Web Empire

In my earlier post on Getting Traffic I described some of the elements that go into getting visitors without having to pay for them. Here I will discuss briefly paying for visitors.

First let me say that free traffic is better. This is a new blog in a very competitive market — I haven’t even posted 40 messages yet (this is the 39th). I started in mid-November, and averaged 10 visits per day for the last two weeks of that month. In December I averaged 30 visits per day, averaged over the month. Now, three weeks into January, I’m averaging 50 visits per day for this month. I have not paid for any traffic to this site — the cost is too high for this market, and as of yet I haven’t even offered anything for sale, it would be wasted money. So long as the stats keep moving in the right direction I will be satisfied with natural traffic.

However, for some sites, it is worthwhile to pay for traffic. I am not talking about paying those cheesy 10,000 visitors for $10 junk sites. I’m talking about advertising. People talk about buying ads, but the ads themselves have no value — we aren’t promoting brand recognition here, we are promoting websites. Ads are only worth the profitable traffic they generate.

To know which ads are generating profitable traffic, you need to know:

1. How much traffic comes from that ad
2. How many of those visitors buy your product
3. The average lifetime value of your customers

For #1, simply look at your stats, and see how many have the referrer from the site and page you are advertising on. Some ad sellers providing tracking information (especially if it is pay-per-click) as well.

#2 is a bit more difficult, you need good tracking software to keep tabs on the conversion rate. You can make your own tracking software by adding a simple random variable to the ad URL (e.g. www.mysite.com?t=1263) then pass that $t value through to your order form. That will only track immediate sales, not those who bookmark your site and return later to buy, but it is much cheaper than the tracking software.

The third value, average lifetime value per customer, is something that changes over time, and needs to be tracked with good accounting records. At first, when you only have one product, the lifetime value is equal to the sales price of that product. But you need to develop more ‘back end’ or related products, to really make money. Once you have established a relationship with a customer through their first purchase, they will be like gold in the bank for future purchases, so long as they are highly satisfied with their first purchase.

Once you have gathered the above information, simply look at the cost of the ad, divide by the number of paying customers it generates and subtract that from the average lifetime value of your customers. The higher the value in the lifetime value - ad cost equation the better. If that value is negative, the ad costs more than it is worth.

I have just added a sign-up form for update notices, please sign up. Right now I’m thinking there will one email per month, with descriptions of what I consider the most important posts in the preceding month, and perhaps an occasional product announcement (list members will get a discount offer). I will not be flogging affiliate products on that list.

Ruud Hein over at Search Engine People has begun a series of posts explaining How Search Really Works, in a very basic and understandable way. I recommend it for any beginners out there. As of now, there are only two posts, so it has a long ways to go if he plans to cover the topic thoroughly, but those first two have him off to a good start.

The above link is to the first post, the second can be found here at Keyword Links. That is an aspect of SEO that the beginner often misses; focusing on the elements on the web page itself to the exclusion of all else. There are ways to influence how people describe your content, thus maximizing keywords in the incoming links. But better yet is building your own Web Empire, where you can send hundreds, even thousands of links to your own sites, with complete control over which pages get links and the text in that link. That is one of the beauties of having multiple websites.

This is a good example of why you should put your website content into a database and use modular design. Suppose you want to have site-wide links from Site A to Site B. You can use a simple line of PHP code in one of the components of your site to display a static link to Site B, but then every link has the same text, and links to the same page, both of which weakens their overall value.

Instead, call a function on Site A that returns the number of pages on the site, which will correspond to the counter value in the content database. Then call another that looks up the keyword (or first keyword for use in the META tag) or page title (which should include the keyword) for one of the pages on your site, chosen at random but changing only every week or month. (See my earlier post on Random Elements on how to do that if you don’t already know). Now you have lots of different links, including ‘deep linking’ that has relevant keywords in the link text.

When it comes to designing individual sites in your Web Empire, variety is of primary importance. Sites should use a variety of layouts, and use different colors, fonts, etc. Specific design considerations are different for the various types of sites we described earlier.

