I know it’s late into the month, but it’s never too late to start a challenge. Lynn Terry is challenging her elite members to double their traffic to a site. And since I did that for this site only a couple of months, I decided to take on this challenge for a niche site I have been neglecting, but nonetheless is getting some traffic. As a matter of fact, traffic on this site increased over 50% last month. Here is a screen shot of my stats as of today:
This challenge will go on for an entire month, until May 12th, 2010. I am looking to get 2904 unique visitors between now and then.
Here is what I’ll do:
– add at least 20 pages to the site (products pages, as well as blog posts, as the site has both)
– guest post once (this is not in the IM niche and guest posting is not popular, but I’ll do my best to find a spot to guest post)
– submit 5 articles to several article directories
– build some incoming links
Now, that’s what I’ll do for my niche site, but I will also submit 5 guest posts for this site: I’d really like to get to a consistent 5K monthly visitors by the end of this year.
What are YOU doing this month to grow your business? Public challenges are amazing: you’ll automatically be more productive, since there are others following your success or failure. Would you join me this month in growing your traffic? Post below and I promise I’ll check with you to see how you are doing.
Let’s look at another hot market: Wedding Favors. It’s almost wedding season and many future brides are feverishly searching for the perfect wedding favor: why not be there and offer them what they need? This is a definitely a hot market.
Let’s get started with the wedding favors niche research!
Top 10 Highest Paying Keywords (from the Google keyword tool)
wedding favors shot glasses $4.13
shot glass wedding favors $3.76
wedding favor shot glasses $3.25
wedding wine favors $3.09
wine wedding favors $3.09
wholesale wedding favors $3.04
inexpensive wedding favors $2.86
cheap wedding favors $2.73
western wedding favors $2.40
glass wedding favors $2.37
Bonus
wedding favors coasters $2.33
personalized wedding favors $2.31
affordable wedding favors $2.24
customized wedding favors $2.22
autumn wedding favors $2.21
Top 10 Most Searched Keywords (all phrases are exact matches in Google)
wedding favors 246,000
wedding favor 22,200
cheap wedding favors 14,800
personalized wedding favors 14,800
wedding favor ideas 14,800
unique wedding favors 12,100
wedding favor boxes 12,100
wedding party favors 12,100
beach wedding favors 9,900
wedding guest favor 9,900
Bonus
wedding shower favors 9,900
wedding favor bags 8,100
chocolate wedding favors 6,600
elegant wedding favors 5,400
candy wedding favors 4,400
Resources
Wedding forums are going t be an amazing resource, if you get involved! Future brides love to talk about their upcoming wedding, and you’ll learn first hand what they need, and make a plan to help them 🙂
Great AdSense payouts makes this niche perfect for information sites. Of course, any information site can use some product pages, so don’t forget to add those: brides need lots of favors, so even though individual favor prices are not a lot, they add up when they need 100 or more.
Again: build a list! Future brides need lots of things, an if you send useful information, especially information that will save their sanity while preparing for the wedding, that list will be gold. You can suggest honeymoon destination, bridal dress & shoes sales, etc.
Here are some domains available for this niche now:
WeddingGuestFavor.net, .info & biz with 9,900 exact searches and a month: WOW!
DoItYourselfWeddingFavors.net, .info & .biz with 1,300 exact searches monthly!
HomemadeWeddingFavors.net & .biz gets 2,400 exact searches a month.
IrishWeddingFavors.net, .info & .biz getting 1,600 exact searches a month.
PlantableWeddingFavors.net, .info & .biz with 1,300 exact searches monthly
WeddingCandyFavors.net, .info & .biz with 1,600 exact searches monthly
WesternWeddingFavors.net, .info & .biz getting 1,600 exact searches each month.
There are a lot more .info & .biz domains available in the niche, but the above are a good start. If you’d like the rest of the list I have available , leave a comment below, and I’ll email it to you. Another evergreen niche!
Many people are unfamiliar with the top SEO tactics for making their websites profitable. You need to be sure you follow these tips if you want your website to make money for months and years to come.
1. Keep It Simple, Stupid The KISS rule is essential for success in the online business world. Spiffy Javascript and Flash effects may look nice, but they’re more difficult for search engine algorithms to understand, which will ultimately lower your page ranking. Because search engine optimization is all about tailoring your website to search engines, you want to make sure to keep your site simple enough for the engine to understand.
