A Wiii Fit Story: 2008 Year-end Totals

I’ve been encouraged to bring back some more of the personal project style posts to this blog so in honor of doing so I’d like to give you a 2008 wrap up of how my wiiifit.com site did.

If you haven’t been keeping up with my Wiii Fit project, read the previous project posts.

Analytics for 2008

Here’s my take on why the analytics look like they do.

April – June

Since the game hasn’t been released, there wasn’t much competition for the search results. I was one of a few other sites tracking Wii Fit news so I got a decent amount of traffic.

The spike that happened in mid June was the week the game was released so a mass number of people started searching for it and gave me a nice spike in traffic.

June – October

More and more competition grew for the search results so my site was stagnant because it didn’t have the link juice to rank high enough.

October – December

Christmas was coming and Wii Fit just happened to be one of the hottest items for the 2008 season. So people’s searching went up and I got a nice curve in traffic.

Google Adsense for 2008

Almost 30,000 impressions yielding a bit over $100 bucks.

Here’s a chart of how the earnings looked.

Amazon?

When building the site I did a “Why Not” move and used an Amazon Associates widget to make a Purchase Wii Fit page. It took all of 3 minutes to complete with the super easy to use widget maker.

Although I didn’t expect it to make anything because my understanding is that Amazon referrals don’t convert well, I didn’t have much to lose other than about 5 minutes of my time.

Here’s how it performed.

Not too shabby, especially for practically zero work.

Things to Consider

Here’s a few tips I learned from doing my site that might help you if you’re doing something similar.

Links are Crucial

I believe that the number one thing that didn’t make this project an overwhelming success was the lack of links to the site. I did my best to get optimize all the SEO stuff I could, but I never had enough links to my site to boost it to great traffic levels.

Don’t underestimate the value of Google Images.

A majority of  my visitors game to the site via Google Images. I developed a nice picture page and it paid off.

Build questions into your SEO strategy.

Yahoo Answers tends to get picked on for producing lots of crap content. Call it a signal/noise problem if you will. But what makes there service such an awesome product for Yahoo is that they are now getting SEO results for questions being asked. People like to type questions into their Google searches, use it to your advantage.

Think about how people will search for your site. Develop your SEO strategy to include answers to your user’s questions.

At Christmas-time, get people to Amazon anyway you can.

I’m pretty sure I’ve heard this advice from Darren Rowse, and he’s 100% correct. If you can get people directed to Amazon via your associate link there’s a good chance you’ll profit. Those Amazon profits I showed you weren’t all from Wii Fit sales. There were a few odds and ends in there that people just happened to finish their Christmas shopping on Amazon after being directed to the site through mine.

Produce some killer, unique content.

Another potential fatal blow to the site’s success was that I didn’t take the time to produce some nice articles that would have been completely unique to my site. By simple becoming an aggregate of content that showed up in my inbox form Google Alerts, I was merely diluting the search results. Instead of there being only one piece of content somewhere I produced a second similar one that inflated the density of the search terms.

Thanks for taking the time to follow the project. All in all it was a decent project. It paid for my hosting, which was my only real stipulation for considering the site a success. It also got me my first Adsense check! I will probably won’t touch the site again until October to get a few updates in before the Christmas season. After the Christmas season I will probably see if it’s worth putting the site up on auction and getting a few more bucks for it.

I hope the project has been as good of a learning experience for you as it has been for me. If all goes well, I plan to have get another project similar to this one, but bigger, starting in July.  Stay tuned.