For your ‘factory’ site, think in terms of one or more databases. Put all of your content into database tables, and plug that information into the individual pages. So, for our site listing various dinosaur species, we might have a database table with these fields:

• Scientific Name
• Pronunciation
• Common Name
• Meaning of Name
• Earlier Name(s)
• Order
• Suborder
• Infraorder
• Family
• Time Period
• Location
• Type (e.g. Duck-billed, carnivore,  etc.)
• Length
• Height
• Weight
• Description
• Notes

Not all of these fields would have values for every species, but you would fill in as many as possible. Then parts of this same data could be used on other sites, especially the fields that contain simple data, rather than extensive text. You do not want to use the same description or notes on other sites, but you can include the alternate names and earlier names and size and such from the entry for Tyrannosaurus Rex in a side-bar on your site about Sue, one of the most complete T Rex fossils ever found.

If you can develop several different table with inter-related information, all the better. For each time period, such as the Jurassic, you might have a table listing environmental conditions on different continents at that time, or plant species found at various localities during that period. Then, whenever you mention a dinosaur is associated with a particular time period, you can include a side-bar about what that time period was like in the area that dinosaur was found.

Your simpler sites, like house sites, can use data from your database tables when appropriate, but otherwise tend to be simpler in design. Page content may be static, with the only use of include functions being for the repetitive header and footer information, and for optional ads and links that will appear or disappear as they are sold.

On your junkier sites, you can use your database information to increase the prevalence of  relevant keywords. For example, your site with text from an old book on dinosaurs could include a sidebar labeled ‘Interesting Dinosaur Facts’ that uses your database to display information on a random species on each page, using a variety of text constructs around the data fields, such as:

The {common name | scientific name} form the {time period} was {height feet tall | weight pounds in weight}.

or

{length} foot long {scientific name} a {type} of dinosaur, roamed {place} in the {time period} period.

Of course, you need to make sure that only records with all the required fields filled are used for your constructs, so they look right.

Of course all of your sites should follow basic good SEO practices such as are described on this, and many other sites. Build a dozen sites in this neighborhood, then move on to the next. If it takes a year per neighborhood, your dinosaur empire will be complete in five years, by which time you should dominate the field. It should only take a few weeks to get the start of your factory site up, though you will continue adding records to the database (and hence, automatically, pages to the site) for several months. You should begin earning a trickle of money by the second month, and by year’s end it should be substantial. If you pick a more profitable topic than dinosaurs, you should be earning a living from your websites by the end of the year, and ready for retirement when your Empire is complete in five years.

Since making money is the ultimate aim of our Web Empire, we need to know how we are going monetize our sites before we build them, as that can affect the layout and content of particular sites. For our Dinosaur example, as with any other topic, we have these general sources, and within each some specific examples of typical monetization sources:

Advertising Agencies

• PPC links like Google Adsense, or ads other advertising aggregators  like adbrite or fastclick
• Text links like TLA or backlinks and linkadage

Custom Advertising

• Ads from lodging providers at destinations like Dinosaur National Monument
• Ads for Eco-Tours that include dino excavation sites

Affiliate Sales

• Dinosaur books and videos from Amazon
• Dinosaur posters  from Allposters

Your own Products

• Dinosaur ebooks for children (i.e. how to catch a dinosaur; dino care and feeding; etc.)
• Educational dinosaur-related multi-media presentations

Other monetization options that may fit your topic, though they aren’t very easily applied to dinosaur-oriented sites, is to offer services (dinosaur sitting?), a subscription site, or selling tangible products (you could sell fossils, but it probably wouldn’t be profitable enough to be worth the effort).

These are just a few examples of the sorts of things you might consider under monetization. So, how does this affect site development? If you are selling advertising space, be sure not to make the factory site look junky by including too many ads — on other sites, experiment, and see what works best (i.e. is most profitable). For affiliate sales, provide a lot of information before sending people off to the affiliate site. You want to pre-qualify them, so that a high percentage of those who click through to the affiliate actually buy something. You don’t want to send away potentially profitable visitors down a non-profitable link. Luring them to click on something that won’t buy is self-defeating.

Put a lot of options in your site design for easily placing ads, both those you sell and ads for your own products. This is easily done using PHP and includes() within if(file_exists) conditional statements. Side-bars can be a series of such conditional statements, prioritized according to the importance of the content. Then it is easy to fill-in with ads and links.

In our last post in this series we will look at further considerations for designing the individual sites.

