David Fiske Affiliate marketing & web development musings from Fiske Towers

Let's stop and regroup.

I have 24 hours left on my Wordtracker account and have to come up with either one or several good niches to tackle.

I have come up with some ideas but they are proving to be over populated areas, or in all fairness, not strict niches.
 
So let's re-visit why I am doing this. Compare Sat Nav has a conversion rate of 0.25%. It fluctuates on a daily basis though 0.25% is a fairly representative figure. I estimated it would achieve 1% so am suffering slightly from this.

So am I giving up on it?

NO.

But it is very narrow minded to focus on making just one site successful. Plus, it can get boring. If you work on the same thing day in day out, it gets tedious.

Several coding changes means I am waiting for the search engines to pick up on the changes. I also have the following changes lined up:

• Create a dedicated image bank on the Compare Sat Nav server of all the systems listed
• Write custom descriptions for all 414 products currently listed
• Complete the comparison section
• Change the home page to make it more welcoming and colourful

Then I need to:

• Build links back to CSN
• Build up targeted traffic to the site

It currently has around 50 visitors a day but at a 0.25% conversion rate, I will experience one sale every 2 weeks - which is very poor indeed.

Remember, to make £20,000 per year from it, I will (statistically) need 3,200,000 visitors a year. This is 266,667 visitors per month or 8768 visitors a day. That is around 17536% increase - ouch!

There is also the fact that sat nav systems peak around Summer and Winter. Summer is the time when the caravans come - holiday season. For a couple of hundred pounds, you can have a European sat nav systems so you drive through France or Germany, assisted only by your sat nav system. The Winter peak is Christmas.

So the solution is to create a portfolio. A portfolio would mean that I could create one or a number of sites to help smooth out this seasonality. For example, a site about Mothers Day would smooth out the gap between Christmas and Summer. However, the skill is finding something interesting and seasonality-less.

Perhaps my portfolio needs to consist of several sites:

• Valentines' Day site
• Mothers Day site
• Fathers Day site
• Easter site
• Holidays site
• Christmas site
• Dieting site
• Dating site

Online dating and dieting are big businesses and target specific markets. The only thing is creating enough content to satisfy visitors.

Essentially, I don't think it is an easy task to attract 3 million visitors to a niche site every year. I hope I am wrong and would love for other people to send in examples of sites that get more than 3 million visitors.

Therefore, I need to build a portfolio so the lull periods that Compare Sat Nav experiences can be offset. I cannot create a revenue river without several revenue streams!

As for which niches I am going for, I will post tomorrow with a definite list. I have spent a good few days racking my brain and it is starting to hurt now. Enough thinking, let's start doing!