Interesting Facts about the Banner & Display Advertising

Display Advertising/Banner click-through rates (CTR) are at all time low. To anyone reading, This is not any new information. The downward trend has been visible since the early 2000s. I recently came across an interesting article from Mike Volpe on the subject of Display advertising, which presents 10 Shocking Facts about Display Advertising. It gives you a number of reasons why Banner advertising is not very effective. I don’t totally agree to this. Banner Advertising is as effective as the person working on its strategy and the success depends upon how much constructive efforts have gone into it, just like any other form of online Marketing. The Ad creative, ad copy and the overall strategy play an important role. After all it’s a $16 Billion market. Nobody would spend that much money, without any realistic returns. However, the article came out with some really interesting facts. Here are the most interesting ones:

• The average click through rate of display ads is 0.1%.
• Only 8% of Internet users account for 85% of clicks on display ads. (This was taken back from 2009, I am sure this would have improved significantly by now, especially with the introduction of Re-targeting)

Now setting the fun facts aside, what are the possible solutions to make the banner more effective?

• New Metrics? – Another way to look at the banner is through metrics other than the most widely used which is “CTR”. A lot of other options exist:
  • Ad Engagement – No industry standard definition yet, but primarily reviewing if the ad creative is appealing and if a user interacted with the ad in any way such as a mouse over the ad for a certain period of time.
  • Display time – The time for which the ad was visible on the page.
  • Engagement Time – The time for which user interacted with the ad.
  • As per Google, Technology is helping advertisers factor in- emotional engagement and impact on offline behavior (like in-store shopping choices) as display advertising metrics to measure a campaign’s ROI.
• Rich Media? – Rich media, so far, has proved to be very effective at improving ad engagement. From videos to games to carousels and forms, all available in the banner ad. A 2012 study by media mind states that rich media ads are three times more likely to bring prospects to your websites than traditional banner ads. According to ClickZ, rich media advertisements can generate 6 times higher engagement rates than static display ads. Take a look at this article on how rich media can increase engagement and improve ROI on display advertising.
  
  

  Ad feedback on Reddit
• Different way of Targeting? – Google primarily uses contextual targeting to put ads on publishers’ website. No doubt this is the best option available for advertisers at the moment but this clearly isn’t working very well. Facebook lets you use “Custom Audiences”, or in a way allows you to target users on the basis of their profile, demographics and how they have interacted with your website or content, but again, we know that the CTR on Facebook is generally much lower, in comparison. A better way would be to use targeting in a different way. For example, this is the reason why retargeting ads work better than normal ads. Similarly, letting user take control of what they want to see and what they don’t want to see, can help increase the Ad engagement and CTR. This can be accomplished by a simple ad feedback system such as the one which is offered by Adzerk and currently in use on many popular sites like Reddit and stack-overflow. It lets users give a thumbs up or down to an advertisement.
• Fewer Ads? – Google predicts that by 2015, the average number of banner ads seen by an internet user will decline by at least 25%. People will less banner ads but the ones they will see, will be more relevant and connect with the user which will take up the engagement rate.
• ✔ 111,492$ paid✔ 0.1$ per unique click✔ 1$ per referral✔ 2$ free signup bonus

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Posted in Adsense

Adsense CTR – Everything

In the Internet marketing world, CTR (click through rate) matters a lot, not only for advertisers but also for the publishers. The main role of an advertiser is to create an ad or copy that can get higher CTR. Similarly, publishers need to place these ads in a way that they generate highest CTR for them. From a publisher’s viewpoint, click through rate is one of those essential factors that help them generate money and retain advertisers. If you somehow fail to give adequate clicks, your advertisers are likely to flee. Therefore, let us dive into the world of click through rate and understand what exactly it is.

What is Adsense CTR?

CTR or click through rate is the relationship between impressions and clicks. Out of the number of times your ad or search result is shown to a visitor, how often users click it and not ignore it. This metric is among some of the most important benchmarks of your toolset for online marketing. It is vital for you to understand its importance in terms of online success. In a nutshell, click through rate is the number of times an ad is clicked divided by the number of times the page or ad unit is viewed. In other words, it is the ratio between number of page views and number of click on the advertisement.

