day Challenge, presented by Ed Dale.
A Slight Change of Plan
I (Ed) was going to give you more conversion tips but you got plenty of good information on conversion yesterday. Today, I want to specifically concentrate on the traffic decision. Given it’s the weekend and you have two days of catch-up, you may well want to catch up on a different project as you’re not getting anywhere with your current one.
Are You Ranked?
The answer to the vast majority of you if you’ve followed all the steps outlined in the challenge is yes! It’s working a treat.
Make sure you’ve installed your free (you just don’t know how good you’ve got it) TDC Stats Tracker. You can use Statcounter or Google Analytics. But the reason I prefer Dan’s tool is that Google Analytics is updated once every 24 hours or so whereas Statcounter & Dan’s TDC Stats Tracker update in real-time. It’s also very hard to track outgoing traffic with Statcounter. (The only way to do it is using redirects, but it involves a bit of coding and it’s not free so we won’t explore it here).
Please review the Day 22 - Testing and Tracking training for more details.
Impact of Rank on Traffic
Here’s the GTrends tool and our famous ‘Speed Reading Free’ keyword
You can see here that GTrends is suggesting we’ll get less than 10 searches a day. But only if you’re in the number one spot in Google. If you’re not in the number one spot, then there is a drop off.
Here’s a chart to show you what I mean.
If GTrends suggests that you’re going to get 100 visitors a day in position #1, then you’re going to get about 30 visitors in position #2, 12-15 in position #3. Once you’re in to position #4 - #10 it will tail off. Traffic won’t drop to 0, but we’re talking about a couple of searches per day at most.
Some people are saying ‘we’re not getting any traffic’. The reason you’re not getting any traffic is because you’re ranked somewhere like position #12. If you’re getting 4, 5 clicks per day at #12 and GTrends predicts 100 people will go to your site for the #1 keyword then that’s good. Traffic is behaving as expected.
The key question: Are you getting the traffic you expected given your page ranking (not to be confused with Google PageRank)?
Mike’s Comment: Read the Red Cardinal Post
Mike (Mindel) jumping in here. Take a look at this Red Cardinal blog post. A few months ago AOL accidentally (!?) released 36,389,567 search queries with information on 19,434,540 clickthroughs on to an unsuspecting public from their search logs.
The Red Cardinal looked at the % share of clickthroughs for the top 10 search engine results.
Here’s some commentary
Interestingly, the #1 position receives 42.3% of all clickthroughs. The #2 position only accounts for 11.92% of all clickthroughs - almost 72% less clickthroughs than the top position in the SERPs. Attaining the #1 position for your keywords/phrases results in nearly 4 times more traffic than that of your nearest rival - now that’s a serious difference in both traffic and potential revenue. - Red Cardinal
See the rest of the post for more detail. It makes a fascinating read.
How Long to Get to the Magic 200
That’s the magic 200 visitors you need to make a sale, using bad numbers. It’s important to realize that if your traffic stats are telling you are getting 30 visitors per day, then it’s going to take 6 - 7 days to get to your 200 visitors and a sale.
That is indeed a problem. You need to understand that. It’s quite legitimate that even though you are ranked properly, you are still getting no traffic.
Remember we were selecting two keywords in two different niche markets. This is why. Now is the time to make a call. If one keyword is not getting traffic and one is, then dump the one that isn’t get traffic and move on. Now is the perfect time to move on and try another keyword in a new market.
What we’re finding out now is that a lot of people who have entered the Hall of Fame have gone from woe to go in a matter of hours. It is realistic that you spend half a day on Saturday, select a niche keyword in GTrends, write an article, get one of 25 different content providers, then put up a piece of content. Ideally you want a new content provider each day if you can do it. Don’t focus on just one. One or two (maybe three) niche keyword targeted posts per content platform is fine.
If you’ve done all that and you’re not getting the result, then move on. You’ve saved yourself months of product development and work. Which is what 99% of marketers do because they are product focused first. You should be happy that you’ve saved yourself all that time and energy by being market focused. And it’s cost you $0.
A Word on Clusters
I (Ed) have seen a lot of forum post questions about clusters, mentioned on Day 21 - The Big Picture. Looking back on the slide it was a bit confusing so I really want to clarify clusters and groups of sites all targeted around a particular keyword.
For example you’re all familiar with our ‘Free Speed Reading’ keyword. We all know it’s not going to generate traffic, but lets assume it did. Lets say GTrends gave us 100+.
What I hope you’ve done is build up a number of these content platforms around the keyword ‘Free Speed Reading’. Here are four examples of user generated content (on four platforms) all pointing to my affiliate program (Ed playing a Gibson) .
That’s a cluster of user generated content sites including (but not limited to) Blogger, WordPress, Squidoo & Google Page Creator. Notice I didn’t say blog. It’s not just blogs people. Ezine Articles aren’t a blog. Article sites aren’t blogs. YouTube is another classic example.
We hope to generate 200+ visitors a day with an individual cluster
But if you don’t get the traffic for one cluster, then create a new cluster around another keyword. E.g. ‘Speed Reading Tips’ and a few more content platforms.
