I often get emails like this:

“I’ve had this site for X months now. I’m promoting a good product, I’m getting rankings in the search engines, I’m getting traffic, but the site just isn’t making any sales/getting any Adsense clicks.

Can you take a look at my site and tell me what I might be doing wrong?”

So I thought I’d demonstrate exactly how to diagnose a site that’s not making money. Show exactly how to find out why, and exactly how to make the right improvements to take it from a failure to a success as quickly as possible.

Analysis

So first up, if you aren’t using some kind of stats tracking program (Google Analytics, Awstats in your cpanel, whatever) then you won’t be able to do any of the below. Realistically if you have a website that you want to make money from and you aren’t tracking stats, you’re just flushing money down the toilet.

I’m going to discuss using Google Analytics but you will find the same data in any half decent stats tracking program (like Awstats).

Assuming you have stats tracking set up, you’re mainly going to be looking at 3 sets of data: The amount of traffic you’re getting, the sources of your traffic, and the pages on your site that traffic is arriving at.

Common Mistakes & Mis-diagnoses

Alot of people who send emails like the one above have already made some diagnosis of the problem themselves without looking at the numbers:

“This must just be a bad niche”
“This product must just not convert”
“This market must just be too competitive”

Which of course, without looking at any data, can be highly detrimental.

The 3 Big Questions

There are 3 things you need to ask and analyze to work out why your site isn’t making money and understand how to change that.

They are:

1. How Much Traffic Am I Getting?

This is the first and most basic question.

You might think your site is doing terribly, you haven’t had a sale in many months and you just don’t understand why… but a quick glance at your traffic stats will tell you that you’ve only had 30 visitors over that period! Most sites won’t bring a sale in 30 visitors, especially depending on where those visitors are coming from.

And the good news is that this one has an easy solution – more work! You just need to keep promoting, keep writing articles, keep commenting, keep building those links and might well be on your way to a nicely profitable site.

2. Where Is My Traffic Coming From?

If someone says “I’m getting 60 visitors a day and still not making any sales!”, the FIRST thing I want to know is “Where is that traffic coming from?”

We all know that traffic from the search engines is not the same as traffic from social networks, is not the same as from article directories and so on.

This is where Analytics comes in.

Let me demonstrate with a video.

The conclusions you make from this are that, since THESE (these keyword groups) are your visitors, how can you optimize your site to better serve them. Why aren’t they currently buying through your link and how, based on what they are searching, might you serve them better and convert more of them into buyers.

3. Where is that traffic LANDING?

Actually, to say “my site is getting 50 visitors a day” is almost meaningless. Sites don’t get traffic, PAGES do.

People are coming to your website and landing on PAGES of yours. Whether it’s the home page or another. If you’re not making sales, it’s your PAGES that aren’t converting. And there will be a reason why.

More about it in this video.

4. Is your traffic Clicking And Converting? (Adsense or affiliate links)

The next kind of tracking that even I only started far too late in my affiliate marketing, was content level click tracking.

What that means is that if you have a site with multiple pieces of content that contain Adsense, or that have affiliate links, you need to create a different affiliate sub-ID or a different Adsense channel for EVERY piece of content.

If you’re confused, what I’m talking about is a different tracking link for each affiliate link. You can create them (you’ve seen TID’s in Clickbank?) in clickbank and in most good affiliate programs (amazon, CJ, Shareasale, etc) with no problem. To be clear, this means:

You don’t have one affiliate link that you put in every position all over your site. You have individual sub-ID’s for your affiliate links and each piece of content you have contains a different one.

This means you can see not just which of your pieces of content is getting traffic, but which are getting Affiliate/Adsense clicks.

It might be the case that your most high trafficked pages get the lowest click through rate. And there will be a reason for that.

Or your lowest trafficked pages get the highest conversion (because with the different sub-ID’s you can see which of your pieces of content CONVERT the best as well as get the most click throughs).

Most of all, once you have set this up, you can test different little tweaks on your site based on what we discussed in the videos above, and see how they alter CTR’s and conversions.

Give It A Shot

At this level, you’re not just playing in the sand anymore… you’re marketing like a real affiliate superstar.

If you have looked at and set up each of the steps 1-4 above, there is NO WAY you will be in doubt as to what your traffic is doing and why you’re not making sales.

