Niche Site Case Study Week 3
September 6, 2007
I'm back for the third week's results from my niche site case study. The overall traffic is doing well, as you can see:
So far I've received 367 unique visitors and 1,468 page views. That's an increase of 173 unique visitors — almost as much as the last two weeks combined. This is due in large part to the traffic I'm receiving from the articles, as you can see from the external link traffic:
August
September
The articles are still getting a lot of attention at EzineArticles.com as well, with 900 views generating a total of 233 click-throughs:
Google has now indexed 8 of the content pages, and Yahoo! has finally indexed the site as well, though MSN/Live still has not. Google is steadily sending traffic, which I expect to increase as I get more and more links into the home page from 3WayLinks.net and more links into the inner pages from the articles (which are still being spread around the web).
August
September
The site's AdSense revenue has risen from $2.30 last week to $8.27, due to more clicks and Google's SmartPricing granting the site a higher value per click. Very positive news there if the site can hang onto that EPC as the search engine traffic grows. It usually takes 2 - 3 months before a brand new site really starts to catch on in the search engines, even with a good number of links coming in, so we have to be patient.
My click-through rate was rather low, though, just under 5%, so I've made some modifications to the templates and uploaded the changes to the site. We'll see next week if it helped increase the CTR without causing a down-swing in the click-value (which sometimes happens).
You can read all about how I created the site and what I've done to optimize it for the search engines in the original niche site case study post.
I'll post the next update next Thursday. Please post your thoughts and comments below.
Comments
78 Responses to “Niche Site Case Study Week 3”
-
Jonathan Leger has been earning his living online full-time since the fall of 2004. He regularly posts advice about search engine optimization (his current passion), AdSense and Internet Marketing. He is the creator of a suite of popular software tools, including: Jonathan L Leger 
-
Jon,
What I'm absolutely floored by (regarding the EZA stats) is the percentage of clickthroughs to your URL relative to the total number of views - 26%!!
With my article submissions in the past, I've averaged less than 1% over 141,000 page views. I switched to the bio line method you're using, and saw it jump dramatically - but still only to 6%.
What else (if anything) can you attribute to that astounding CTR to your URL to?
Thanks!
~Mike
Jon,
That is impressive with the traffic you are receiving from the article sites. I never received that type of traffic from articles, just did them for links and figured the occasional visitors were a bonus. Thanks for doing this, I enjoy real live case studies!
Dave
It's funny that you brought that up Mike. I have averaged 1% clickthrough also but have a 3% Publisher rate.
If I could get 10% URL clicks that would be fantastic.
I'm not sure why it's so high, guys. Maybe it's just the niche that it's in.
Awesome stats! I am also curious how you get such a high CTR on your author bio link. Attribute to your suberb writing skills, or maybe the niche? Thanks for the great case study!
Hi Jon, I'm impressed with your adsense earnings so far. That's a nice chunk of change for a relatively new site.
A couple of things I would suggest Jon. In your articles I would use more than just one link in the resource box to help more as far as gaining rankings. Then on the site maybe where you've got the latest news you could put a google link block that looks very similar and maybe add some more articles. And change up your title tags because I see that you repeat a certain phrase quite often on all of the title tags. (wink)
Oh and I like how you incorporated burn the fat clickbank product..NICE!
John,
I too am blown away with the 26%. I've never gotten above 5%. I'd like to know too what else you've done differently.
Thanks for this detailed study.
Brian
Hey Jonathan,
Thanks for the case study. What do you say about social bookmarking? I can see you don't use it…I use SocialPoster.com to get my pages notices and indexed fast by Google. Of course this does not replace long term link building.
Ron
Jon,
This would be hard to confirm, but do you suspect that some of your article click-throughs may be from your case study followers? They know your topic and author name on ezinearticles.com, and may be curious to see the web site which has not been revealed. FYI, I was not one of these impatient clickers.