CTR = No. of clicks / No. of exposures

CTR% = No. of clicks * 100 / No. of exposures

For instance, if you have an advertisement running on your website/blog and it is viewed by 100 people. If 5 of them click on the ad, your CTR would be 5 percent. On a PPC Model, the higher the CTR percentage is, the better earnings your site will generate for you. Therefore, it is important to place the ad in such a way they are viewable and at the same time not obtrusive. Striking a balance here is important to generate ad earnings over a longer term.

You must be wondering what a good CTR is. I’ve seen websites performing from anywhere between .05% to whopping 10%. It primarily depends how much time you are spending to optimize your website for more clicks and what niche the website is about. More about this later, but you should also know that the average CTR for the display advertising industry is about .10%. Then you also have many publishers out there who are getting considerable clicks on their Adsense Ads but their revenue is pretty low. Let us cut out the myth once and for all. Getting a huge number of clicks on Adsense advertisements will not guarantee good income. There are a number of other factors involved. For one thing, you need to targets the ads that can give you good PPC. Sometimes a single click earns you more than 100 clicks. It all boils down to the eCPM or actual earnings. There are ways using which you can measure the eCPM for ad units/types and optimize it.

What is a good Adsense CTR?

It is strange how everyone is looking for a satisfactory answer to one question: what is a good click through rate for Adsense? Let us attempt an answer. It is necessary for you to understand that it is against Adsense TOS to reveal exact statistics about your account and of course, the CTR. Therefore, it would not be possible to pepper up the article with real life examples.

While some blogs do everything to increase their click-through-rate and fail to increase it more than 1 percent, others do get close to the double figures. Majority of the bloggers have CTR between .50-to-3-percent-range. At this rate, not only blog or website earn a decent amount, but it also stays pretty safe. One the other hand, if your ad units get too many clicks and high CTR, your Adsense account will be exposed to certain risks.

You must be wondering if you can compare your CTR with other blogs. Unless you know the blogger personally, there is no benchmarking tool to that for you. Even the Adsense Scorecard, which google calls a benchmarking tool, does not really compare you with our peers in terms of CTR.

Why is it difficult to compare CTR?

Comparing CTR, and a number of other Adsense statistics, is difficult because every website/blog is incredibly different. Comparison might even be pointless at times.

Why? Because the number of people who click on an advertisement vary tremendously, depending on a number of factors. Outlined below are some of the factors that play an important role in deciding your click through rate:

CTR varies between different NicheSurprisingly, CTR varies tremendously from one blog/website to another, even if your blogs have every other factor controlled. The simplest reason that comes to mind is the topic of the blog. For instance, many publishers believe that websites with products related topics appear to get higher click-through-rate than other sites. Their argument is pretty valid. According to them, people tend to click on ads more when they are in buying mode. When they see an ad that meets their requirements or is about the relevant product, they are much more likely to click on the advertisement. Even if they don’t want to buy that product, visitors feel good to explore and find more details about it, which will help them make a decision in the future.

CTR might vary seasonally
CTR as well as CPC can, in fact, vary seasonally. The Adsense team mentions about this on its support page. For instance, there are countless blogs out there who claim to havehigher CTR on weekends. While some have pretty low impressions throughout holidays, some feel that the holiday season, can generate huge variations in CTR. Of course, these variations vary from website to website, considerably depending upon the visitor demographics.

Relevant Ads
Let take this one with an example. Let’s say you’ve got a blog about ballpoint pens. Which ads do you thinks have more probability of being clicked – ballpoint pen ads or dog food ads? Of course, your visitors are interested in ballpoints and they will click on ads relevant to what you are talking about on your blog. In almost all cases, the more relevant the advertisements are to the subject/niche of your blog, the more likely they are to get clicked.

While there could be few blogs with topics that are difficult for Google to distinguish, but generally Adsense is quite good at this. They have ads for almost all verticals and niches.

There have also been a few cases where bloggers have contacted Google about irrelevant ads, and Google has made changes to fix the problem. In order to optimize your CTR further, you can also block advertisers which are irrelevant to your domain, if you see their ads/creatives appearing regularly on your ad units.

CTR varies on the basis of your Visitor Profile
It has been repeatedly reported that websites and blogs with higher level of repeat (loyal) readers have lower click-through-rate as compared to the ones that have high search engine traffic. The only logical reason to this problem is that your loyal readers become blind to not only your website design, but also the ad positioning, which is whyContinuous Ad optimization is needed for a website to maintain a higher CTR. Repeat visitors mainly look at the content, you share with them, so mixing ads in the content, makes sense too. Search-Engine visitors, on the other hand, are mostly looking for specific information. They normally take action, which puts them in an information gathering mode. As a result, they are more likely to click the ads on your website or blog.

Another group of readers is the one that is referred to your website or blog by another website. Such readers can choose any course of action, depending entirely on what the referrer is all about. However, most of the times, CTR is low for such readers. Therefore, do not expect too much from refered traffic.

What’s around the Ad unit?
There are many design factors that can affect the CTR. You need to be very careful here though. You should not, in any case, draw extra attention on the ads by creating animated graphics or putting them inside a obtrusively colored box. This will only lead to an account ban. However, there are many Adsense publishers out there who have developed some subtle, clever ways to draw the attention of their readers towards the ads.

One important technique that does not break any Adsense TOS is to utilize the areas around your advertisements to your advantage. However, Stats have shown that advertisements perform far better on a clear, white background and white space around them. Why don’t you test between different designs, and see what happens?

Placement/Location of the advertisements
An important factor for click-through-rate is the design and positioning of the advertisements on your blog or website. For instance, if you put the ads on the very bottom of the page, there is a chance that very few people will see them, which will definitely result in very low CTR. You don’t want that, do you? Therefore, you should always position the ads where they can be seen and clicked easily. The same is the case with the colors you choose for the ads. Select the right colors and you are definitely going to improve your CTR.

• Place ads above the fold.
• Merging them with the content.
• Using Wider, instead of longer Ad units.
• Using either a similar or contrasting color theme [Test what works best].

Click-Through-Rate varies depending on other option to ‘click’
Does your blog contain any outbound links other than the Adsense ads? If your answer is NO, there are more chances of your visitors to click on those particular links. There are countless bloggers out there who are using this technique to increase their revenue. All they do is drive traffic to their website through useful, high-quality content and do not have any other outbound links. Their click-through-rate is normally higher than the pages with outbound links. Of course there are a few problems with this technique, since you would not be able to interlink your blog. This will not only make your site insular, but also makes search engine optimization difficult. De-clutter your blog for better results!

How important is CTR?

Click-through-rate is the most important and heavily weighed part of quality score. What is the first thing Google looks to when trying to get the feedback of users on advertising text? Of course, CTR! If a particular ad has a higher click-through-rate, it means that majority of the users find it useful and relevant to what they are searching. Relevancy is the second most important component. Google considers the relevancy of your keyword to an advertisement. Similarly, google uses CTR to understand the relevancy of an advertisement to your website and maintains a quality profile for your website. Sites with very low CTR, could be considered poor in terms of quality (exceptions being there) while the sites with very high CTR, are suspected for activities against google’s policies and have to go through automated and manual reviews.

How to increase Adsense CTR

Content is the king. You must have read this statement a hundred times, and it is absolutely true. High-quality content is something that makes your visitor stay on your site and click on the ads. Besides, making a couple of changes to your ads’ placement and types can also boost your click-through-rate. Outlined below are some tricks you should follow to get your desired results.

1. Epic Content

This is the most important tip anyone can give you increasing your click-through-rate. Great content brings more visitors, resulting in more revenue. Rather than creating countless useless sites made just for making some quick bucks, take some time out and build impressive content for your blog. Writing high-quality content is undoubtedly the way to go. It will not only help with your click-through-rate, but will also allow you to leverage on premium SEO. Moreover, it will allow Google to place targeted ads on your blog for your audience. Having more relevant ads is the only way to lure your visitors to click them and boost your overall earning.

