After seeing a very low CTR on TerrierGrooming.com for about a year, I decided to take the bull by the horns and try to do something about it. Turns out that I managed to double the CTR and income!

Before and After

After buying and then re-launching the Terrier Grooming site in the summer of 2009, I decided to re-design it again about a month ago. The reason behind this was mainly because of the bad optimization of the previous version. It did/does get quite many visitors – just around 4000 unique visitors so far this month. But the CTR was horrible before, AdSense showed 0.3-0.4% earlier, something had to be done!

Since the re-launch a month ago, the numbers have improved to around 1% instead, or in other words more than double the amount of clicks, which I think is an awesome result. It could be higher for sure, but a very high percentage of the visitors are coming in from Google Image results, and considering that I think it´s an fair amount of clicks! It´s without any doubt my best performing site right now if you only count AdSense.

Right now I’m thinking about putting the site up for sale at Flippa to see what I can get for it, and to free up some cash for other projects (I know that is a very common excuse for trying to sell crap sites/domains, but in this case it is actually true (come to think about it, that is also an common excuse for excusing a excuse)). Anyway, I’ll let you know if I decide to sell it!

It has now been quite exactly 3 months since I launched the first sites in my Kiditect Network, so I thought it might be time for a little update on how it is going…

Initially I had plans to quickly launch a number of additional sites to the network, but due to other projects taking up time and somewhat lack of inspiration, it is still only the 4 initial sites that are live so far.

3 out of 4 are Performing Well!

I can’t exactly say that I can quit my regular day job based on the income from these sites. But in my eyes they are still performing quite well.

As I wrote in my first post about the launch, all domains but 1 where hand registrations by me. I bought ToddlerBoots.net as a dropping domain on NameJet. So far, kinda to my surprise, Toddler Boots is the least best performing domain. It don’t seem to get any advantage from Google what so ever, rather the contrary.

I’m not going to share the exact income figures with you instead I’m showing an estimate of combined income from AdSense and Amazon. I’ll also have a look at the Google ranking for the sites… The searches here bellow where made without quotes, for the keyword in the domain:

• ToddlerSuits.net – Ranks as #3 on the first page. Has made high $XX.
• ToddlerWatches.com – Ranks as #1 on the first page. Has made mid $XX
• ToddlerUnderwear.net – Ranks as #4 on the first page. Has mid $XX
• ToddlerBoots.net – Ranks low on page #6. