Your opinion: Get more traffic or optimize current traffic?

[Sutra]

I'm at a crossroads and would like to get your opinion.

Where I'm currently at:

• Daily profit ranges between $35 - $175.

I get most of my traffic via my Facebook fan page. I post 3 new articles a day. I outsource the article writing but I make manual edits to the articles (add pictures, internal links, add keywords/sub-keywords, etc). It takes me about 60 mins to edit each article. The bulk of that time is due to image sourcing/editing, keyword research/placement, and crafting a compelling headline that includes the keyword. I could outsource some of that and cut down the manual edit time to about 30 mins per article.

Where I want to be:

• Short term: Consistent $200 daily profit.
• Longer term: Consistent $1000 daily profit.

The options:

Option 1) Create more fan pages to bring in more traffic, and increase article output

Pro:

• This is just doing more of what is already working

Cons:

• Will require about 12 articles a day for short term goal, which is about 6 hours of work on article editing alone. This is doable but to reach the $1000 goal will require around 30+ articles a day.
• Potentially leaves a lot of money on the table due to poorly monetized email subscribers

​

Option 2) Optimize email monetization by creating and selling my own product to email subscribers

Pros:

• Captures a much larger portion of revenue with the same amount of traffic
• Compounds revenue gains as traffic increases

Cons:

• Don't know if it will work. People may say, "It will work, you just gotta test!", but it's still only a possibility, whereas option 1 is a reality.

So there's the conundrum:

Go with Option 1 which works right now, or go with Option 2 which MAY work (and if it does, it captures a lot more revenue much easier)?

What do you think?

 

[Future State]

While I grapple with an answer, let me ask: What percentage of your traffic is from search engines?

 

[Sutra]

@Future State Search engine traffic is 3.10%. Tiny compared to Social but SE traffic has been rising fast since I've been targeting keywords. Social is 85%.

 

[Potatoe]

The huge red flag to me is the amount of time it's taking to edit an article. Are these really long, in-depth articles? I feel like if you're getting an article from your writer and it takes you an hour to get it ready to post, this is where you can make the biggest gains, at least to start with.

Perhaps next time you're editing an article, take notes on any edits you make, and then turn those notes into instructions and pass them along to your writer. If you teach them how to handle keywords and everything else the way you like it, you'll be freeing yourself up for more important tasks... and you'd probabally have time for options 1 and 2.

 

[Future State]

My question relates to another possible answer... But first, I'd say to get to where you can remove yourself from the editing and posting phase of the content creation. Maybe even find someone to come up with content ideas too. Make sure that while each is primed and written for your target social media people that you do basic SEO optimization of each post for long-tails that can easily be ranked.

Despite the absolute bold-faced lie, social (especially Facebook) can rank a page. So as these pages get shares and likes, you'll get additional hands-free impressions from the search engines. If you're running CPM ads then who cares what type of traffic. Look for low-intent, low-to-medium traffic, no-competition keywords.

I seem to recall that you're doing a lot of display ads. If you aren't already, I'd be putting some amazon products in there as well, even as just text links. As your entire traffic portfolio grows to insane proportions, those one-time effort monetizations will begin to add up.

The email list idea should be taken advantage of to some degree. Again it depends on the type of traffic you've collected. They may not be buyers. But you could send out weekly round-ups of your most click-bait style articles. You could sign up for Commission Junction and find stores that don't mind you doing email promotion. Or you could bypass that and create a "Current Sales" page that you update and send people to and they click from there.

So as each store holds some kind of sale, you change that page and send email traffic at it. Your own product would be profitable but how many times can you push the same product on them without setting up auto-responding sequences that offer mass value. That's worth doing depending on the traffic quality and how tightly knit this entire campaign is. If it was a SaaS it'd be great. If it's a content magazine...

Another option would be selling email blasts to advertisers in the niche. Spin it off as "exclusive."

Time and money are your current issues. Option 1 is your best bet while making sure you're setting it all up to take in free search engine traffic as well.