2. Content is King – Put lots of content together! Niche content is the best – simply defined as articles about things that everyone wants to know, that nobody already knows. Blogs are great, because they’re a regularly updated source of content. If you need to develop lots of high quality content, go through a freelance writers’ site and put out multiple requests – this way you can get a huge amount of content quickly.
3. Share Links – Send emails to the owners of established quality websites with similar content to yours and offer to share links. Chances are, as long as your site looks professional, like it’s going to make it big, they’ll accept, because they got where they are by sharing links. Search engines track how many sites link to yours, and use that to determine how valuable your site is.
4. Proper Sitemap and Meta Tags – When you submit your site to search engines, they will want to see that your site includes a sitemap that meets their search engine’s parameters, and that each page contains meta tags to help the engine categorize your site. The big engines like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft’s Bing all offer programs to help you figure out the most relevant meta tag keywords, so definitely make use of these.
5. Keyword Optimization – When you’re creating a page that you want people to “land” on from the search engine, you want to make sure that the keyword density on that page is sufficient. You can figure out the best keywords by downloading a keyword generator from Google or other engines. Once you know what your content keywords are, make sure your page contains a 1-3% keyword density – or 1-3 times per hundred words. This may seem small, but keep in mind that very high keyword densities often make your content unreadable. Trying to “game the system” often results in penalization by search engine algorithms.
Researched and developed by Ratelines.com, find the best interest rates in the money market.
Certain keywords get searched more times than others; knowing which keywords these are can help you use your valuable time and focus on keywords that will provide you the best return on your investment. What is known as the 80-20 can be easily applied to paid search, 80% of your traffic is going to come from 20% of your keywords. So wouldn’t t it make sense to spend 80% of your time on that 20% of your keywords?
These keywords often represent a significant amount of your traffic along with most of your conversions and generate the most revenue. It makes sense that your eyes and time should be focused on these keywords more than your long tailed keywords.
While growing a list of quality long tailed keywords through query mining can be beneficial and provide very targeted visitors to your site, the low volume of searches and revenue related to these keywords does not justify a significant time investment.
With that in mind, keeping focused and fine tuning the ad groups that contain your highest grossing keywords is extremely important. It presents you with the best ROI for your time investment. In another post I addressed the practice of keeping branded keywords separated in their own campaign. This would allow for your other campaigns with head and tail keywords to not have their data skewed by your high CTR and converting branded keywords.
Following this methodology, keeping a common structure throughout your other campaigns can be extremely helpful as well. If possible and relevant to the ad copy, try to keep like head terms together within ad groups. If you are consistent with your set up if segmented and relevant ad groups, reporting will be more clear and you will be able to make more justifiable decisions regarding your head and tail terms. This practice should lead to optimizing your account for clicks and cost reduction.
Justin Freid is the founder of Justin Freid Media, a paid search and search engine optimization agency. Justin also runs an internet marketing forum to help others learn and implement SEO, PPC and Social Media Marketing.
by Adriana | Comments Off on Head Keywords – Applying the 80-20 Rule To PPC CampaignsChallenges
Today is the last day of the PPC challenge over at Matt Levenhagen’s forum and my last update. It’s going to be a short, one, as I haven’t been able to add any more campaigns this past week.
Taking a look at the image to the right, you’ll see :
So, I ended up spending more than I made, but that’s OK: now it’s time to go back and analyze things and make adjustments. As a matter of fact, I already paused a few ad groups.
During this challenge I found some amazing merchants that I want to explore/promote further: some I realized would do better with video promotion, some with bum marketing, and some by even creating sites around some of the products. In the end, that is the reason I blasted in the first place: to find merchants and/or products to promote.
Am I disappointed I didn’t reach my goal of 50? Yes, a little. But honestly, my first inclination was to set a goal of 20 blasts (one for each business day of the month), knowing I was going on vacation, and would miss some time. And I ended the challenge with 23 blasts.
Now it’s time to pick a challenge for the month of April, and I am not sure what to do. Here are my options:
– create sites for my existing domains just sitting there (probably 25 or so). This would be intense, but the results would probably be awesome!
– organize some of my PLR and use it to update several sites I have but really neglected for the past several months
– work on creating links and revenue for 2 sites I have and would love to flip, but not in their current state, as I want as much as possible for them.
Any thoughts? What would you like to see me do? Please comment below.
: they have their finger on the pulse of the industry, and you can benefit.
