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It’s now week 4 of the case study.

I have originally intended to make this little experiment last for about 6 weeks, but I did a quick evaluation of the statistics, reviewed my strategies, and realize that there isn’t much of a point carrying on with this experiment.

It might take abit more time and tweaks to make this site achieve its $1 per day goal, which I thought was a fairly easy goal to hit for.

I think there is a very important lesson from this case study; so important that we can stop right here and we will already have learnt alot.

What is the main reason that this case study didn’t fail to hit my goal?

Lack of RESEARCH.

Duh, right? If you think you’ve heard this all before, hear me out.

The most critical mistake I made was this: I took the gist of the content right out of Content Goldmine, and simply assumed that since the niche and articles were well-researched, it will work with any business model.

Wrong. Dead wrong.

Does this mean that Content Goldmine is an inferior membership site? Far from it; it’s excellent.

What could proper research have done for me?

In summary, in this past 4 weeks, the site has netted me a grand total of $1.35 from Adsense. The affiliate products weren’t a good fit for the site, because I couldn’t find any on Clickbank that is niched enough to obtain a good match.

Again, poor research. I’ll probably add some CPA ads to the site to aid in the monetization. I should probably remove Adsense ads because the payout from the clicks are way too low.

Okay!

I hope you learnt some stuff from this case study, even though it didn’t turn out to be as successful as I envisioned. There were many lessons to be learnt though!

My better half and I thoroughly enjoyed doing this case study though; it was good insight for her. She finally knows what I’ve been doing in front of the laptop all the time.

In the spirit of giving, and to thank you for supporting the case study..

If you’re interested in looking at the actual niche site to further aid you in your education, just drop me a personal email, and I will reply you with the URL. You can find my email address at the sidebar, in my bio.

Hope you enjoyed this first case study! More to come for sure.

Do drop me some feedback as to how I can improve the case studies I do in future!

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It’s been 3 weeks since this case study started.

Here’s a brief recap.

Week 1: Posted 5 articles on the blog, and then submitted one article to EzineArticles. Once the article is approved, it is then submitted to Goarticles.com and then posted on the blog.

Week 2: About 5 articles have been submitted. Stopped all activity because at this point of time I wanted to add the site to 3 Way Links to demonstrate the power of it.

Week 3: This was quite a passive week. We stopped almost all activity on article submissions and just wanted to get our site onto 3 Way Links as soon as possible. Unfortunately, an upgrade was being done to the server and I couldn’t get my account going. We submitted the site right after 3 Way Links came back online, and we got approval in a day; very efficient.

Here’s a summary of our traffic stats.

52.90% Direct Traffic
34.19% Referring Sites
12.90% Search Engines

Of course, direct traffic mainly came from me and the better half as we edited the sites, added posts and made changes to it in general.

34.19% came from our article submission efforts at Ezinearticles.

12.90% came to out site while searching for resources on our niche. However, because ours is quite an obscure niche, our traffic was on the low site.

Earnings-wise, we’re still far from our aim of a consistent $1 per day; we’re getting the hits, but not the clicks. The affiliate programs aren’t converting as well.

So far we’ve mainly had $0 days, and peaked at $0.46 cents, with a total of 3 clicks.

Up until now, things aren’t looking very positive, but maybe 3 Way Links still needs some time to take effect. Afterall, we’ve only been on the network for about a week.

CY provided some useful information about article marketing to me that I’d like to share with you as well.

1. Don’t write a summary of your article in the article body. Instead, include the summary in your bio box.
2. Write a Part 1 article, then link to part 2 article from your bio box.
3. Write a how-to article, then link to a presell page where you presell a tool that can automate the how-to process you mention in article.
4. Write a product review, then link to a page from your bio box, where you offer extra bonus and discount if they purchase via your affiliate links.

If you have any comments/ideas at all, do not hesitate to drop me a comment!

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How time flies!

We’re now in week 2 of the case study.

We’re starting to get visitors from the search engines. 6 today, to be exact.

Traffic from ezinearticles are still coming in, even though it’s been about 3 days since we last submitted.

As described in the original post, we’re now at the stage of witnessing the power of 3 way links.

Unfortunately, 3 Way Links has been down for the past few days, so we’re experiencing some lag time here. It’s been fully functional as of today, and our site should be accepted by tomorrow.

Earnings-wise, things haven’t been very pretty either. Mostly zeros, and some 1 cent/4 cent days.

And yup, no affiliate sales.

We’ll see how things go when 3 Way Links comes into the picture.

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Things are getting interesting.

Through the meticulous efforts of the better half, we already have 4 articles on Ezinearticles.

Traffic-wise,

I’m still not getting any traffic from the search engines. Traffic is 100% from search engines. The direct traffic mostly came from me and the other half, when we wanted to see how our site looks like after editing.

Here’s a screenshot of our traffic from Ezinearticles. About 5.5% clickthrough rate.