Jonathan,
Very cool stuff. I have a new site also and have seen a increase in traffic and click. I got the site indexed in 7 hours in google. I have 16 pages indexed in google, yahoo 1 and msn 2. Not bad for a site that is one week old. I love it. Thanks for all that you do. Very cool stuff. By the way I am getting errors on the IAW that is is not finding any keywords when I know it has in the past. Is the site down or something??? Thanks again, Steve
Nope not me…Last week.
Hey Jon,
This has been really fun to watch. You keep it simple and easy to follow. I have to say that this project is also a case study in blogging as well.
Well done sir.
Doug
It's possible that some people following the case study are finding the articles via EzineArticles.com, but I have it under a pseudonym to help prevent that.
what software/program is used to display your daily hit results?
I just use the site's built in AWStats.
why is it that you can't download traffic on sites that are given to you. I mean the more the merrier—money hopefully
Debbie Solomon
Hi John and everyone,
I was glad to see you starting this project because I was
doing the same thing almost at the same time. Let me
describe shortly.
I used Niche Inspector to find a good niche. Then I built a
site where I posted 10 articles that I wrote with your
Instant Article Wizard. So far so good.
After 5 weeks I had 15 pages indexed in Google, 6 in Yahoo and 8 in MSN. I managed to get over 72 quality links back to my site.
I was on my way. Until last Sunday when my site completely vanished from Google index. I still don't understand why. Overnight my site has disappeared from Google radar.
Now it's quite frustrating. Good luck anyway and thaks for sharing your experience here.
Jacques
Jack:
Were you using any black-hat methods for getting links or ranking your site, etc?
I like the way of sending traffic from ezinearticles, as i checked my stats and truely it sends hits and a lot of traffic to my sites .
congrats also on your traffic , good way to do it and best quality backlinks
Cheers
Mike
John,
No black-hat methods for getting links. I am subscribed to
a well-known membership site who allows its members to post
articles in dozens of PR2 to PR5 blogs linking to our sites.
Jack
Jon,
Your stats are amazing! I wouldn't have believed that this was possible had I not been privvy to your case study.
Thanks for doing,
Phill
Jon,
This is one hell of a case study. I can't wait for next Thursday's results! Thanks for motivating me to thinking seriously about article writing.
Cheers,
Nick
Thanks guys.
Jack:
Okay, another question then: is it gone from the index? When you do a site: command, does it return nothing? Or does it just not rank anymore?
Yes Jon. It is completely gone. When I do a query site:www.mydomain there is NO result. "Your search - site://www.mydomain - did not match any documents." !!
Jack
@Jack
I do believe that means you're in the Google sandbox. It happened to me on my first site I ever did. I built it, it went away and then it came back. You've got to let it age a little bit…
Nice,
Excellenttraffic from ezinearticles.
Do two of these a week…..thats 104 a year……x $8.27 a week……= $860.08 per week.
Do you think that is realistic?
Ted
Hey Jonathan,
Google adsense will drag your rankings down.
Q. Does mentioning google syndication for the page affect ranking?
A. It decreases ranking.
Data: [-35] 280 310 310 280 300 290 430 360
That's out of 270,000 searches there is a correlation
showing that if you use adsense on your site you are
more likely to be on the right (google Position#10) than
on the left.(#1)
[35] is NOT a sure thing.
100 is a sure thing.
But 35 is significant enough.
Especially if you have to limit the size of your ad
and all the other Google hoops.
Create your own DVD information product and sell it.
It can all be hands off. 100%
Keep all the money.
Get a person's name.
Sell to them again.
Have your ad/product be 100% relevant.
Increase the conversion rate.
etc.
etc.
etc.
Jack
Try eliminating the www before the domain name!
Regards, mitch
That's great, Jon. I have submitted 5 articles around the sametime as you did. Although there is some URL clicks, it is still far from being called traffic. May be it has to do a lot with niche you are in. Is it so?
Jack, if you throw 1 or 2 links with some trust at it it may have a better chance of sticking. Now that is it gone, it may take awhile longer to come back in google. Many times, not always, if I get some trusted links to a new site right away, it will bypass the sandbox. If no trusted links, it is more likely to get hit, in my opinion. Of course, every site is different and I don't always do the same thing. Some rank fairly quickly and stick, some don't.
Jonathan,
I can't help but wonder what would of happened if you had submitted to "submit your article" and gone out to many more article directories.
Any reason why you choose to use just Ezine Articles and go articles
Terry
The only way to find out why Jon gets far better bio click thru's than everybody else here is to let us look at the aricles and the site. Any chance of giving up the site URL at some point in the future Jon?
Hi Jon
Thanks for keeping us up to date with your progress.
I too am amazed at the click through rate of your article and looking forward to your review next week. I hope my own efforts reap similar rewards.
Simon
PS I have noted an increase in traffic to my website linked via article from 3waylinks. It has been rising steadily over the past 3 weeks and is the only seo on this site.
Thanks for keeping us updated Jon. Your style of writing makes it easy for us to follow your workings. It is interesting though, that most people following your same steps and advice do not do as well as you - I suppose your writing skills also make a difference to the success of your site in terms of adsense earnings.
Keep up the good work.
Barry
Hi Jon,
I have been following your case study and decided to do one of my own,I uploaded
the site today and I will submit articles for the site over next few days,I'll add a blog tonight and hope for the best. looking forward to your case study results for next week.
thanks Jon, great case study. I've told many people about it.
Hi i don't know what to do anymore i have no clicks nothing i have no money in my adsense account over a month now and i am doing everything right i really like what you are doing not that it is helping me in anyway because i don't understand what you are doing though i really need some serious help, is my blog the problem i heard that i will not get much money from blogs i have to start a website (paid web hosting) something about blogs are related with impressions and websites with cpc, is it true can some one answer me please i need some help you can check out my two blogs {snip} and {snip} i think i am doing everything right
{no personal urls please}
Hey please tell us your website url… we want to see how you are actually doing it. Please send us the url…
I'm not letting people know the url until the case study is over, otherwise it will skew the results.
Hi Mavin,
re. "Hi i don't know what to do anymore i have no clicks nothing i have no money in my adsense account over a month now"
I took a look at your blog linked to from your post name
one of the posts on your blog is "Is Your Auto Insurance Company Rated?"
doing a direct search (with quotes) for that phrase returned 9,640 results on Google
even though I don't believe Google's returned results I do believe that they have 422 pages indexed:
Google Link
so it's a case of "duplicate content"
in the past I've built sites with hundreds of pages of other peoples articles and they are no longer worth building - there's no way of avoiding the hard work now required to get traffic - original content pointed to with keyword anchor text links from web pages with pagerank 1 or higher
Hi jon ,
just recieved your email about case study-this was just the thing i was looking for as (real world stats) you keep it real.
very encouraging. keep up the good work! :
Jon
I've been following your case study and the one thing you have not covered it is your internal linking strategy as well as how your pages are constructed. Plus, I know 3waylinks.net is your baby but this skews the results of your test for people who don't use 3waylinks. It would have been nice to run 2 tests in parallel - one with 3waylinks and one without - to see how the results vary. I look forward to upcoming results which I hope to cover in the next version of my seoTimetable free traffic strategies ebook.
Nice results! By the way, I have an article that made around 40% clickthrough to my site
And another article that has around 50% of publishings comparing to views.
I'm about to write an intersting survey about it in my blog.
Jonathan, how's your "coolest guy on the planet" experiment? It was very interesting also! Are you about to beat Brad Fallon?
UPD. Just checked the results - You are the ONE!!!
Hi Jonathan,
Would you mind sharing the changes that you make
to the web site each week?
Thanks,
Phil
Jonathan, how many weeks will you be doing this niche study?
Phil:
If I make any changes I'll let you know in my updates.
Scott:
There's no fixed time, but it will probably run for 2-3 months, with the number of updates I send out becoming fewer as the case study progresses and large changes don't happen every week.
Very interesting, Jon.
Looking forward to updates
Jonathan,
Is there something wrong with your RSS feed?
This post isn't showing up in my reader nor is it showing up on your homepage when I visit there.
I only know about this update because I got your email about it.
Just curious.
Question:
What kind of results do you expect to see after 2-3 months in terms of traffic and income?
Thanks for your time!
this is a very good website and i hope the treffic will increase aswell the ranking of the site.
thanks
Chris:
The RSS thing was my fault. I failed to tag the post in the 'blog' category, so it didn't show up on the home page or in the feed.
I don't have a specific traffic/income goal, since this is a case study. I'm just letting it grow and move and reveal how well it's going to do on its own.
Jonathan,
Thanks for the info.
I have a question…
What's your opinion on using Article Wizard to write on any "hot topic", that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the site your linking to in the Author Bio.
For just linking purposes this may seem to be a good idea. Except the sites that link to it may not be relevent.
For now, all my articles have been "content related" to my site. But because my content, is not the hot topic of the day, I don't get a lot of click thru's.
I was thinking maybe I should write some articles on Paris Hilton or something, lol… but would like to know others opinion?
And do you have a trick or method, on finding "hot topics" to write about, and topics that would be more likely to be picked up by high ranking sites.
Scott
Those are some nice stats there Jonathan. We have just recently tried using a few articles ourselves. So far not too much luck, but then again we got distracted and started doing other marketing stuff.
I realise articles are the way to go for long-term promotion, but it's just sooooo hard for me to get motivated to write articles. Definitely a hump I have to get over (Maybe I should break out your software…). Keep up the good work!
Jonathan,
Cool. Thanks again for sharing with us. I'm very interested in learning more about this.
Jonathan,
how much to you expect the site to make? What if the ranking is not that good, will you do anything to improve it or just move on to the next site?
Pete
Hi, Jonathan
What a wonderful experiment! BRAVO! But I'm wondering … has anybody tried to duplicate this to compare the results? (Sorry, but I just got around to reading about it tonight.)
In fact, I challenge everybody reading this blog to duplicate what Jon is doing, but with your own topic and whatever tools you have. Here's what Jon did:
* Pick a topic
* find some keywords (how many?)
* write 20 articles, 10 for the site and 10 to submit to the directories
(Jon used IAW to write 10 articles himself and paid someone to write another 10. You could do them all yourself, or outsource all of them, or any combination — just get 10 unique articles to use.)
* generate the site
* link it into 3WL
* publish the articles
* monitor your traffic
That is, duplicate everything that Jon is demonstrating here, only with a different topic/keyword and your own tools. And then set up a blog and post the results for others to see. (Also, I suggest you keep track of the amount of time you spend on each task.)
When people ask you how much you expect to make, and what you'll do to improve things, you'll explain that the GOAL was simply to DUPLICATE WHAT JON DID and OBSERVE THE RESULTS. Could anything be simpler?
If you can do it once, you can do it a hundred times.
I'll raise my hand as the first to commit to duplicating this experiment, and I'll get it done this week. I'll be spending lots of time in airports as it happens, flying to North Carolina for a day, then to San Francisco for the WIME. So I'll have lots of time to work on it.
Is anybody else game?
-David
3waylinks.net, has a 0 page rank. Which suggests that Google has flagged the 3 way linking. I've been told that any pattern will not go unnoticed by Google. That concerns me, in fact scares me away. Any thoughts?
Scott:
Where did you get that silly idea from? 3WL has 0 page rank because the site is only a couple of months old. Do a site: command in Google and you'll see all of its pages indexed.
I swear, all of the misinformation spread around about the search engines is really killing people…
Jon,
I understand that you're using IAW to create articles for your website content. Would using IAW to create articles to be subimitted to the article directories ok? I've heard that these article directories have very strict policies regarding using softwares to generate articles.
Please share your thoughts.
Thanks.