2. Advertisement Placement

You need to test different placements, positions and combinations for advertisements on your blog. Avoid putting ads on random positions, since it will have a negative impact on CTR and your earnings. What you should be doing is trying out different colors, types and sizes of ads in order to see what works best for your website. Moreover, you need to keep switching the ad positions. This technique works pretty well with your regular visitors. Since your loyal readers visit your blog regularly, they start ignoring the ads if they are placed on the same position all the time. This is known as the “banner blindness”. Periodic change in the placement of ads is the only way to cope with this problem.

Do you get frequent suggestion from Google? Majority of bloggers just ignore these emails from Adsense. You should not. Read what they have to say and then test if its correct.

3. Modifying the ads

Always try new things. Try Modifying the advertisement colors to more bright versions rather than standard adsense colors. Majority of the Adsense enabled blogs or websites utilize the standard colors and visitors get used to it. Changing the colors frequently to brighter shades allow the ads to stand out from the rest of your blog’s content. It will definitely grab the attention of your visitors. Also, you need to make the font of your ads bigger than the content font. This will allow the user to see the ad immediately. It will make the ads prominent, increasing the chances of clicks.

4. Remove unwanted ads

Do you have a lot of posts or pages? Just remove all those ads from the places that do not convert (use heatmaps!) and have very low CTR. De-clutter your blog. After doing this you’ll see that clicks are no more wasted through unwanted, crappy posts.

5. Suitable Keywords

Keywords play a very important role in gaining search engine traffic. Since visitors coming from search engines contribute most to the CTR, it is vital for you understand the importance of choosing the right keywords. Here is a case study showing how you can increase your CTR and Adsense income:

Case Study

The cash you make from Adsense is controlled by quite a number of variables, such the number of visitors you get to your blog, the amount of money advertisers are paying in your particular niche and the percentage of visitors that click the advertisement. Clearly the more ads pay you, the more users you are getting and the more they are clicking on your ads the more money you will make.

We have carefully chosen two websites with similar layout. Therefore, neither of the factors is going to have any considerable effect, apart from the possibility of visitors to these websites to react differently to the content. The screenshot from Adsense Interface below shows the CTR of each site.

The very first thing you might notice between the two websites is that they have very different click-through-rates. The first site or site 1 has an average click-through-rate of 23.33 percent, while the other one has an average of 3.95 percent. When you compare the results, the first site is clearly leading in terms of clicks. It gets 6 times more clicks than the second one. This means that we can increase our revenue 6 times if we know what to do, can’t we?

If both these websites have similar layout, color scheme and design, what exactly is causing these tremendous differences? The answer is all in the suitable keywords. Site 1 targets a “buyer” keyword, while Site 2 targets an informational keyword. For instance, if we take the example of dating niche, Site 1 would be about the finest dating sites you can join, while Site 2 would be about tips and tricks on how to meet the partner of your dreams, etc…

It is possible that the same advertisers are offering the same products. However, Site 1 attracts people who are ready to make a buying decisions and all they are looking for is a little help and encouragement. On the other hand, Site 2 will convert only a few people since most of the visitors will be looking for some free advice or information. You must understand that it is not just the niche in general that has such an incredible effect on adverts; it is the relevance that counts a lot. Considering the same example of dating niche, the Site 1 offers information on dating sites, so the ads are related to those sites. This shows that the content of the website and the ads are incredibly close. On the other hand, the Site 2 might offer general information about dating, meeting people, starting a conversation, etc., but if the ads are promoting dating eBooks and websites, there is very little in common between the Adsense ads and the content of the site. This affects CTR to a great extent.

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Posted in Adsense

Niche Site Making $1000/Month

In April-13 I created a niche website on a topic I had no prior knowledge of.

4 Months later this site is generating an income of over $1,000, completely passive.

In this post, I reveal my exact strategy I used to build this niche website. No holds barred.

Need Proof?

The earnings from this site in September-13 of £625.78 = $1003.19 (at time of writing)

If you’re wondering why it’s not in dollars, well I reside in the UK

Keyword Research

The way I approached keyword research for this site was different to most. I wanted a tried and tested niche that I could build a quality site for, one that I knew would make money.

