How To Get From 0 to 4,000 Vists A Day - Revisited

This is going to be one quick tip (really two) that is going to form part of something a lot bigger (hey Jess ;-))

Anyway, there are many reasons why blogging is perfect for affiliates; you can quickly add new content and have the content automatically integrated with links and other widgets, you can also appear to be an authority on a subject when you're really not (take this blog for instance ;-)) but the bit I love is that you have at your finger-tips a system to really exploit the long tail.

Back in March I wrote a post called How to get from 0 - 4,000 visits a day in 10 weeks and it was pretty much well received in the SEO and Affiliate marketing community.

What a wrote then is still true now. But now I'm going to extend it a bit.

On the end of the last list should be "extend your target posts into infinity and beyond.

I see many affiliates target the same areas as I do and often a rye smile comes across my face when I see them all target "head terms" with new sites. My view is to dive as far into the long tail as your imagination takes you and then allow the data that your analytics software to drive you further into the longtail and ac cross subsets of your chosen niche.

I use some subscribed to software to do this, but as others have told me not to give away my competitive advantage, I'll tell you how to do it by hand.

Every week I'll look at my keyword referers and write down any that I think will be good post topics and allow me to attract some good niche traffic with suitable merchants to promote with it. If you've already started in the long tail, written a decent amount and thought carefully to the keywords you've placed in your templated sections then this list should be a veratable bounty of great post ideas.

Get your list to an amount you can comfortably cope with (taking into account you'll be getting emails from merchants and you'll have conversations with affiliates that'll beget other ideas) and post away.

That bit isn't rocket science. But I'm sure many affiliates will see merchants as the only source of post ideas - whether its emails from them or monitoring their site's RSS feeds of new products.

But whilst I was implementing this strategy on my blogs this week I suddenly thought "how do you know you're on the right track if you're ahead of the game by a few months, and how risky is my approach?". For some it'll come with experience and for others you'll have to rely on cold hard stats.

And here's the answer.

You could rely on just looking at the plain old visitor numbers. But my advice is to go a bit further.

When I look at my stats in Google Analytics I do two things. The first is to gauge the bredth of terms. Every time I log in I'll look at the total number of search terms for the past 30 days and see if there's a growth in that figure.

This is a bit more useful if you're looking at exploiting the long tail.

But there's an even better method. My advice is to look at the ratio of search volume for your ten most popular search phrases as to the total search volume for the rest.

Here's the (partial) stats for two of my sites. The second I learned off the first which I've pretty much left fallow until I need to work on it again.

	SITE 1
Total Visits	Top 10	Ratio
1,333	495	37.13%
9,593	2605	27.16%
37,926	11,135	29.36%
-	-	19.26%
-	-	12.78%
-	-	13.00%
-	-	10.04%
-	-	12.41%
-	-	14.53%
-	-	12.66%
	SITE 2
Total Visits	Top 10	Ratio
37	13	35.14%
115	33	28.70%
90	18	20.00%
126	45	35.71%
288	61	21.18%
325	52	16.00%
1690	96	5.68%

With the second site can you see how much I've thought about attracting more niche searches than other affiliates and that the ten most popular search terms only attracted 5.68% of the overall traffic?

This is partly because this only looks at Google data. By accident the site works very well on the "head terms" in MSN and Yahoo!.

This forms part of my strategy as, I feel, is the best way to gain good placements in Google:

1) Start Niche,
2) Use your data to go nicher (is that a word).
3) Cover a huge spectrum of keywords
4) As you go you'll attract more links,
5) Leverage that link juice to move more into the head
6) Beat the other affiliates that tried to start too big.
7) Go back and try and mop up some more long tail keywords.

I hope that was of use? Its basically building a pyramid with a strong base and adding more layers and then making the base even wider and building it higher again - always keeping a strong foundation of long-tail keywords.