Niche Site Challenge: Week 25
Welcome everyone to the 25th Weekly Update in the Niche Site Challenge.
For those of you who don’t know, the niche site challenge is this:
- A part time challenge where we build niche sites
- Two hours a day maximum
- Our goal is to make money with these niche sites
- …But you’re not allowed to advertise them or build products
- The money comes from affiliate links and the traffic comes from SEO
If you’re interested in learning more, then browse around on this site a while. In particular, this update gives a link to everywhere else.
Most of you are regular readers though, so we’ll skip through the longer explanation.
In these weekly updates, I write about my experiences, share different articles and generally make everyone feel bad for not updating me on their progress. (Seriously guys… I know you’re reading these articles because I can see the stats.)
I also drop in some random thoughts every week that’ll help you with your own niche site projects.
What I’ve Been Doing This Week
Last week, I wrote about how some of my sites were underperforming.
Frankly, I’m underperforming in the niche site challenge full stop. I want to go forward and build more niche sites, get back on track and make more money.
But before I do that, I want to improve the sites that are underperforming. Last week, I wrote about how there was a clear indicator: More posts = more traffic = more money.
This week, I’ve delved more into some underperforming sites. Today, I’ll talk about two things that I’ve done wrong. One of them is a big problem for a lot of niche bloggers. One of them might be… or it might just be me being stupid.
Let’s talk about the former first.
(Oh, and I’m in the “start-up stage” for another niche site. More on that next week when it’s up.)
Random Thought: Why You Should Review High Ticket Items & How to Know If Your Site Is Good Or Rubbish
If there’s one thing that should be (and is) repeated constantly it’s that when you’re making money through niche sites, you need to write about high ticket items.
So today’s Case Study #1 is a real example of how this niche site is failing. It’s also a good example of seeing where you’re going wrong with your niche site.
Check out this picture:
I know… I’m rolling in the money with this site.
Those are my stats from the last week with Case Study #1. There are a few things to talk about – but we’ll start with the elephant in the room: Nobody is excited about $3.78 in earnings.
In fact, some people are probably clicking off this article right now because they’re so ashamed of such paltry affiliate earnings.
This is what happens when you write sales letters for low-cost items. Amazon gives you between 4% and 8% depending on how many sales you generate. (There are exceptions for various categories, I believe.)
Let’s assume a 6.5% affiliate rate. If you make five sales of products that are in the $10 range… you’ll make about $3.78.
If I’d been selling items that were $100 each, then I’d have made $32.5 from the same amount.
It’s the difference between $13 a month for a niche site and $130 a month.
But there’s some good news in the above picture. That’s a 12.5% conversion rate. That means that despite financially underperforming, the site is well-written. People trust the sales letters and are convinced to buy.
The website in question also had a high click-through rate from the sales letters. Essentially, all that needs fixing is the offers that people spend money on.
Random Thought: Affiliate Links Are The Devil – Contain Them
Another one of my sites has made no money. I haven’t really paid attention to it for this reason.
Check out the stats for this one:
In the last month, it made no money, which is terrible.
However, I noticed that there were no clicks going through. In my WordPress Dashboard, I was sending traffic to Amazon, but Amazon was showing no clicks.
What was the cause of this?
It wasn’t software errors. I’m just an idiot.
Somehow, I managed to write all of my articles for this niche site without using any affiliate links.
I’d just copy/pasted the Amazon links without my affiliate ID.
Stupid, stupid… don’t do that.
Instead, you should create a Word document with all of your affiliate links, then use something like Pretty Links to make sure you’re entering your affiliate links when you post your articles instead of random links.
That’s certainly what I’ll be doing from now on.
Final Thoughts And Other Articles
Hopefully, you’ve all had a laugh at these mistakes.
If you’d prefer something more constructive, then check out this article I wrote yesterday which is useful for people building niche sites.
As always, you’re welcome to leave comments below to let me know if you’ve got any questions or to let me know how you build niche sites and how that’s going.
Until next time!