Website Optimization Techniques

As you may notice, I am advertising Build a Niche Store (BANS) in my sidebar. Now I have been using it long enough to earn some revenue and evaluate it’s performance.

First of all I would like to say that it is a top quality script, the best I have experienced in the way it works in the admin area. Also, it lends itself well to making highly keyword optimized web sites. Checking my visitor stats, I see that the long tail keywords are being found in the search engines.

So the script definitely gets the thumbs up from me.

How about the money-making potential?

With the script I created one new website, added the eBay feed to 2 of my existing content sites and created a fashion store to add to a classified Ads site.

I did most of this work this month so it is early days. And, I haven’t put much effort into building links to these sites. The overall stats are as follows:

Impressions: 2155 Clicks: 414 Earnings: 2.58 GBP (~$5 USD).

So the eCPM is about $2.32 in my case which is acceptable I think since people have to visit your site, click on an item, place a bid and win the auction before you get paid.

The CTR is high too (19.2%) which suggests highly-targetted visitors.

Also, it takes days for the auctions to end, so there is this lag to consider.

Conclusion: it works and could be a good complement to Adsense on your content sites.

To get higher revenue would involve generating more traffic to the sites and picking higher ticket price auction items. Also, there should be some peaks in the income if people register as new eBay users.

So, I look forward to implementing some more niche sites.

Update:
Soon after posting this I got a spike in earnings so I guess I should have more patience. Here is a graph of earnings (orange GBP {x2 for USD}) vs clicks to eBay:

The spike was mostly due to a new eBay user registering which nets a whopping $25!

Well I finished the IPN script and did some testing but didn’t have time to create a user guide, also I think it should have an administration back-end so it is as easy to use as possible.

So unfortunately I am going to slip my goal to release this week. But it will help in making my 3 initial products have a common look and feel which will enable them to work well together.

Thank you for your patience.

In my previous post I mentioned about the imminent launch of my first product. Well, this product is ready apart from the sales page. In the process of setting up the product delivery system, I decided to turn my IPN script into a product too. If you don’t know, IPN (Instant Payment Notification) is one of the ways you can automate your product payment with PayPal.

With IPN you can send a download link by email to a buyer of your product and log the transaction in a database. IPN is the most secure way to do this rather than the other method PDT which relies on a buyer proceeding to a Thank You page to get the product. The problem with this is that they may stay on the Pal Pal site and wonder, where is my product. Or, the URL of the Thank You page may end up in Alexa search results so anyone can search for the download page of your product.

The Thank You page should only really be used to thank the buyer and remind them to check their email for details of the transaction and comply with PayPal’s Thank You page requirements.

I have one PayPal business account but multiple products and sites, so I also wanted a solution to send buyers to a particular Thank You page, send them a download link by email (or not if they are paying for a service) and be able to test multiple sales prices.

This is easily done with non-encrypted buy buttons, but I wanted to use encrypted buy buttons. This prevents people changing the price and avoids having to check that the price is correct with a database look-up. The reason I don’t want to verify the price is so it becomes easy to split test various prices. I simply have separate button code for each price.

I also made the code easy to integrate with testing software where the IPN script pings the relevant conversion goal file.

So in summary, this new script allows you to set up unlimited, automated product sales pages where you have an encrypted buy button on the page and hooked into one PayPal account. Also, it ensures that your buyers get their product details delivered and facillitates accurate tracking of sales conversions.

I will aim to release this product this week. Stay tuned…

My first website optimization product will shortly be released. It is a mini-site creation tool. What it does is allow you to create a highly focused and keyword optimized content-based website.

The home page is a sales page or a squeeze page, with the content pages comprised of articles that act to draw in organic search engine traffic (visitors interested in your topic).

The articles are loosely linked from the home page footer with the intention of search engines (rather than people) following a link to an index of the articles.

Visitors landing on and reading articles are encouraged to write their own articles at the end of each one, so the site can actually grow in content pages via contributions from site visitors.

I have made it as easy as possible to add articles to the site and also added many countermeasures to combat spam submissions. There are also moderation options for how you want to handle article submissions.

There is an admin area where you can approve, edit and delete articles. With the least strict settings, you can have articles that pass through the spam traps automatically added to your mini site.

URLs are based on the title text and are made unique by adding a dash plus a number to the end of the URL should their be a conflict.

I have created a set of basic templates that can be chosen together with an outline of a sales letter to help you fill in the content in a structured way. I based this on possibly my favorite e-book called “Killer Mini Sites” which is years old now and I don’t recall where I obtained it.

I have been testing the script with live sites. The first one is a sales letter style site and the second is a new website designed to capture traffic and attract inbound links at FreePrivacyPolicy.org.

The first site uses an older version of the script with the link to the articles in a subdirectory and linked to mid-way down the sales page. With the second site, you can spot a link to the articles in the footer. But notice how the home pages have large “call to action” links at the end of the sales pitch. So the articles are designed to capture relevant visitor traffic and drive them to the home pages. The second site has the latest script running.

You may be thinking that a blog is another way to do the same thing, but they are not since the home page of a blog is usually a list of the current posts and people read these and bounce off the page to another blog.

However, a sales letter is designed to steer people towards a single goal. Blogs are cluttered with options and gizmos so most readers are blind to the offers on the page, so read and leave for the next blog on their list of favourites.

As a blogger myself, I have created several “dead blogs”, these are blogs that you started off enthusiastically writing articles (posts) for and then got fed up of posting to anonymous people that read your blog and leave without even a comment. So this tool allows you to turn a dead blog into a useful sales site by copying the posts to the article input form and erasing the old blog code. This removes all the pressure to blog everyday.

So when will I release this mini-site generator product? Well, I think I have all the code running smoothly now but I wanted to create instructional videos for using it and create a DVD containing the product and tutorials. Also, I need a sales page. So the full product is about a week away from launch.

Please post your thoughts in the comments…