Online dating is a huge market online.  We straddle the fence between Match.com and BlackSingles.com.

For us, BlackSingles has a better reception as far as media conducive to our demographic and better yet, they take the time to keep their banners fresh and up to date.  Our experience shows that Match.com has a seemingly larger database of potential dates…. But what good is that if no one is getting to those landing pages?

Here is an example of the testing that you should clearly do to effectively monetize traffic via all of your affiliate programs.

Goal: To get as many site visitors into a conversion funnel to become a dating customer.

Traffic Sources: Mostly organic traffic on one of our test sites:  www.blackatlanta.com

Our ClickThrough Stats:

Dating Impressions and Click Throughs for Multiple Banners

Please note that Revenue can still be generated on this clickthroughs!   As with most affiliate programs, we are most concerned with:

• setting that all important cookie
• getting them to sign up for an email list for the affiliates to market and convert
• a direct conversion, (which did not happen yet on these clicks)
  

Banners:

Banner 2401

Banner 2408

Banner 2413

Results

So out of 253 banner impressions, the 3 different banners got varying degrees of rotation.

Per the results, Banner 2413 was the winner with 80 impressions and 4 clickthroughs (5% ).  This banner also received ALL clickthroughs!

Some Reflections

Now, some may say that should clearly promote a winner only after a solid test number of impressions given.  Sure, we could have waited for 100 impressions a piece for ALL banners, but sometimes, a HUNCH can help you in making money.  Just ask Warren Buffet.

So clearly, the last piece of this is that we immediately go into our ad server and deactivate the two losers!

Now, these results were click through summaries for that the Affiliate program has provided to us.  You can use your analytics program or vendor programs… JUST GET STARTED!!!!

**************************************************************************************************************************

Update:  as of 2/10/09, Our study still stands… The Click through rate has decreased…. but with over 300 shows a piece, still has a better click through than the other two.

Click Through Is Still The Winner

DEFINITELY turning all traffic towards Banner 2413.

ShareThis

In our article “Size Length and Size Matter? Home Page Testing on BlackAtlanta.com…”, we discuss landing page bounce rates.

High bounce rates normally means 1 of 2 things:

1. Marketing Deficiencies: You have lost the attention of the user based on how they got to your page (PPC or Organic Positioning) This happens because you have not properly matched landing page content to the reason the site visitor lands on your page. If using PPC, your landing page needs to cater to the content of the Ad!
2. Technical Glitches: Perhaps the page loads too slowly and the site visitor just … well, uh… BOUNCES off of our your page on to other surfing fun.

Now, if a page has a high bounce rate, you should use analytics to find out how they are coming to the page. At that time, you will be able to determine what you can improve. For example, if they are coming from Google search to your page for the keyword “cool pianos”, you need to cater that landing page to COOL PIANOS.

Now, here is the challenge: Because the page has a high bounce rate, once you improve the page, you need some immediate attention-grabbing content and/or features.

My suggestion is to install an analytics program such as Google Analytics. Learn which pages and section of your website are getting traffic and WHY. Then, even if you are getting high bounce rates, strategize on how to take advantage of that traffic coming to the page.

Catch the attention of your visitor ABOVE THE FOLD OF THE PAGE!!!

Lastly, if you are PAYING via PPC ads, SUSPEND and pause your campaigns until you figure out what you can do to decrease bounce rate while improving the completion of the desired action.

Read more on our experience with BOUNCE RATES at http://blackinternetmarketing.com/size-length-and-size-matter-home-page-testing-on-blackatlantacom/-/Black-Internet-Marketing/2008/11/10/

ShareThis

Slim Chews: Lose 20 Lbs in ony 6 Weeksl

In our post describing the importance of the landing page experience and good search engine optimization, we announced testing a review site based on weight loss.  Today, we show a screen shot of SEO excellence.

As our a world-renown blog and podcast guru, Mwangi at TheDisplacedAfrican.com, questioned the reason behind showing you publicly our experiments.  We remind our readers that we are not just another “make Moolah” with our tongues hanging out type blog or site, but a site that tries to add another level of value to our readers.

As a guy who has been in web development and strategy for almost 10 years, I am not the professed guru of internet marketing, nor do I show the $100K Google Checks.  So what we do work on though, is showing our clients and readers proof in our own way.

