100k Dollar Niche Site Part 1

As a supplement to our Niche Site Ranking series, I wanted to write a series explaining exactly WHY ranking well is so important for a niche site builder, this might seem obvious but you might be amazed how much you are leaving on the table by settling for long tail traffic. Way too many builders get caught up in building their empire, meaning the more sites they build then the more impressive it seems, at least on the surface. I constantly have to fight this train of thought as I love building out sites, but building out links and tracking stats and monitoring rankings is about as exciting as watching grass grow.

The problem is that this skill set is one that can take your earnings from mediocre to extraordinary, from zero to hero, from rookie to seasoned veteran. The art of ranking well is a bonafied game changer when it comes to your earning power from niche site building. Let’s take a look at why this is so important and do some math that should quickly open your eyes.

Niche Site Conversion Rate

There are a number of ways to calculate conversion rates but for this example I am simply going to use one of my Amazon sites as an example. Amazon does a nice job of calculating your conversion rates for you and this will give us much more accurate data than a hypothetical formula that we just pick out of the air. In the month of December my Bike Trainer site sent a total of 1428 clicks to Amazon and converted 133 sales from those clicks. This is a 9.31% conversion rate, which is very good in my opinion and helped no doubt by the Christmas buying frenzy. It is also important to note that we sent 4719 unique visitors to the site during the month, all organic SEO traffic.

So let’s take a look at what our 9.31% conversion rate earned us for income last month. We are looking at these as starting points to give us a baseline to compare how much the earnings would increase based on an increase in traffic, so bear with me.

Ok so you can see that we earned about 1600 dollars from this one site in December. Let’s review what we know already.

4719 Uniques for December

1428 Clicks to Amazon which gives us a 3.3 Clicks to Visitor Ratio.

We sold 133 items to those 4719 Uniques for a 2.8% sale to visitor ratio.

This traffic earned us about $1600 dollars for the month from this particular site.

If we reverse engineer some math then we know that every visitor is worth about 34 cents ($1600/4719=.34 cents)the way the site is setup currently. If you’re a PPC guy and you know you can buy traffic for say .10 cents a visitor, then you should be able to return a nice little profit but I am NOT a PPC guy so I am going to stick to Organic Search traffic.

So let’s say we wanted to pump up the income to about $3000 dollars per month from this site, then we know that we would need approximately 8800 visitors simply by dividing $3000 dollars by .34 cents to arrive at 8823 visitors. This isn’t a perfect formula because you don’t know that you can convert at the same rate, but for our purposes we will assume that it stays pretty close to that same ratio.

Improving the traffic is only one way, the most basic way, to improve your income but you can also tweak your click through rates, product offerings etc but let’s stick to traffic. This is going to get complicated enough without introducing these other variables and maybe we can perform an experiment on them in the future.

Click Through By Position

There have been a number of studies done over the year studying what percentage of clicks you will get depending on where you rank for a keyword. What I mean is if a keyword is searched on 10k times and you rank #3 for it, how many of those 10k searches can you expect to earn with your #3 ranking. Take a look at the chart below, I pulled this image from SEOBook but I have seen it published around the net in many places, so I don’t know who “owns” it. The search data originated from a massive study done by AOL using their own search data.

Overall Percent of Clicks

1. 42.13%, 2,075,765 clicks
2. 11.90%, 586,100 clicks
3. 8.50%, 418,643 clicks
4. 6.06%, 298,532 clicks
5. 4.92%, 242,169 clicks
6. 4.05%, 199,541 clicks
7. 3.41%, 168,080 clicks
8. 3.01%, 148,489 clicks
9. 2.85%, 140,356 clicks
10. 2.99%, 147,551 clicks

The #1 position earns 42% of the search clicks for a particular keyword which is surprising in itself, but look at the massive drop from #1 to #2, it goes from 42% all the way to 11% which is worth a WOW. Even more discouraging is you can be on page 1 for a keyword and earn a whopping 3% of the search clicks for that particular term.

Now, before some of the tighty whitey’s in the readership start trying to flex their massive brainpower, these percentages are NOT cast in stone and they CAN vary from search engine to engine or even from niche to niche. If you speak in broad and general terms though, these numbers are generally accepted to be a very reasonable ratio to work from and they illustrate my point nicely. Don’t get hung up in the exact percent, make sure you understand the concepts that are being discussed.

How We Left 18k Dollars On The Table In December Alone

So far a LOT of information to set up the topic and I know that it’s a lot of information in one post. Seeing as I am in danger of having an Epic Mark Post, I am going to break this up into a two part series and finish up later this week.

When I first started writing this post, I was feeling pretty good about the income for December, but once I did the math, you are going to see how I left 18k dollars on the table from just 4 stinking keywords. FOUR keywords could be the difference between 1800 dollars and 18 THOUSAND dollars! Just four, and the best part is, there are about a dozen pretty strong keywords for this site and a few hundred more longtails.

Stay tuned for part 2 where I will show you exactly why ranking well for targeted keywords is absolutely critical for your success. Too many people build a site like the Bike Trainer site, get some success and then move on to the next site. I am going to show you that a rather innocent looking site like this one, could be a 30k dollar a month powerhouse of a site.

Any of you have a niche site that churns out 30k dollars a month? Unfortunately, neither do I….yet.

Check out Part 2 of the 100k dollar Niche Site Series.