All you have to do then is tweak. Small obvious changes could take your site from zero to hero within days.

Powerful stuff!

A few commenters on my last post mentioned that they were impressed by the conversion rates of the text links in my blog posts for the particular niche blog that was being tested.

So I thought I’d write a little something about what I do to achieve the highest possible conversion rates on all pieces of content that I put out there, and in particular one little secret that I have an inkling makes all the difference.

Let’s start with a scenario…

Say I’ve got a keyword that I think I can pick up some quality targeted traffic from. I want to write a piece of content on this keyword and have it both rank highly in the search engines AND convert highly for this group of visitors.

Let’s say the keyword is: “Tony Robbins seminar review”. I’m trying to write this post so it will rank well for that keyword and have the searchers of that word coming to my site, where I’m promoting some seminar tickets that I want my visitors to grab through my link.

The first thing I do is try to get into the mind of the searcher.

I try to think deeply about who that person is, what their core desires are, and what it is they really want to find. I try to imagine I was them, searching for that term – what would I be looking for.

Obviously this exercise is easier the more specific the keyword is, but the above is an example we can work with.

So first up, most people searching for the word “review” regardless of what comes before it, is someone who wants to know what the opinions of OTHER PEOPLE were about this product. They’re not looking for the sales pitch from the company, they want to know a user’s opinion.

So if I’m writing on that keyword, I have to find somewhere on the net, what the opinions of other people have been, and use them to craft my post.

I might start the post by addressing that person’s thoughts:

“Almost everyone knows the name of Tony Robbins in the world of personal development. But does everyone rant and rave like those people you see on TV? What do real people say about Tony Robbins seminars when no one is watching?”

You talk to the thoughts that person was probably having when they searched it. Anyone searching “review” keywords is someone who is interested, but wondering if the advertising claims are BS or not… they might be slightly skeptical, wondering what other people have said so they can be assured enough to make a purchase.

And the other thing about people searching “review” – at least, the people searching “review” that you want to target – is that deep down, they actually DO want to buy! They want to be excited and take the plunge, but they just want to be confident before making that decision. They want someone to confirm that the product is as awesome as the advertisements say.

So you speak to those thoughts within them. You have your post confirm what they want to believe – as long as the thing they want to believe is true (like if Tony Robbins seminars AREN’T awesome, you don’t write that they are, and you shouldn’t even really be promoting them).

And this alludes to the kicker: the factor I think really makes the difference.

That is, you don’t just give the searcher what they’re searching for… you give them what you think they would find in an absolute dream scenario, even if they didn’t search for it.

Here’s an example:

Say someone is searching for “buy Tony Robbins tickets online”.

What they are DIRECTLY looking for is a website that sells Tony Robbins tickets.

What they would LOVE to find (even though they didn’t search it) is a site that sells Tony Robbins tickets… AT A DISCOUNT.

You see the difference?

So at the end of the blog post on this keyword, I slip in something like this:

“In fact, I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you that at the site below, you can not only purchase your Tony Robbins tickets online, but at the moment, there’s a special offer on where you can get them at 10% off!”

And so on.

Of course this particular statement is reliant on your ability to actually and promote a site where your readers can get a discount, but it’s the underlying principle that’s important here.

Move your thinking from “What does this searcher want?” to “What would this searcher be OVER THE MOON to find?”

Maybe it’s a discount, maybe it’s a way they can get a bonus with their order, maybe it’s just something that they can do after they purchase to get the most out of the product… anything small like that helps.

Because when you’re not only meeting the searchers expectations, but exceeding them… that’s when you’ll get the super high click through rates and super high conversions.

Give this a try on some of your affiliate blogs and let me know if you see results!

This post is about monetization and conversion for affiliate type blogs.

Let me start by showing you some interesting stats for one of my affiliate blogs in the past month.

But before I do, some explanation.

I usually monetize a niche blog with affiliate links in two positions:

1. Links in content. That means calls to action through, and at the end of your blog content.

2. A banner, whether it’s in the sidebar, or the blog’s header, that consequently appears on every page and post of the blog.

I set up two campaigns; one that tracked the clicks and conversions of the affiliate banner that on this occasion sat in the sidebar, and one that tracked the total clicks of all the call’s to action on all the pieces of content on the blog. In other words, I tracked the performance of sidebar banners vs calls to action.