It’s all very well using keyword tools to find the search volume for keywords and getting excited when you see 74k monthly exact searches for the keyword “How to Make French Toast”.

Which is what I did very early on in my SEO career. I proceeded to rank a website at #3 in Google for this very keyword, before discovering that there was no money to be made in this niche. I digress…

What I needed was a PROVEN NICHE, one which another SEO/Internet marketer was ranking well in the SERPs and making money from.

Here’s what I did;

I went to Flippa.com

Flippa is my number one source of free information on profitable niches. I mean, what better way to find a niche, than using sites that are being sold with Analytics, PayPal and AdWords income to prove the niche?

Searching for a Niche

My Flippa profile has 3 saved searches I use over and over again;

1 – Saved Search #1

• Sites that have already sold
• Over 12 months old
• Net revenue of over $100.

2 – Saved Search #2

• Sites at auction
• Over 12 months old
• Net revenue of over $100.

3 – Saved Search #3

• All UK TLD Websites
• Over 12 months old
• Net revenue of over $100.

I mentioned in my previous post “buying a website in a competitive niche“, that UK websites quite often go for much less that thier .com counterparts, and it was this saved search that came up with the goods.

Being based in the UK I have a fondness for .uk sites. I can write about topics for a UK audience easier than I can for a US audience, purely because I live here and know the mentality of my visitors.

Niche Selection

Keyword Research

I cannot emphasise enough just how important keyword research is in today’s SERP environment. As a matter of fact, this has always been important, however most SEO’s just don’t get it.

Get this step wrong and you could end up wasting both time and money on a site that has no chance of ranking, or one that will take years to get anywhere near a good return on investment.

For keyword research, my tool of choice is Long Tail Pro (LTP), there is a free version which will do just fine. However I currently have the Platinum version as it also allows quick and easy competition analysis and domain availability checking, more on that below.

The primary function of LTP however, is finding those golden keywords. I’m not going to cover old ground, so if you want to know more about Long Tail Pro you can check out the videos on their sitehere.

Competition Research

If the competition for your chosen keyword is too high. you will always be facing an uphill battle. What we want is low competition keyword within a financially viable niche. By viable, I mean there must be money changing hands, people advertising, people buying services/software etc.

Long Tail Pro’s keyword competition feature helps us to gauge how competitive each keyword is. It does this by applying its own algorithm to the top 10 search results and combines factors such as Age, Back Links, Keyword in Meta Tags, Juice Links etc.

Here is the bumf from their site which explains how they do it;

The Avg. Keyword Competitiveness tells you how authoritative the results are AND how well they actually target your chosen keyword

This highly complex keyword competitiveness formula takes a look at all the results and gives you quickly a number between 0 and 100 for how competitive the results are based on authority and keyword relevancy.

as a general guideline; here is what I have found from my own analysis for keyword competitiveness:

• 0 to 10 – No competition
• 10 to 20 – Extremely low competition
• 20 to 30 – Low competition
• 30 to 40 – Moderate Competition
• 40 to 50 – Somewhat High Competition
• 50 to 60 – Very High Competition
• 60 to 70 – Extremely High Competition
• 70 to 100 – Don’t even think about it!

What I Look For

In general I am looking for keywords with competition less than 35, preferably under 30. The lower the better, and as you can see from the example keywords below, within just a 20 minutes I was able to find 3 low competition keywords I could target, all whilst writing this blog post 

Keyword 1

Keyword – Divorce Process 
UK Exacts – 4,400
LTP Keyword Competitiveness – 25

This first screenshot is taken from the Long Tail Pro keyword results screen, as you can see the Avg KC (Keyword Competitiveness) for the keyword ‘Divorce Process’ is just 25 out of 100. The best part about this is that this keyword gets 4,400 UK exact match searches each month AND it has a CPC of £1.71 ($2.73).

The keyword details page breaks the competition down even further.

I can see the number 1 result is a .gov.uk site, these are very hard to beat in the UK search results and as you can see there are 0 links going to this page. This site is ranking based on the authority of the domain alone.

