Using WordPress for Organic Traffic

January 24, 2008

A new strategy is slowly emerging in the SEO aka Organic aka Free Traffic world. The new buzz is about using the wordpress platform as a content management system, preferably on your own hosted domain. WordPress has “friendly URLs” features so its natural for setting up minisites with content rich keyword focused articles – to attract traffic from Search engines free listings. I have already experimented with the platform and I can say that “other things being equal” it pulls more traffic from Google etc. than a simple HTML site. So far my results show about 3-5 visits per article per day. I can monetize this traffic at around $0.05 per visit – so thats about $0.15 – $0.20 per article per day – or $5 – $6 per article per month. No question this is so far absolutly great in terms of ROI.

the real bottleneck is volume – and the question remaining is – can such result be linearly extrapolated 100X

Will keep you updated.

More on this – including a free eBook – on Caroline MiddleBrook’s Making niche sites with WordPress


EWealth.com review

July 9, 2007

Compared to some of its direct competition, EWealth.com isn’t the largest of the affiliate marketing message boards on the Internet. Digital Point has more discussion on the subject without even trying to corner the market. But that’s not to say that EWealth isn’t worth checking out.

Choosing to focus completely on the subject of marketing, EWealth doesn’t bother scratching around the edges. Many forums strive to cover a bit of everything, and in the process, they lose half of the appeal that they’re trying to reach out to their audience with in the first place

It’s refreshing to see a marketing board where you know that the members are there for the same reason. And what might that reason be, you ask?

Well, EWealth covers anything and everything you could possibly need to know about affiliate marketing. All the major commission networks are covered. We have forums for ClickBank, Commission Junction, Clickbooth, Linkshare, NetTraction and oneNetwordDirect to name just a few.

You’ll find plenty of communities housing the usual Clickbank and Commission Junction chat, but it’s rare to find a line-up as comprehensive as this. The downside is that many of the smaller affiliate forums have sparse few posts and the topics are fairly few and far between. It’s never a good idea to pack a board with lots of less active forums, and EWealth would undoubtedly benefit from a more compact category listing.

If you can get over this, you’ll find that the community members are friendly and eager to find an answer to your questions. Responses, as you’d expect, are not quite as quick as the larger boards, but they’re certainly more detailed and there is a core of regular experts who can be counted on.

Despite being keen to cover all areas of the affiliation market, EWealth – one way or another – has a community which is considerably lop-sided. Most of the discussion revolves around the Clickbank forum, with up to ten times as many posts in this area as there are in some of the other affiliate schemes. Now admittedly, Clickbank is a popular service and widely used around the world. But Commission Junction is arguably just as influential, while it languishes in almost obscurity below the buzzing Clickbank area on EWealth’s main page.

If you’re priding yourself on offering the most rounded meeting point for affiliate marketing experts, it’s probably not a good thing to have such a heavy weight on one part of the market. That said, EWealth does offer fantastic coverage of the Clickbank service. So if that’s your thing, you really should be marking this down as a site to visit.

The forum offers a fairly popular “Buy, Trade, Sell” area, in keeping with the tradition of webmaster boards these days. You’ll be able to bid on domains, sell your links and get in the thick of the action. The smaller scale of the site increases the likelihood of snapping up a bargain, but it also gives you less opportunity if you’re the one doing the selling or promoting.

All in all, EWealth hosts a tidy little community which will appeal to affiliate marketers who don’t want to get lost in the swarm of members on larger sites. There is a large precedence on Clickbank, which can be slightly misleading for those new to the affiliation game. But if you’re experienced in the field and simply want a friendly forum to share your ideas with, this could be the place to do so.
 


Internet Marketing Discussion Board Forum Research

July 2, 2007

We have performed an extensive research of the leading internet marketing forum (discussion board) marketplace. Stay tuned for our detailed reviews of the best places to pick the latest online marketing information & tips - for free.


Adwords CPA (PPA) Beta Expanding

June 26, 2007

Google is expanding  its CPA campaigns beta. I have been officialy invited and I already set up an initial campaign. Adsense publishers can now promote my products directly for a set payment per sales conversion, rather then per click to my website. I will let it run for several days and report here if it actually brings conversions (sales).


Article Marketing offers superior ROI over PPC

June 12, 2007

With PPC traffic getting more expensive and competitive by the day, it now becomes worthwile to examine again the organic (SEO) side of search engines – as with article marketing – aka content marketing - it might be possible to get a higher ROI on your marketing dollar over there.

A quick example: Lets assume an average unique outsourced keyword optimized article costs $10 and on average that article brings  in one unique visitor per day (365 per year) from organic searches. I have verified with several SEO specialists and this is a rather conservative assumption, as some of these guys claim that with good SEO an article could bring an average 3-5 visits per day.

Lets stick with the 1 visitor per day assumption though.

If you ordered 1000 such articles and added to your website, over a year you would expect to have an additional 365,000 targeted visitors - for an investment of $10,000. The cost per visitor would be 10000/365000 - which results $0.027 per visitor.

This is considerably cheaper than what is available on either Adwords, MSN Adcenter or Yahoo Search Marketing PPC.

Furthermore:

1. Organic traffic is supposed to convert better than paid traffic

2. Some of these articles would bring in traffic in the following years as well – driving cost per visitor down even further.

This seems almost too good to be true, and obviously requires more work and an upfront investment in articles, but if the numbers work then the ROI on organic article listings is much higher than paid search. 

Please comment if you have any real data that either supports this hypothesis or contradicts it!


MSN Adcenter Content Ads upgrade

April 15, 2007

MSN Adcenter has launched its content network.

MSN: “Campaigns will automatically expand to include distribution to content pages within the Microsoft network, such as: MSN’s Health & Fitness, Money, Tech & Gadgets, Travel, and Windows Live Marketplace”

Updates re. results. soon.