The results were interesting. The columns are from left to right: Clicks, Page Views, and Conversion Rate.

This offers a number of lessons but I think the main ones are these:

1. The title of this post is the biggest lesson. If you are forsaking one of these forms of monetization for the other (only using a sidebar banner, or only using in content links) you might be missing out on as much as half of the affiliate sales you could otherwise make. Banner advertising is not dead, banners do still get clicked, and you need to be integrating them in to your monetization strategy if you aren’t already.

2. Engaged readers = conversions. Although the sidebar banner generated more click throughs, look at the difference in conversion rate. The people who clicked on the calls to action (on this blog always at the end of the content) were MORE THAN DOUBLE as likely to make a purchase. They read through the whole article, they were engaged with your content, and so they were more motivated to buy. A call to action that fits with how the visitor found your site (If they searched “dog training ebook” and your call to action says “Click Here to find the number one dog training ebook on the market at a discounted price” then you’re on the right track) is vital to achieving this.

And there is plenty more to take from this that we’ll delve into in the coming weeks.

If your site is getting traffic from the right targeted keywords and not getting sales, these are vital matters to look at. With the right tweaks you can literally double your sales or more without getting any new traffic… and who doesn’t want that??

I wonder if you realize that there’s more value in a website than just the amount of money it makes.

A friend was showing me the other day, a chart that his company had developed for the valuing of a website for sale. It went into detail about what caused the site to have value, what factors were important for prospective buyers of a website and so on. What might be surprising to you is that profitability was not high on the list!

I’m sure you’ve all heard reports such as that of Facebook – a company reported to be worth 16 billion dollars without having turned a physical profit yet.

There is more to the value of a website than how much money it makes. Things like the number of keywords it can be found for, the number of links it has coming in, it’s Google PR, it’s traffic stats and TREND of traffic stats are all important.

What does this mean for you and I?

It means that if you have a site, or a blog that you’ve put effort into promoting, that’s got links coming back, got some content, a few SE rankings, getting traffic but that isn’t making the cash you want – you could quite possibly sell it for a decent sum of cash.

I’m not talking about a million dollar deal here, but you could easily cut and run with a few hundred or even a few thousand dollars from a half decent and established, [tag]wordpress[/tag] blog.

Not only that, but if you’re so inclined, you could consider the strategy of setting up blogs SOLELY for the purpose of a later sale – it’s not something I’ve done before so I can’t speak from experience but if you like sporadic larger cash bursts, it might be something to look at.

There are a few places you can go to sell your blogs, the most popular of which is www.sitepoint.com in the site sales forum. At this particular place, the selling of blogs is even becoming popular, accounting for 10% of the overall site sales at that forum.

In any case, it’s an interesting way to look at the creation of your niche blogs, and a gentle reminder that…

Even if it’s not making you money – it CAN make you money!

Oh and if you want to learn more about flipping your blog – a guy called Tim is running a pretty cool blog about the subject at Flipping Blogs.

Yo,

A friend of mine contacted me yesterday and told me to check out this product a he had created…

It was just a 20 minute video that he was selling for $10, the sales letter of which actually got me a bit suspicious so I watched it with minimal expectation.

The claim on the letter was that you could somehow make money from EVERY person who visited your blog or website – You can see why I was suspicious…

Well what I discovered from the video was something pretty damn cool that I’d NEVER heard of before – I was rather impressed and heard further that a few secret guys
were making a killing doing this…

So anyway this friend asked if I’d send an email about this product – Because I had a heap of things planned for you guys, and even though this was great and worth
you spending the $10 I didn’t want to do it.

I asked him – “Mate is there any way I can pay you maybe $500 and be able to give my list the download link to this for free”…

Anyway, he umm’d and ahh’d for a while and well I won’t go into full detail about what happened but bottom line is I got you the link for free!

He didn’t want his server getting taken up with it so I even got it available on one of my domains for you… How good is that!

Here’s the link to the video, it’ll take a while to download but it’s 20 minutes well spent.

http://www.nichemarketinginsights.com/blogcash/blogcashvideo.zip

And don’t worry it’s not another opportunity that will distract your focus, it’s something you can implement to increase profits on your existing sites with minimal effort, very cool indeed.
Ok that’ll do me for today. Hope you enjoy!

Andrew