Casey:
Yes I have, and I would do so again. You see, IAW doesn't "generate" articles, it generates research from which you can write your own articles. Use properly, it does not violate any article directory's policies.
Some very well known SEO's state that a 0 rank is a site that has been flagged or banned, and a N/A rank is a new site. It may be wrong info. but that's what I've been told by several SEO's experts, including Brad Callen.. I never have had a 0 rank, on my sites, and they are new, they are usually N/A or 1 when new.
I just bought a web site (two domains) from someone and the main site's home page is very short — in actuality, it's just a squeeze page. The only links off the page are to the TOS, Privacy Policy, and a brief Contact Us page. This page has a PR-4, and the TOS page has a PR-3! (The second domain has a PR-0.) It was registered and put up in February. It doesn't have a whole lot of links or anything; in fact, the only ones that show up in Google's links: command are to pages that used to be on the same domain. One thing that the previous owner did, however, was she ran several ad campaigns with e-zines that have decent PRs, but none of those links are live any more.
I'm wondering if it might be a good idea to do something different with it, like put a blog on it. (Would it be helpful to add into 3WL?)
Scott:
Zero page rank means only that there are not enough links into the site for it to have a PageRank of 1 or higher. I think you misunderstood whatever Brad was saying, because he is an expert SEO and would know better than to make a statement like that.
It's true that if a site is banned, it will have no PageRank — but then, if a site is banned it will not show up in the index at all, either.
Hi Jon,
Interesting study. I'm mostly impressed with the clickthru rate that you have on your biography. Do you have any tips to give me on this?
It's almost 30% of the people reading your article click on the link provide.
Mine is below 12%
How you do that?
Thanks..
I am new to creating articles an have a question. Is it better to pay someone to write articles for you (such as elance.com) or would you suggest using IAW.
I had 10 articles written for my site (wich sell real products) and I have had problems getting them accepted.
Also do you recommend using Niche Inspector for research in finding new keywords and new products to sell online?
Plain and simple if a site is banned or very new it will not be in the index Scott. Page rank has nothing to do with a site being banned.
Would you agree Scott that if a site is banned you will not be able to find it in Google? Well type in 3 way links and you will see it. So if its in G then it's not banned. DUH
Don't be so harsh, James. Play nice!
Hey, happened to your blog?
Hi Guys,
I was wondering what the bio line method is that you use in your signature box for your articles?
Thanks
Paul
Is there an update today? Say yes lol…..
Not today Desmond, but tomorrow. =)
Hi Jonathan,
you stated in your post "Google has now indexed 8 of the content pages" and that happened only after 3 weeks. It seems to me that this is a long time. What do you do to get indexed by Google ?
I use the addurl page http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl and for me for a new site submission it takes approx 7 days, for a new page or post of an already indexed site about 5 days.
Does somebody know if there is an addurl page for Yahoo ?
thanks in advance
ciao
alexander
Hi Alexander,
I was little surprised at how long it took for the entire site to be indexed as well. The crawler came around within 3 days and spidered the entire site, but for some reason Google lagged in actually showing the pages in the index.
Great article Jon!
How can I increase my Google Adsense revenue on my site?
Any ideas?
Keep up the good work,
Debra
This is a great case study. I am just recently starting in the internet marketing realm after having success with mostly eBay selling. This has really given me some great ideas on where to go from here. Thanks a lot Jon.
Ryan Horne
I have recently put up a new site based on a gaming niche. I've so far written two articles on EzineArticles. One has peaked at 23% CTR and the other at 36% CTR. Rather spooky, but these also averages out at 26%. Until I read other peoples CTR I assumed this was the norm? All I can say about my articles is that they are on a popular niche, entertaining and around 500 words apiece.
Hope this helps
Marcus Ty
Jonathan -
Do you have any suggestions or can you point me in the direction of any guru's that have worth while programs on list building?
Thanks
Dave
Hey Jonathan,
Just wondering how your project is running now. Do you also use Social media websites to generate traffic to this site ?
Dave