Scrolling down through the list I can see the reason the competition is on 25/100 is because these pages are not directly targeting this keyword. We have variations such as “Divorce Procedure”, “Divorce Proceedings” etc

With a bit of effort I am pretty confident I could get a site (EMD with prefix or suffix) ranking on page 1 of Google.

Keyword 2

Keyword – Log Cabins For Sale 
UK Exacts – 9,900
LTP Keyword Competitiveness – 26

 

Again the keyword results screen shows the avg KC for the keyword ‘Log Cabins For Sale’ is just 26 out of 100, and with 9,900 UK Local Exact Match searches it looks great. However this time its not the CPC that interests me, it’s the big ticket item.

I know that a log cabin will cost thousands, if I could create and rank a site for this search term and generate say 20 leads per month….how much do you think a long cabin company would pay you for those leads? £10 each, £50 each, probably much more than that considering they will be making thousands from just one sale.

What if you offered to sell them your site? Do you think you could sell it for $5,000? I think that would be a steal for them!

The keyword details page has results that I like to see, Ebay, GumTree and 3 sites with ZERObacklinks.

Keyword 3

Keyword – Survival Knife 
UK Exacts – 2,400
LTP Keyword Competitiveness – 16

The final keyword I found is “Survival Knife”, with a KC of just 16 and local UK Exacts of 2,400 it definitely worth looking at.

I know you may have seen Spencer over at Niche Pursuits build a site around survival knives, however he was targeting the US market and it looks like the UK market might still be wide open 

Here the keyword details page breaks down the top 10 results in Google. You can see how after Penguin 2.1 we have sites ranking with very little backlinks. A few of the sites appear to be Ecommerce stores which Google seems to love, but we do have 2 YouTube videos ranking in the top 10.

This is a keyword I would definitely look into some more.

Domain Research

Keyword Dump

All of my domain purchases start out this way. I perform a “keyword dump” into an excel sheet, which entails thinking of as many related keywords to the niche as possible.

The above snippet shows how I start with a keyword such as “Window Blinds”, then I move onto related terms such as “Wooden Window Blinds”, “Patio Window Blinds”, “Vertical Window Blinds” etc.

Then you have all of the prefix and suffix combinations just in case you can’t get an EMD. Below is a list that of those I use often;

Prefixes

• my
• just
• the
• best

Suffixes

• HQ
• review(s)
• guide
• online
• net

Once we have a nice list together in excel we need to find out which domains are available.

Bulk Availability Checker

I use NameCheap.com’s bulk checker and simply paste up to 50 keywords from the excel sheet into namecheap, select the TLD’s I am looking for (usually .com, .net, .co.uk – I will sometimes include .org & .org.uk, but don’t tend to use these much).

Once the results are returned, I simply look through and copy/paste all available domain names into an excel sheet.

What to look for in a Domain Name

You will find that you have favourites from your list, I always do too!

I have a list of questions I mentally go through as I consider which domain name to register.

1. Which country am I targeting? (I will avoid UK extension if targeting the US market – however I will consider a .com or .net for a UK audience if the .uk is taken)
2. How long is the domain name? (I try to stay under 20 characters if possible)
3. Does it contain the keyword?
4. Has it been registered before? (if it has make sure the site wasn’t dodgy and check the link profile as explained in the private blog network guide)

Registrars

I like to have my domains easily accessible and I have 2 favourites when it comes to domain registrar.

I use both GoDaddy and Fasthosts (for my UK extension domains).

Obviously I spread my blog network sites over multiple domain registrars….but you knew that from reading my guide right 

Content Planning & Website Structure

I like to take a logical step to my Content Planning. I need to know I have enough fuel for the fire so to speak.

Without content our sites are worthless, if you have plenty of related topics to write about then go for it. If not, you may need to review your keyword/niche choice.

I actually kill 2 birds with one stone here and plan both the site content and structure using another…you guessed it…Excel spreadsheet

Content Writing

Home Page

I always write the home page myself. I like to have more control over the root of the site, and the homepage is usually where I want my traffic to land.

