The purpose of this post is two-fold:
- To report on the results of an affiliate project I wrote about last year in my post, "How to Get an Affiliate Site Up, Running and Earning in 2 Weeks"
- To introduce my next affiliate project (which I will also document the results of)
Christmas Jumpers UK - Your One Stop Shop for Christmas Jumpers
Last November I wrote an in-depth article about my new stab at being an affiliate - you can read the whole article via the link above, but to summarise - Christmas Jumpers UK was built off the back of spotting a growing search trend for "Christmas Jumpers", coupled with a lack of competition in the affiliate space for this particular area of 'fashion'.
After 2 weeks I had already earned some commission from sales made through my website and whilst it was early days, I was hopeful that it would perform well over the Christmas period. At the time of writing I showed you a screen shot from my Google Analytics account which showed my first couple of week's traffic:
As you can see, at the time of writing the post my traffic had risen to just under 140 visits in 1 day - not bad I thought.
What I couldn't have predicted was the surge in traffic that the site would continue to see in the run-up to Christmas 2013 - check out the screen shot below which shows visits from November '13 through to January '14:
At it's peak on the 15th December '13, the site attracted 4,395 visits in 1 day, 92% of which came through organic search (or Google as I like to call it!).
The sudden drop and then resurgence came from a drop in ranking for "christmas jumpers uk" from #1 to #8 - since this keyword sent the majority of my traffic, it had a disastrous effect on visits (and my wallet!). Fortunately however, it recovered after only a couple of days, and to boot, it was due to fall with seasonality anyway (it was getting very close to Christmas so a bit late to order your jumper in time for Christmas day).
Over the Christmas period as a whole, the website enjoyed over 72,000 visits and earned well into 4 figures of commission.
What was so surprising about the success of this website is the lack of 'traditional' SEO I carried out... title tags were templated (not how I'd usually do it), there was very little content on the majority of the pages, and the content that there is/was wouldn't really be classed as "high quality".
I did next to no link building with the exception of 1 carefully placed link in my original article on iMediaConnection and a link on my personal blog, and I created social profiles on Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus. My link profile was nowhere near that of the likes of ASOS, Amazon, BHS, Asda George et al - the only thing I had going for me that I could logically attribute this organic visibility to was the exact match domain I had acquired - www.christmasjumpers-uk.co.uk. But that wasn't enough to sustain such a high ranking for such a competitive keyword was it?!
No.
Check out the site usage statistics:
My suspicion is that the above stats go some way to explaining why this website stayed in that #1 spot for so long - 5.46 pages/session, 2.5 minutes average time on site, and a bounce rate under 40% - that's pretty much unheard of for a low budget affiliate site.
The Key - Adding Value
The reason (I believe) these stats are so favourable is that this website was able to offer something that none of the other sites that were competing for that #1 spot was able to offer - each retailer would stock a small range of 5-10 Christmas Jumpers, meaning that users would have to search multiple websites to find a design that they liked. What this website did was bring those ranges together in an easy-to-navigate compendium of Christmas Jumpers... No single retailer can possibly offer this.
Conclusion
I am under no illusions that the exact match domain will almost certainly have had a dramatic effect on the site's initial ranking for the money term - "christmas jumpers uk". I do believe however that in order to keep that ranking, the users' interaction was integral. Had that bounce rate been 60% plus, or the session duration been under 1 minute, I'm certain the results would have been entirely different.
Putting the Theory to the Test
As an SEO professional I am painfully aware of Google's ever-changing and evolving ranking criteria, and I'm also aware that it is never possible to compare 2 different websites like for like... That said if my conclusion above is correct, then Google are only going to become more capable of ensuring that sites that add value rank well.
With this in mind, I have created a similar affiliate site, Onesies UK. As you'll notice, I am using the same Wordpress theme and I've even used the same website to use as my '1 link'. I'll be creating social profiles as I did last year and in November I will write a follow-up post to this to detail my results so far.
Stay tuned!