On to Proof… 

In our article on creating a landing page based on a niche affiliate product, we launched www.SlimChews.net.  Read that post in your spare time…

Two ways for Traffic…

As you know, we can always

1. PAY to send traffic to a site.  OR, if skilled enough and let’s face it… LUCKY enough,
2. We could gain traffic naturally through search engine optimization.

SEO Keywords Results for Our Experiment

For the affiliate product of “Slim Chews”, a weight loss that at some time or another must have been reviewed by Oprah and featured on TV, we wanted to be found for:

• Slim Chews
• SlimChews

Our target audience would be those who are familiar with the product or had heard of the it.

Results:  Since posting that blog post on October 21, 2008, we have gained a good share.  See below.

Keyword:  “SlimChews” position #2 (as of 11/18/08).

Please note: Through our SEO value, we “own” position 2,3,4,5 via our SEO. Although these are other sites, it funnels traffic back to our landing page.

SlimChews Search from 11/18/08

Keyword: “Slim Chews” position #1/551,000 Results! (as of 11/18/08).

"Slim Chews" Search from 11/18/08

Keep checking us out! And if you need to lose weight with a system reviewed on Oprah, click here!

Please let us know your thoughts below via our comments section!

ShareThis

BlackAtlanta.com currently runs on a popular flavor of a Content Management System.  Normally, as many of you may know, a CMS runs dynamically from a Database and generates the page content based on the structure of the page requested.  Modules, components, content, etc. are all placed into the page based on the specific page or channel requested.

Our test was to determine whether we could reduce bounce rates between:

• A short version of the page, where the whole page was above the fold.  Options in navigation and choice were limited.
• Or the regular version of the site.  A very LONG page with many options.  (Image shown to the right –>  very long so we really decreased the size )

Based on analytics, (Powered by Google), we were able to assess that “Black Atlanta Events” was a very high keyword searched regularly on the site.  As seen below, we thought that we would:

• “bait” users by placing the Events link in the top left hand hot zone of the page.
• We even thought that we would make the font larger to further entice…
• Reduce the number of options on the page by taking away navigation
• Steer users into a reduced number of channels through graphical content boxes.

We ran this test between November 5-7, 2008 and compared this mini-home page landing page against the regular landing page (home page) between October 29-31, 2008.

Hypothesis

We hypothesized that the limited option landing page would funnel users into more popular areas of the site immediately, and thus reduce the bounce rate.

Now, Google defines the bounce rate as:

The percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. Use this metric to measure visit quality – a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. The more compelling your landing pages, the more visitors will stay on your site and convert. You can minimize bounce rates by tailoring landing pages to each keyword and ad that you run. Landing pages should provide the information and services that were promised in the ad copy.

Now, all traffic was organically driven.  So keyword relevancy would be high based on Google’s strict algorithmic excellence   LOL!!!

Our findings.

We honestly pulled the plug early on this assessment.  We found an immediate reduction in the total number of page views, AFTER the click through.  In other words, those that stayed and beat our Bounce rate…. were only looking at a few pages and THEN bouncing.

Bounce Rate

Although we did see the Bounce Rate INCREASE by a little over 8% with the shortened page, we cannot fully call the test conclusive, as the number of page views sent to the shortened landing page was only 28% of what the normal long page received.

Time on Page

Strangely enough, the time spend on the page almost doubled with the shortened page.

Conclusions

As stated above, very few conclusions can be made without truly increasing the number of test page impressions, where the home page was the entry point.

I AM a betting man though.  So here are my conjectures:

1. The Increased bounce rate experienced on the landing page, could be improved with a simpler layout.
2. The bounce rate also had less “flair”, meaning that the bored user left the page.
3. Our other experiments on landing pages that are longer than the fold of the page, show that with the use of Clicktale, a large percentage of users actually scroll down the page past the fold and some even scroll back up, until they find where the click will be.  This is an interesting observation, that means that most users don’t mind scrolling if the content is appealing enough and if they feel the page has the content that attracted the click through.

