AdSense Update - First Site Getting Some Rankings
The very first site that I started as part of this project was the site that I used for the 30 Day Challenge. At the moment this site does not even have AdSense on it but that doesn’t really matter at this stage because monetization is irrelevant until there is traffic.
Analysing the Traffic More Closely
So far all the sites have had just the tiniest trickles of traffic - less than 5 visitors per day but yesterday I saw the first little jump, up to 17 visitors for this first site and the rest still sit between 0 and 5. The first thing I did was to check where the site was ranking for my target keyword and here’s the interesting thing - it has completely dropped out of the serps for the target phrase. It dropped out 2 weeks ago and I assumed that this little mini spike must mean that it had come back and it hadn’t.
So I took a closer look at the keywords used to drive the traffic (it is all search engine traffic) and I noticed that they were all much longer tail keywords. I’m not going to give you my actual niche keywords but to try to explain, imagine my niche is “soup recipes” and each article I write is a recipe for a particular soup, I’m getting ranked on keywords like “chicken soup recipe” but not yet for the target keyword.
This is both good and bad. The bad news is that so far I have not even had a single click for my target keyword phrase - I’m just nowhere to be seen in the serps for it which means that I have a lot more work to do before I can hope to start getting traffic for that keyword. The good news though is that I’m getting a whole bunch of traffic (relatively speaking!) for keywords that I am not even targetting which means that when it does start to rank properly, I can expect a decent amount of traffic from this site and hopefully from the niche in general.
Looking at the Rankings
The main keyword is not ranked at all in the serps - I paged through to the point where it said that it would only show duplicate results. What I did next is have a look at the long tail keywords and saw some themes going on, I checked the rankings and sure enough my pages are ranking for many of those keywords in the top 20 results. That’s good news and there’s something better too - I noticed I had traffic for an article I only wrote the day before yesterday and when I checked my ranking for the most obvious keyword, my new page ranks at number 7.
This means that even though my site does not yet have enough juice to rank for the main keyword (which has just over 26,000 competing pages), I do have enough juice to rank for those tiny little phrases and can now do so in a matter of hours. This is great!
A lot of fuss is made about doing keyword research and now that Google has incorporated real numbers into its tools we can now do much more accurate predictions for traffic. It will now tell you how many searches per day that keyword gets which means that you can now more accurately predict how much traffic you will get if you rank number #1 for a given phrase. According to Google, my phrase should drive about 130 visitors a day to the site in the number #1 spot - of course this depends on having an enticing title and description and so on so as always its just an estimation.
But here’s the thing, if I did one day manage to rank number #1 for that particular keyword, the main page may get 130 visitors or so, but how much additional traffic would the site as a whole get? This is one of the advantages of the keyword sniping strategy. By building a whole site (albeit a small one) around a single keyword you get to rank for all those long tail keywords too. This of course assumes that you write original content for each article, if you just publish 10 re-writes of the same thing then you won’t get that advantage.
A Note on Backlinks
I haven’t talked about the backlink strategy yet but I should mention that so far this site has been built differently to all my others because I followed the 30DC techniques. This meant that for the first 3 weeks I only had a single piece of content on the site and I created a squidoo lens, a hub page, a weebly page and an article for EZine Articles before adding any more content to the site itself.
As a rule of thumb, I want to build the site before I promote it which means that I will be writing my 10 articles for the site itself before I start working the web 2.0 platforms and doing any article marketing. But what this suggests to me is that those backlink strategies work, which is encouraging.
Also, there is one other consideration - time. This site was the first to be built so it could just be that. If my other sites follow suit in the next couple of weeks I’ll know its just a timing issue but if not then I’ll know that it’s all in the backlinks!
However even if thats the case I still want to fully develop the site first and I have a very good reason for that. In the 30DC of 2007 I found a niche, did the keyword research, found a nice keyword and started building my web 2.0 sites. In that challenge, having our own domain was not even part of the strategy until the market had been tested. The trouble I had was that I found it very hard to write content for the particular niche I had chosen and by the time I was finished with the web 2.0 sites I couldn’t think of anything to write for the site itself!
First $$$ Earned In the AdSense Project
So far, only 2 sites have AdSense on them - the one I have mentioned here still has the affiliate program and will stay that way until I’ve had 200 visitors and all the domains that are on hold will be ad-free until I start actively working on them.
Anyway, I got my first click the other day, which netted $0.39 :-) We all gotta start somewhere!
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Stumble it!
Barbara
September 12, 2008
I look forward to the day when I earn my first amount, even if it is only a penny!!