Here is what I aim for on my homepage;

• Over 1,500 words
• A Video where possible (even if it’s not my own)
• At least 2 images (graphs work for certain niches, also screen shots and tables of data etc)
• 2 or 3 outbound links (OBL) to authority sites (think Wiki, Youtube etc)
• Inner Page links to relevant content

Here is a very quick and dirty image showing the structure I follow for the homepage of my niche sites;

Inner Pages

I often outsource inner page content to my writer in Kenya. He has a very good grasp of the English Language and knows exactly what I like in my articles. It took a little work when I first hired him, but now he saves me so much time it’s untrue.

The price I pay for each article depends on the length. We have negotiated a cost per word of $0.005, so for a 500 word article it costs me just $2.50.

I also use this same writer for my private blog network sites as discussed in my previous post,Building a Private Blog Network – The Right Way. I do this because the outlay for the content and I prefer it to spun content. Using unique hand written content gives me multiple benefits;

1. The quality of the sites in my private blog network is good and would hopefully pass a manual inspection, as I am providing unique content, thoughts, news and opinions. The inclusion of an email opt-in box in the sidebar is a little bit extra that most p
2. I can also use this content on my Tier 2 and Tier 3 sites without worrying about Google penalising spun content.
3. I have a readily available source of content to use in link building SEO test sites that are basically ‘throw away’ sites.

Video Production

Video is a relatively new area for me, and I regret not getting involved sooner. I found it was very easy to get my first video produced and published, all with minimal effort if I’m honest!

As my niche site is based loosely around a form of training, it gave me an opportunity to have a series of videos created around the topic. I wanted the video’s to be unique and helpful, not just another video copied from YouTube and uploaded to my channel.

To get the ball moving I found a site that had lots of training material for my niche, however it was in an awful format (some kind of weird flash thing). Anyway, I used this content for my videos and ended up creating 5 video’s in total.

(I am comfortable using other peoples content in this way, as there will be no repercussions for duplicate content. My info is in video format, which the search engines cannot read  I wouldn’t copy another sites content word for word…ever.)

How to Create Video for your Niche Site

There are 3 steps to creating a niche site video;

1 – Find/create the content that will appear in your video

You can create the content yourself, have your VA write it or take it from an existing source. Whichever way you choose you need some content that will go into a PDF document.

2 – Create a PDF document (or power point presentation) and begin adding the content from point 1

No need to be fancy here. Just create 3 slides;

• An intro slide – this will have the video title along with your brand/domain name and logo.
• A closing slide – this will have a call to action to visit your website and a link to the next video if you are planning on producing a series.
• A content slide – this will be the meat of the video, you can populate this slide exactly how you want it and have your VA populate the others, using your slide as a template.

3 – Export all slides from the PDF document

Once you have your completed document, simply open the file, and go to File –> Save As –> Other Formats, and choose PNG as the file type.

This will export each slide in your document to an individual PNG image file

4 – Open Windows Movie Maker and import the slides

Open Windows Movie Maker and drag in all of the slides from step 3. This will create a video for you.

You can then choose each slide in turn and change the length of time that slide will be shown in the video…Simples 

If you would like a more detailed Step-by-Step post on the creation of niche site videos, please let me know in the comments and I will do so.

My Niche Site SEO Blueprint

I took 4 simple steps to rank this niche site from nothing to top 3 for it’s main keywords.

1 – Build a Private Blog Network

Everything you need to know to build a private blog network the RIGHT WAY can be found in my previous article – Building a Private Blog Network  -The Right Way

Please Note – There is a cost to building a private content network. These costs can be kept down by utilising expired domains and cheap $1/month hosting accounts. The costs will rise if you buy at auction.

The biggest expense in a private blog network is time invested and content creation. Outsourcing the content is a great idea if you can afford it. If not you can get busy writing 350+ word articles yourself, keeping them highly relevant to the niche.

What’s more, you can use a PBN for more than just 1 money site. For this niche site, the PBN I use point to at least 3 of my money sites, so the cost is split across all 3 domains.

If you have any questions, please ask away in the comments section and I will be sure to reply.