We will continue to tweak our landing pages and improve hot zone studies.  For the time being though, we will allow this user demographic base to continue to get what we project they like…. Longer pages… More Content, More choices…and yes… more sizable length

If you like this article, please subscribe to our newsfeed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/BlackInternetMarketingLessons

ShareThis

Back in a blog at http://blackinternetmarketing.com/sex-sells-or-does-it/-/Black-Internet-Marketing/2008/09/23/ entitled Sex Sells or Does It?, we ventured into the notion certain sexier images and banners may provoke more click throughs.  However, on our test site, www.BlackAtlanta.com, the opposite occurred.  The LESS sexy banners were clicked by almost 3-4% higher rates. 

We concluded that the demographic liked bikinis less in regards to a possible dating scenario. 

In order to conduct that study, we used an AD SERVER.  An ad server allows you to: 

• test multiple versions of banners, just as we did.
• advertise clients’ ads on your site
• give your code to your sites where you might be buying traffic to track and gauge the true results of a campaign
• Give your clients an online portal to test and see the number of impressions and click throughs that your site provided. 

OpenX is a great solution to this.  On our site, we used an older version called OPENAds.  We have since upgraded to OpenX and enjoy the robust and dependable code base.  We encourage you to do the same, even for your own banners on your own site.  Testing is key, and following trends will allow you to increase click throughs of your campaigns and offers… which ultimately leads to Increased revenue or visitor actions. 

Enjoy OpenX!

ShareThis

By concentrating on the weight loss niche, we will launch a site and make revenue from a natural organic traffic model, and then see how we can throw some PPC money at it 2-3 months down the line, if Organic Traffic has not picked up.
The weight loss niche, from an online perspective, is one that I am very interested in.  You see, in 2 days, it will be November 1st.  This means that, as online marketers, we have exactly 2 months to get on the ball for the New Year’s Eve Resolutions.

I already have a couple of weight loss sites.  Having lost weight on my own program (drug or metabolism enhancement free), I have a key interest in losing weight.  (See Fat3500.com for my ebook).  However, I also know that there are a lot of weight loss aids out there that are heavily sought by people.  So it is a GREAT niche to master to make a few bucks.  Check out slimchews.net for an example site.

Enters the Challenger WU-YI Tea.

Here are the steps I chose to pick Wu-Yi Tea as niche product.

1. Offline research:  First and foremost, there is a real buzz around the water cooler.  I heard someone talking about it and swore they were talking about fitness with a WII instead of losing weight with WU-Yi tea!
2. Based on hearing about it, I decided to google it.  Yep, Very healthy PPC ads.  I did a google search for WuYi and found that there were not a lot of results…. only about a 157K results…
3. See above.

With a well search engine optimized page, I can get some traction with Google …. Now we have to look for search frequency….

Learn to use the Google External Keyword Selector Tool.  You can reach it by clicking here…. So as of September 2008, the following happened :  There were approximately 18,100 searches in September for “Wuyi” !!!!

The keyword has an average Cost Per Click of $2.31.

Value Driven Business Motive

• So we have a good business model:  weight loss
• We have a term that has a decent number of results to compete against for natural or “organic” SEO
• We have a term that has a good frequency of searches (18,100)
• We have a term that has a relatively “Juicy” CPC.  This means that we have an EXIT plan if we build a site.

What is an Exit Plan?

My exit plan would be to buy the domain, create a website, optimize the site for Search Engine results, and then see if my site will convert.  If It does NOT convert, then I am looking to SELL the site.  Maybe someone else would be able to tweak it and make it work.  At a CPC of over $2 for a simple click, this means that a decent attempt at search engine penetration, with a HOT domain, in a sought after product field could mean a decent ROI for purchase and time.

For the next posts, I will show you the next steps, including Affiliate Program searches, Domain Name Purchase, (even though I already bought it), web hosting Setup, Blog Setup (my chosen method of a strong SEO candidate), and initial seeding for Google.

Stay tuned!

For our other WuYi Tea Experimental posts:

WU-Yi Tea Experiment: Planning WUYi.TV Weight Loss Site | POST 1

WU-Yi Tea Experiment POST 2: Changing DNS… Preparing for Site

WU-Yi Tea Experiment POST 3: Creating a Simple Site for SEO Aging

ShareThis