Not phenomenal, but decent, so I’m leaving it as it is for now.

Earnings-wise, we’ve made a total of $0.32, purely from adsense.

I was getting slightly disappointed that we weren’t getting sales from the affiliate products we were promoting. I wanted to suggest to the better half some ideas about how to bring more attention to our affiliate links.

In order to do that, I wanted her to understand more about what we’re promoting, so I clicked on the link, and…

*BAM!*

404 Error!!

And I got a huge scolding from the better half for screwing up when I’m supposed to be the “expert”.

Turns out that Gotrythis wasn’t setup properly on my server.

Horrified, I went to check out my links on this blog as well, and…

*BAM*!

I couldn’t access them either!

How wonderful.

The better half wants me to make a public apology to all the visitors of the blog, which I curtly refused.

Huge lesson learnt though; always check your links!

Anyway, the action plan for now is to slow down on articles submission.

I might get her to drive some traffic from Yahoo! Answers, but mainly, now what we want to do is to witness the power of 3 Way Links.

Again, to learn what it’s all about, read SEO Myths. Why not? It’s free!

I apologize for the goofup. I guess this is what happens when careless people do live case studies.

Stay tuned for more good stuff to come.

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It’s been 2 days since the better half submitted the first article to Ezinearticles.

It was approved in less than 24 hours.

So far, we’ve had 152 views, and 6 click throughs to the site itself, for a CTR of about 4%.

Not fantastic, which is why we have gone on to edit the resource box, which I think looks much better now.

The site has also been indexed, but we don’t have any searches coming from the search engines yet.

Profits-wise, no sales of affiliate products have been made, and I’ve earned $0.10 from adsense clicks in all.

So far so good I guess. We will submit 5 articles in this fashion. Once those 5 have been submitted, I will submit the site to 3 Way Links in order to better compare the difference.

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Inspired by the niche site case study Jon Leger did on his blog some time back, I decided to do one myself, now that I’m getting more savvy with niche marketing.

If you haven’t seen it yet, I highly encourage you to do so.

In a nutshell, I will kick off this case study by briefly planning out what I have done, and what I will do.

The twist is that the better half is the one who’s going to be executing the plan; I will merely be the strategist and advisor, and of course, the tech guy. I set up the site for her, and made it look nice and all that. She’s the one rewriting the articles, looking for graphics, and submitting the content.

And yes, she’s never done anything like this before, so it’s all quite exciting.

To make things easier for her, I’ve chosen to base the site on a topic that she’s interested in.

1. For now, I’ve already had the site set up, in a wordpress blog, using rewritten PLR content from the excellent Content Gold Mine. What I had her do is rewrite all of the content, and then post 5 of them onto the site as basic content. Step 1 is done for now, and we have a fully-functional site. However, in order not to skew the results, The URL of the site will be kept confidential for now. In time to come, I might decide to reveal the URL; or not. (It’s getting zero traffic right now.)
2. Tomorrow onwards, we will start driving traffic to the site via articles submission to Ezinearticles. Note the process we’re trying out though; we will send these articles one by one. As each gets approved, we will then post them to three other places at the same time: 1) The blog. 2) Goarticles. 3) Associated Content.
3. In the meantime, she will submit the site to major article directories.
4. Also, she will be submitting the site to the 3 Way Links network. (Learn what it is from this free report. You get a discount when you sign up to 3 Way Links from here.)

For now, that’s the battle plan. I’ll be posting the results on here, probably weekly. Or maybe I’ll post whenever there are significant results. The goal for this site is to hit an average of $1 in profits a day. Which would mean $30 a month. Monetization methods include Adsense and affiliate links. With a few affiliate sales, I’ll easily exceed $30 a month, so let’s see what goes on from here!

Some things you might want to know…

• I didn’t do any research on the niche prior to starting out; I merely presented the other half with the topics that were provided by Content Gold Mine, and asker her to take her pick. So I have no idea how profitable the niche is.
• Content Gold Mine does recommend a few affiliate programs, but I didn’t choose to use them. Instead, I took all of 5 minutes on Wealthy Affiliate’s Clickbank research tool to find 3 top ones to promote. I hope that’s not considered cheating!
• I have no idea how powerful 3 Way Links is going to be, but judging from Jon’s prior case study and his free report, it’s all good.
• I’ll be posting the results in the form of charts from Google Analytics and Go Try This. (GTT is currently unavailable for purchase, unfortunately; it’s an excellent piece of software.)

I hope this case study proves extremely insightful for the uninitiated to niche marketing. I also hope it shows you the power of article marketing and 3 Way Links!

It’s all very exciting for me and the other half as well; even if the site flops and we don’t manage to get the desired amount of profit from this site, this will be a fantastic introductory course to niche marketing for her.

Lastly, I hope this inspires the non-action-takers to take action as well.

Nothing happens until something moves! This case study will show you that it’s all doable.

So let’s kick some butt!

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