INSIGHT
because you become trustworthy and
memorable and the place to come back to
again and again. A good guide to ascertain
whether your site is a brand is to use a
it gets about 20 million visits a month, but
livescore.com has a big problem. It is really
bad on conversion. It’s a drive through site;
i.e. you dip in and out getting your scores.
Figure 3
tool like Semrush.com. Type in a domain
and if you get more than 35 percent of the
traffic on their unique brand phrase, it’s
a brand (by my definition at least). You
could say livescore.com is a brand, for
instance. According to trafficestimate.com,
Figure 4
Clubcall.com is a brand. It’s been around
since 1996 and has football news. It gets
about 1.5 million visits a month and is
terrible at making money (I know because
I am a shareholder of the site). Why is
this the case? For the same reason as
livescore.com: drive through traffic. At least
livescore.com has ten times the volume of
traffic and is a destination site, so it gets
sensible revenues from brands willing to
pay (typically) £600 per conversion for
banner ad inventory, and it will get some
decent affiliate revenues.
Theoretically, the best performing
affiliate sites are casino ‘spam’ sites, that is,
if you can get the traffic. Onlinecasinotop.
net is a classic. Does this site (Figure 3) look
like a money maker to you?
And when you look at the site, you will
probably think ‘how can a site like this
make money?’ The searchmetrics graph
(Figure 4) shows it ranked and died.
I had a discussion with IrishWonder,
the notorious black hat spammer, and it
turns out she had some inside knowledge
on this. ‘Mr Onlinecasinotop’ made
fortunes, enough to buy a spare house and
have change for a mid-priced Ferrari, all
off ranking for ‘online casino’ and having
such an awful site, that the banners looked
attractive enough to click.
As an affiliate, you care about money.
You are only there to pass traffic through to
a conversion. That’s how you get paid.
The catch is that if you want to play in
the Google organic search ecosystem,
it demands you follow these
webmaster guidelines:
Quality guidelines:
basic principles
●●
Make
pages primarily for users, not for
search engines.
●●
Don’t d V6V