 

[Sutra]

@Future State Awesome, thank you for your in-depth answer!

I just hired an Editor who started today. So that will be a huge timesaver.

I agree with you about the social shares affecting ranking. I don't have any definitive proof, but my most shared articles seem to rank fastest. That's partly due to getting some backlinks in the process I'm sure, but the shares do seem to give it a boost.

I use a mixture of CPM and CPC. I hadn't thought about going after low-intent, low-to-medium traffic, no-competition keywords just for the CPM. Thank you for the tip.

I actually do place Amazon affiliate links in the majority of articles (attached to compelling text to get that cookie). When an article goes viral, those amazon links are a nice revenue boost. The real money from those will come in once I get a large Desktop user base. And that will happen as I get more traffic from the SERPS. Once I'm getting 50K+ desktop users per month from search , that will be an incredible revenue boost.

That's a great idea about the "Current Sales". Will definitely try that out.

Great idea about selling email blasts to advertisers. Will look into that as well.

Good points about selling my own product. The whole thing is something I need to figure out. I feel that it's such a wasted opportunity if I don't monetize my email list better. I'm able to get email subscribers like turning water on from a faucet. If I can monetize the list well, damn, that would be some kind of wonderful, hah.

 

[Ryuzaki]

I agree with you about the social shares affecting ranking. I don't have any definitive proof

I hit #12 for a 1,500,000 exact match term plus at least another 500,000 exact in long-tails and typo's just on social shares. Would have ranked a lot higher if it wasn't a branded term.

I've got another post that hit #4 for a branded term:

#1: Official Site
#2: Wikipedia
#3: Old Official Site still live
#4: Me
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Facebook shares seem to be the key. They seem to be measured as backlinks. Not sure if they are equally powerful as any other link or less, but it definitely gives rankings.

 

[miketpowell]

How did you get the likes on your Facebook page? How about just getting 10x the amount of likes? That alone would bring you into your long term goal without changing anything else with the work you do.

What kind of traffic and RPM do you currently get?

Why do you think if you made a few new pages you'd need more articles? You can start 2-4 more pages that post the exact same content at the same time, works just fine.

I'd just focus on getting the content you produce now in front of more people on Facebook with more pages and more likes on those pages. Once you've gotten a bigger "base" worry about some more optimization.

 

[Sutra]

@miketpowell

Majority of Facebook likes come from FB ads for Likes. Getting more likes will help (I have an active Likes campaign constantly running) but the niche segment is limited. I still have a ways to go before hitting it but it will come.

I get anywhere from 7k - 40k uniques a day. 85% mobile users. Wide range is due to how viral the articles go and how often. Page RPM is around $8.

Physical location plays a big part in my fanpages. So articles that apply to one location, while interesting to people in a different location, don't have nearly the same viral effect. So they need to have their own articles for the most part. Though there are some subjects that cross over so I do plan to post those articles to all pages.

 

[miketpowell]

Depending on the niche you can likely make another page that is targeting the exact same group of users with a slightly different name/angle but post the same articles on it.

I'd do this and test your ROI on it:

1. Set up new page that will target same niche audience but just different name/slightly different angle. It could be one the "editor" of the website for example.

2. Run ads for the page for 3k likes or so. Post only highly engaging images until you get to that 3k like point.

3. Start posting the same articles on this page with UTM tags so you can track the traffic to the page specifically for 2 weeks.

4. Gauge what the payback period is going to be on those likes you bought is. My guess it will be 1-4 months so likely very worth it.


Facebook just does't give much reach to pages, if you have 100k likes getting "link" posts to 20,000 people is not easy. If you have 2 pages that have the exact same 100k people liking it you won't just get 100% overlap on anything you post on both pages.

Lastly even before you do email I'd suggest you try this: http://www.digitalmarketer.com/website-push-notifications/ Just started with 1-2 weeks ago and it's been great. Opt in rate is better than email and we can do a notification on a new article and get 5%+ of the total subscriber base on site and reading it within 60 seconds.