We begin by planning the general layout of our first neighborhood. Each website is like a building in the neighborhood, with links like streets (most of them one-way) and our databases forming an underground infrastructure that supplies one or more of the sites with services.

Since this is to be a self-supporting neighborhood, we need one main industry — a factory building, located at one edge of the neighborhood. The factory site will be our biggest and ‘best’ site. It will provide information on dinosaur species, so let us say one page for each species, plus pages on each genus, along with various support pages, indexes, sub-topics and such.

The factory site is our showcase — the kind of site people will want to link to, just for the valuable information it provides. This site will require the most work, but since we chose a topic we are interested in, even passionate about, it should not be too onerous a task to research and write about all those dinosaur species. Remember, our sites will be designed with modules, so they can be easily managed and expanded. So we will make a list of 100 or more species of dinosaurs, and so soon as we have the first dozen or so pages, we put the site on-line.

Our neighborhood will need its own gather-place, a town-hall site, but let’s put off building that until we begin to get some traffic. We know it is coming, however, so we will leave space in the factory site for a notice (ad) about that site. The meeting place will be a forum for dinosaur related discussions.

Of course the neighborhood needs several houses for the workers to live in. These are the sub-sub-topic specific sites. One might be about the Tyrannosaurus Rex called Sue that was found in the Dakota hills and was the subject of some controversy. Another will be about ‘pregnant’ dinosaurs (of which something like three have been identified so far) — and how the bones reveal their maternal state. Another about dinosaur eggs, and another about dinosaur tracks, several about specific dinosaur excavation sites, etc., etc.

House sites are relatively small, maybe a dozen pages each. They zero in on a topic though, and provide intense coverage of that specific subject. Since they are related to the general topic, they all provide valuable incoming links to the factory site. The factory does not link back to the houses, which are spread over as many different servers (and IP addresses) as possible. If, for example, a house site describes a location where a herd of pachyrhinosaurs died trying to cross a river, there would be links back to the pachyrhinosaur page on your factory site, as well more general links to the factory home-page.

We will need some garages and sheds, maybe a barn or two in the neighborhood, just to hold junk. These are sites made up of reprint articles, public domain material, etc. They are fast-build sites, with as much text as possible, spread out over lots of pages. Find an old book on dinosaurs and divide it up so each page has four to ten kilobytes of text related to a single subject. Copy reports off government sites that relate to Dinosaur National Monument or other locations with dino-related keywords in them. Several of these sites will blogs, you can even host some of them on free-hosting sites, just for the SEO benefit of links from a high-authority site.

Each of these junkier sites will link to the factory, and each may link to several house sites as well. People searching for outdated dinosaur terms will find them in your old-book site, and go from there to one of the other sites in your Empire. Or people searching for information on Dinosaur National Monument will find your governmental-reprint information, and likewise end up going to your other sites.

It is a good idea to have one more blog site, this one your personal public-relations site (personal branding), where you establish yourself as an expert in dinosaurs. Your interest may be an amateur one, but many amateurs have high levels of expertise in their areas of interest, even if they are not employed in the field or do not have academic credentials. Post frequently about current news items about dinosaurs, interesting facts you uncover during your research, etc.

As you research all these other sites, keep your eyes open for a subject that might make a good link-bait site. Two or three link-bait sites would do the neighborhood a lot of good, if you can come up with that many effective ploys. If you don’t know what link-bait is, see the Wiki article on linking, it has a few paragraphs describing this.

If you create your own dino-related product, you will need a sales site as well. You can use a sales-site for funneling affiliate traffic too. A typical sales site has no outgoing links other than the purchase link. You can have multiple sales-pages on one site, each in its own subdirectory or sub-domain, but don’t link between these, however tempting it might seem. Once on your sales page you want your customer to click on the purchase link — don’t distract them with any other options.

The local newspaper site is another optional, but useful site to have in the neighborhood. This site just posts RSS feeds relevant to dinosaurs. This would not be a very busy news-room, but there is a constant trickle of new findings about dinosaurs that your target audience is likely to be interested in. Alternatively, you might want to include this as a side-bar on your factory site (for a busier news subject you can make this a separate site).

Our next post will discuss our plan for making money from each of these sites, which will affect the layout specifics that will be the subject of our last post on this topic.