When it comes to converting traffic on niche sites sometimes keeping it simple can go a long way.
In this article i’m going to share my experience with niche marketing and give you some of my best top 3 conversion tips to help you monetise your niche traffic with Adsense and Amazon effectively.
I’m not one for fluff, so let’s dive right in …
Tip #1: Don’t Be Lazy With KW Research & Know Thy Traffic!
You’re probably asking yourself “Errr Adam! What the heck does Keyword Research (KW) have to do with traffic conversion?”
In a word and from someone who has learnt this 1st hands in the field, everything!
Effective keyword research is like having a rock solid blueprint to a house where how well your house (=website) is built depends on how well you do your homework!
If you don’t know who your visitors are then you won’t know how to convert your visitors.
You also won’t have any metrics to provide your visitors with useful information that THEY need and be unable to segment and monetize efficiently.
We’ll cover the monetization aspect below but what do i mean by segmenting?
Segmenting 101 in a nutshell:
Let’s take an example — you want to build a website on baby prams.
So after you’ve assessed the market value of this keyword e.g., how much advertisers are paying per click (aka CPC or cost per click) and gauged the competition you’ve decided to go with a baby prams reviews keyword.
All fine and dandy but what’s next?
Well, the next step would involve segmenting that keyword into 3 High Traffic Keywords (=at least 200 local searches each with a high CPC) which will be your categories.
So now you have 3 categories for “3 types of baby prams” that you could base on the top 3 top brand names selling baby prams you’ve got some very useful intelligence that will mould the structure of your site.
You can create 3 different pages for those categories and now know EXACTLY what the visitors on those pages are looking for!
Hence in this way you won’t be alienating your traffic and providing content for your demographics.
This results in a HUGE drop in your bounce rates i.e., how fast people leave your websites because they haven’t found what they’re looking for which is an important on-page factor that determines your ranking.
Hope that makes sense?
Tip #2: Make Use Of “Proven Hot Spots” On Your Sites!
There are 2 hotspots that are the most viewed on a website but unfortunately inefficiently used.
1) 160×600 Ads On The Left Side Instead Of The Right
The hottest Spots for 160×600 ads are NOT on the right as many would have you believe. Kinda odd considering a lot of themes don’t allow you to customise your banner content to place them on the left.
However, we need to discuss a little why placing these ads on the left and NOT the right is the smart thing to do to help your conversions especially when it comes to Adsense.
The reason behind this is the way we read i.e., from left to right and NOT right to left unless your site’s language is in Arabic for example.
Have a question for you!
When was the last time YOU moved your mouse all the way to the right side of a blog you visited to click on an Adsense unit for example?
Unless that ad was REALLY enticing than probably not so often right?
So what ever action you want your visitor taking and think will give them the best value, then make sure when you’re using a 160×600 ad unit that it is on the left side of your site!
If you’re blending the ad into your content (which i briefly discuss in tip #3 below) than this will work in your favor!
2) 468×60 Ads above the fold dead center on your site.
On occasion, visitors will visit your site just out of curiosity and may not be interested in your content.
When that happens they either scroll up after having read your content, scanning as they go along or they don’t scroll down at all.
On both occassions they will see the 468×60 ad and you want to maximize the chance of them seeing the ad and clicking it.
Tip #3: Blend Your Ads Into The Content Of Your Site
The major problem with banner ads is a phenomenon called “banner blindness”.
Back in the day, where websites looked like vegas casinos with flashing banners left, right and center they would grab attention but today you’d need a REALLY eye grabbing banner to catch your visitors’ attention!
So the best way to avoid banner blindness is to once again keep it simple and try avoiding them if you’re starting out.
Instead of using irritating banners that no one is going to see anyway, start using contextual banner ads that list 3 powerful benefits and/or a solution to the problem your visitor is trying to solve.
One such contextual banner ad that is really cool especially when it comes to monetising with amazon based products is amazon’s very own Omakase.
Omakase is actually a japanese phrase that means “I’ll leave it you” and is a common term used to indicate entrustment.
So if you have a page on your site comparing 3 products with discounts via banners placed side by side, then what would be your next step?
I want you to think about this one for a second or two …
Having an Amazon Omakase banner ad on the far right that automatically matches the content on the page showing the latest discounts for the products from Amazon might be a viable step.
Why?
Because the visitor on that particular page is looking for a discount and the ad gives them EXACTLY what they’re looking for and more – A list of discounts.
