The good
Let me start with the good, in less than 30 days i’ve got my niche site “My Project Manager Resume” to the front page of Google. PMR as I call it has had just on 200 unique visits and around 600 page views. Over 60% of these visitors have visited my “sales offer” page. Deeper traffic analysis shows that I’m NOT dependant on Google for all my traffic and that my external articles via sites such as ezine are generating traffic. A further analysis shows that under 50% of visitors run away, this is all fairly good.
But, before I go sounding the celebration horns, as they say in the classics, “we have a problem”.
The Bad
While there was some initial excitement around the activity I believe PMR has now settled into a predictable pattern and that’s ok it’s just not the pattern I want. I’m sitting around number 10 in Google which works out to be page 1 sometimes and page 2 mostly. You’ll probably know from your own browsing habits that people rarely make it past the first top 5 results. I’m just not getting the exposure I need for such a targeted keyword. What I “think” this means, is that I’ll never be able to take advantage of a Google search traffic, that’s ok, but definitely NOT great.
What The Numbers Really Say
My traffic is too low = My niche is too quiet. A quiet niche = low traffic = people don’t see my ad and you guessed it = no sales.
My bounce rate is too high = Visitors are NOT getting what they are looking for when they arrive on my site. And here’s the kicker – in my case I “know” exactly what my customers are looking for and I’m charging for it! This tells me people in this niche want free stuff and thus can be classificed as non buying customers.
My Product is not selling = this is obvious but it has larger niche ramifications. I could be:
a) sending the wrong message
b) bad at sales copy
c) my offer is not compelling
This indicates this is not a buying market of people.
Google Ranking = My site is not relevant to Google, while the bounce rate gives this away PMR will need many, many, many more months to even frighten the top 5 spots let alone assault the number 1 spot. The content I’m creating is just not relevant.
The Ugly
This leaves me in a ugly position. All these numbers point to a niche where people are simply not buying no matter how much quality content I create. I could equate this to fishing. Despite my best efforts I’m not fishing where the “hungry fish are”. Or I’m not taking the proper equipment, or I’m not casting my line the best way, or…. all of the above.
What’s left to do
This is one of those tuff decisions, do I:
Just maintain the site let it cook some more and “see” what happens. This means spending significantly less effort on the site.
Drop the price of the offer thus dropping the percieved value of my product
Burn a lot more effort and time reworking the content changing the sales message while trying to work out what buttons to push to get sales.
While I consider all this, the numbers keep telling me a CLEAR story, what I’m doing now is simply not enough.
It’s tuff out there,
Justin.