2 – Buy Guest Posts

Believe it or not, you can get some quality links from Fiverr.com, but I can understand why so many people hate on them. The trouble is, those people don’t know what they are looking for and they end up buying crappy links.

Try this: Go to Fiverr and type in some of the phrases below;

“Post your content”

“Post your article”

“Niche Relevant Guest Post”

“KEYWORD Guest Post”

Using the search terms above you can get some crazy links from quality sites all for $5. It’s insane the amount of people who don’t fully understand the value of some of the links they are practically giving away.

3 – Relevant Blog Comments

I still use blog comments, and I do these manually myself.

I ensure they are HIGHLY NICHE RELEVANT, I don’t care for the Page Rank, No-Follow or Do-Follow, number of outbound links etc.

I simply get involved in the conversation by writing highly interesting/engaging comments that the webmaster will accept and even reply to. Just remember, keep it relevant, keep it manual and don’t spam.

Use your name or psudoname in the name box, don’t add your keyword here. It’s junk and it’s oldskool.

Also don’t drop your link inside your comment, just have your URL link using your name as anchor text, you greatly increase your chances of your comment being accepted that way.

4 – Guest Blog Posts

These are niche specific articles I use to reach out to larger more authoritative sites across the industry.

I tackle guest posts in 2 ways.

1 – Write the content myself

2-  Find a very passionate and authoritative figure on a niche forum and pay them to write an article.

Whilst number 1 is both the quickest and cheapest, it’s not always easy to write about something you have no knowledge or interest in. Number 2 is harder but can prove quite effective, especially when you find someone who really knows the lingo of the niche.

By creating a personal email to each webmaster who’s site I want to get my guest post published on, I’ve found I had some good success and some quality backlinks as a result.

Backlinks to Avoid

Site wide Blogroll Links – These are a big no-no, if you get a sidebar ‘blogroll’ link on a site that uses a blogging platform such as wordpress then you are in for a shock. When your link is placed in the sidebar, each and every page that exists on that site will link back to your money site.

So a site with 1,000 pages….will give you 1,000 backlinks = Avoid.

Web 2.0 with Spun Content – These took a hit with Penguin 2.1 and there is just no reason to go spamming the web with duplicated content on hundreds of sites. I much prefer to build my own blog network and select a few of the more powerful web 2.0 properties and add a unique article to each using my writer and VA to do so.

How I Monetized this Niche Site

Google AdSense

I’m not the biggest fan of AdSense, but it is probably the easiest and quickest way to monetise a website, especially one which is providing information.

My CTR is very good and despite the average CPC in AdWords being just $0.14, it still brings home a nice income of $1,000+ per month.

Amazon Associates

I have had some moderate success with Amazon in the past but it wasn’t until the 3rd month I actually implemented it into my site. After I created the videos to provide some ‘training content’ for my visitors, I looked at what else was out there and found Amazon had lots of products to promote.

The truth is, Amazon converts well, and I love the fact that whatever my visitor, once clicking on my link, buys, I get paid. Seriously you wouldn’t believe some of the things I get a commission for;

I am not in the Baby Niche, nor the Automotive Niche, and none of the other niches you can see above. However I get paid no matter what my visitors buy, which is great.

Conclusion

Overall I spent a grand sum of $55 on content, $30 on a logo and $0 on design as the theme was free.

The theme I used can be found here, it’s no longer supported but it converts well. Especially if you use a Google AdSense link bar for the navigation bar as you can see in the screenshot below;

The above image shows how I use the Google AdSense link bar as a navigation bar in my theme. This ad slot brings in around 15% of the total income for this site. Something for you to think about.

I hope that this post give you the confidence to take action right now and create a niche site of your own.

As a side note – I don’t reveal my niche for one reason, and that is I have seen other fellow bloggers have their sites sabotaged by jealous/malicious readers using negative SEO tactics and I am not prepared to let these guys attack one of my sites…I’m sure you can understand.

It’s been a long post and a fairly comprehensive one at that, please ask any questions you have in the comments below and I will answer them all.

– Lewis 

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