And there you have it …
3 short tips to help you convert and monetize niche traffic that you might now know with Amazon and Adsense.
Hope you liked it 🙂
What about yourself? How are you converting YOUR (niche) traffic?
Share your thoughts in the comment box below and let’s synergize!
Image Credits:Toni F
18 comments
Convert traffic on any site is always a challenging task but this article can solve too many questions for how we can do this all easily.
Right now i am using social media sites for convert traffic for my site and i am getting good response from there.
I’ve been trying to find some sources to convert niche traffic to ROI. Do you recommend any particular tool? Thanks for the help in advance.
-Serene
Hey Serene,
It depends on the niche you’re in but the best FREE tool to convert niche traffic and any other traffic is to give your visitors what they want.
So if a person is typing in “bbq recipes” for examples it wouldn’t make sense telling them how tasty your last bbq invite was 😉
Long story short …
Work on keeping your visitors on your site by providing them with what they’re looking for.
Thanks for commenting.
Adam
Glad to meet you Adam Tezer ,
your explanation is good . i don’t know about that hot spots .. thanks for let me know about good ad placement 🙂
hi adam,
its really a nice post i m now going to be in a niche and affiliated marketing and your this tips has helped me to learned more inside about keyword researched thank you
Hey Rohit!
Glad you liked the post mate 🙂
Took me a looonnng time to figure this out myself and i’m still learning but the tips in the post have been field tested.
So go out and make it happen.
Thinking of doing a post on how we do keyword research which is a bit different from what others are doing.
Look out for that one.
Cheers and God Bless,
Adam
It isn’t wise to put too many ads on the page though, I know a person who was actually de-indexed because their site was full of ads and used low quality content.
Hey David,
Definitely a valid point especially if you’re using adsense and google is doing a ninja job wiping those sites out especially those using blog networks.
Really good post at affilorama covering that topic. Dunno if you read that one?
I do remember reading that using less ads drives up your Cost per Click (CPC) but don’t quote me on it since i haven’t split test it.
The theory behind it:
Instead of going the maximum 3 adsense slots per page, i limit them to only 2, 160×600 on the left and 468×60 dead centre.
Basic rule of demand vs supply applies here i.e the less ad spots you have (=supply) the higher the demand (=advertisers), resulting in advertisers mauling each other to death to get an advertising spot 😉
Cheers and God Bless,
Adam
When it comes to converting traffic on niche sites sometimes keeping it simple can go a long way.
I have noticed many blogs place their ads on right side, and you’re quite true that people won’t give it much attention. On the other hand by showing our ads on left side we can increase the exposure and click through as well.
This is the article I needed and very inspiring. Thank’s
I agree with tip #3, when putting banners, make sure that the visitor can see them clearly and easily. I never thought about using contextual banner ads. I’ll try them out on my website. Thanks for sharing these nice tips!
I will definitely gone a try this because i want good traffic on my site, thanks for posting this news.
Tips are looking useful to put in use. I think #1 should keep in mind as it’s the first and foremost thing to apply when it comes to keywords.
Keywords are everything for SEO. If you target the wrong keywords, you will get the wrong traffic that probably won’t convert. Traffic is great, but conversions are what really matter. It’s important to understand how your target audience is searching for what you offer.
Hey Nick,
Couldn’t have put it better myself 🙂
What i normally do before creating any website or content, and after judging the value of the keyword is to actually check out the demographics for the keyword that i’ll be basing the site on.
I take the 1st ten websites that rank for that keyword and plug them into quantcast.com and alexa.com.
Alexa’s “View the full Audience Profile” for webtrafficroi.com for example has a majority of male readers who browse from home 😉
A bit creepy and am actually still looking for similar tools to cross reference demographics but knowing “who” is behind the traffic can go a long way to providing content specific to them.
Cheers And God Bless,
Adam
You really do need the right traffic otherwise they will just leave.
These really were tips I never thought about this way. Those hotspots were not known to me beforehand, and I noticed I generally put the ads and opt-in forms in the wrong place on my websites. I also appreciate you giving us the right dimensions we should use, it also makes a huge difference, just as blending the ads into our content does. They need to pop, though, to be conspicuous, but not as much to distract the reader and make the page look messy and flashy. I already figured out the importance of getting the right traffic, but it was interesting and very much useful to read about the ways others get this done.
Thank you for all your generous help on this blog!
Best wishes, Leonard