Recently there was much online hype with AOL making public its search data for the period of three months. AOL tried to correct this mistake by withdrawing the data asap, but search marketers were fast to grasp the value of the information and make it available online - you can download the AOL search data here. In fact I have seen free and useful online tools based on this data. See a sample here.

No doubt, the information is a great keyword list for search marketers – 100% authentic and 100% free. And remember that AOL uses Google search results. So, in fact we wee granted Google search results for the period of three months.

One of the conclusions I particularly find useful is the analysis of click rate depending on your position in a search engine:

Total Searches:9,038,794
Total Clicks: 4,926,623

Click Rank1: 2,075,765
Click Rank2: 586,100 = 3.5x less
Click Rank3: 418,643 = 4.9x less
Click Rank4: 298,532 = 6.9x less
Click Rank5: 242,169 = 8.5x less
Click Rank6: 199,541 = 10.4x less
Click Rank7: 168,080 = 12.3x less
Click Rank8: 148,489 = 14.0x less
Click Rank9: 140,356 = 14.8x less
Click Rank10: 147,551 = 14.1x less

Summary: While reading articles, forum and blog posts on AOL search data release I got astonished at how quick online marketers were to react. Yes, I was more struck with this instantaneous reaction than with AOL blunder and value of the available search data. It took no more than a few days to dissect and analyze that amount of the data, to develop tools and post them online.

Some marketers have published
entire series of their analysis results and conclusions (check the archive).

[eminimall]

[tags]aol search data, niche, search marketing, networking, online communities, forums, traffic, link bait, social bookmarking, web 2.0, domain names, text-link-ads, links buying, myspace, seo, internet marketing, affiliate marketing, blogs, content generation, google, make money online, work from home, home based job, duplicate content, links, earn your living online[/tags]

I have been a rock music fan for ages. I remember my pre-teens age and my parents unhappy with my habit to enjoy Iron Maiden, Accept, Judas Priest and other bands’ music to the full capacity of my music stereo system.

No surprise once I have found internet marketing interesting and started my search for a niche one of the first ideas that occurred to my mind was to make a website on rock music. The website is online and slowly grows.

But now I have more experience than a year back when I started this project. I realize that it takes much time and effort, that I am short of some great concept and, most important, it is a low paid niche. I have that feeling for weeks now. Recently there was a sale of an established music website on sitepoint.com. The website with 728,000 unique visitors generates $790.00 in profit per month. It should take a few full and part time employees to run a website of this scale – moderate forum, update miscellaneous website sections, manage adv issues, etc.

Obviously, you need a team of great volunteers who agree to work hard and properly and for free. And I have a feeling that this sort of stats applies to all music websites online. It is fun to run this kind of project, to discuss recent news, read interviews with your favorite bands. It is easy to get traffic, to build ‘sticky’ community members, but it is not good for a commercial project.

Affiliate stores (CD’s, DVD’s, digital music) do not make any considerable amount of money for these websites. Adsense makes pennies. I am still to try Chitika. The only type of adv that is likely to work is CPM (banner impression).

Below are some stats facts about the music website I refer to. Imagine that web traffic for some other sort of niche - 722,000 uniques, 5,616,000 page views…

URL: truepunk.com

Established: 15 Oct 1998

Uniques/Month: 721,776

Page views/month: 5,615,706

Monthly Revenue: 786.18

Statistics and Facts

Message Board Posts

518,930+

Message Board Members

26,515+

Product Reviews

1,282+

News Postings

1,085+

Mailing List Members

5,516+

Band Interviews (Ramones, Misfits, No Doubt, etc.)

150+

Summary: This revelation proves me that niche is of great importance if you are trying to earn your living online.

And this relatively little amount of money ($790.00) for that enormous amount of traffic makes me doubt my own belief that traffic = money. Here we add one more variable: niche (high paying) + traffic = money.

[eminimall]

[tags]niche, search marketing, networking, online communities, forums, traffic, link bait, social bookmarking, web 2.0, domain names, text-link-ads, links buying, myspace, seo, internet marketing, affiliate marketing, blogs, content generation, google, make money online, work from home, home based job, duplicate content, links, earn your living online[/tags]

You think you have a brilliant idea for a website, you generate great (from your point of view) content, but despite this you are short of traffic - search engines are slow to pick up your pages and promote them to the top of their indexes, viral marketing is not that powerful as you expected.

You conclude that your website needs promotion, it needs more traffic. You start your research of the most efficient ways to get that extra traffic by using some marketing techniques like this or this. Your appetite grows – you want more and more visitors as you notice that it leads to an online recognition and a bigger amount of earnings. And here comes a manual or a guide on traffic generation (pdf). It comes from a well known person in affiliate marketing - Allan Gardyne, AssociatePrograms website owner.

The manual is free and in fact lists all efficient tactics for getting traffic to your website or blog. 77 tips plus 2 bonuses. Every tip comes with some comments that make it more understandable – when I was looking through the table of content I could not get some points.

Not every tip is universal. Some tips are great for e-commerce type of website, other work for affiliate marketing websites, etc.

Summary: a well written guide is a collection of useful tips for getting more traffic to your website. It is a free edition – so, grab your copy. Print it out (I prefer using FinePrint tool to make it more comfortable for future reference) and explore the tactics you are not familiar with or have not tried so far.

Most tips cover just the top of iceberg. They show you the direction. Your task is to check if it works for you and try to employ its maximum potential.

[tags]traffic tips, search marketing, networking, online communities, forums, traffic, link bait, social bookmarking, web 2.0, domain names, text-link-ads, links buying, myspace, seo, internet marketing, affiliate marketing, blogs, content generation, google, make money online, work from home, home based job, duplicate content, links, earn your living online[/tags]