There should be a whole bunch of keywords that pass the GTrends filters if you’ve selected a good market. So pick the next best one and create a new cluster. Do it this weekend and you’ll be sending more traffic to your affiliate program.
If the traffic is still not enough, then create another keyword cluster around another niche keyword e.g. ‘learn speed reading’.
Putting All the Clusters Together
(FSR - Free Speed Reading, SRT - Speed Reading Tips, LSR - Learn Speed Reading)
That should get you the 200 targeted visitors per day to your affiliate program.
A Message to Market Match
If someone types in ‘free speed reading’ they are going to some content which is about ‘free speed reading’. It’s exactly what they are searching for. We are giving Google exactly what it wants and giving the reader exactly what they want. This is known in internet marketing as ‘a message to market match’.
A percentage of people will clickthrough to our testing affiliate product. If they select ’speed reading tips’ then they get an article about ’speed reading tips’ and not ‘free speed reading’.
Some people would say this is a subtle difference. In the past internet marketers would cluster ‘free speed reading’, ’speed reading tips’ and ‘learn speed reading’ and send them all to the one pay per click ad. But why not deliver exactly what the user wants and what Google wants. That’s how you will get your ranking and maintain your ranking.
Go Or No Go - A Big Decision to Make
So you’ve got a big decision to make. Are you getting the traffic you expected? Are you getting the traffic, proportional to where you are ranked?
If you’re getting 100, 200 a day then focus on the next step, conversion. If not, get a new keyword and get a new cluster.
Make that decision. You may decide to go back to the drawing board. If you have to start again take a look at this post - The Niche Factory in conjunction with the GTrends tutorial at Tip #6 - Buckle Up - It’s GTrends - the Tool . It will help.
Action Points
- Is your niche cluster getting 100, 200 keywords a day? If yes, move on to conversion.
- If no, create another cluster.
- If another cluster doesn’t help, jump niche and start again.
- If you have to start again, don’t worry. People have made their $10 inside of a couple of hours.
- Your goal is 200 targeted visitors per day to your affiliate program.
Technorati Tags: day 24 training, thirty day challenge, ed dale, slight change of plan, traffic decision, are you ranked, tdc stats tracker, dan raine, statcounter, statscounter, google analytics, impact of rank on traffic, speed reading free, gtrends, wordtracker gtrends, number one spot in google, red cardinal, aol data, number one position, the magic 200, move on, 25 different content providers, hall of fame, a word on clusters, blogger, wordpress, squidoo, google page creator, ezine articles, youtube, message to market match, go or no go, a big decision to make, the niche factor, mike mindel, niche cluster
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Topics: Daily Summaries |
August 26th, 2007 at 11:46 am
Ouff! I just finished to catch up with all the posts. Now the real work start!
Already ranked for one of my keywords by the way!
August 28th, 2007 at 1:51 am
Hey guys… Just some clarification required with regards to click throughs, conversions and the magical 200 visitors you keep quoting as the desired number of visitors you’re aiming to get to your content page..
You mention here and I quote… “The conversion rate is the number of people who arrive at the affiliate sales page (after leaving your quality content) compared to the number of people who buy. If you get 1 in 200 then you’re doing well.”
You also mention… “That’s the magic 200 visitors you need to make a sale, using bad numbers.”
This seems to suggest that all 200 visitors that arrive on your quality content page will click through via your affiliate link to your affiliate landing page and 1 person will purchase the product. That sounds a little unrealistic.
So are we talking about… 200 visitors to your quality content >>> become 200 people arriving at the affiliate sales page >>> become 1 sale of affiliate product to give a conversion rate of visitors to sales of 200:1? You can’t use the 1 in 200 to describe the conversion rate from the affiliate page to a sale as well as 1 in 200 to describe the conversion rate from the quality content page to a sale without assuming that all 200 visitors click the affiliate link.
August 28th, 2007 at 2:00 am
There are two metrics.
The first is slipperiness. How many people who arrive at your site who click through to your affiliate link. If 100 people arrive at your website and 20 click through then your slipperiness is 20/100 or 20%.
The second is your conversion rate. How many who arrrive at your affiliate page who buy. If 200 arrive at your affiliate page and 1 buys then that is a conversion rate of 1/200 or 0.5%.
You want 200 people to arrive at your affiliate or money page to make 1 sale ideally.
So with slipperiness of 20% and conversion of 0.5% you will need 1 * 5 * 200 = 1000 visitors overall.
The aim is to eventually make your quality content page as slippery as possible without sacrificing quality.
-Mike
September 3rd, 2007 at 6:54 pm
[…] Day 24 - Go Or No Go […]
April 10th, 2008 at 6:31 am
[…] This lesson is very very important and totally relevant to a network marketer. The lesson explains when you’ll get traffic to your site, and what to do, if there’s no traffic. Read Mike Mindel’s notes on this lesson or go to the Thirty Day Challenge Training Day 24. Posted by julieanne on April 10th, 2008 filed in 2. Traffic […]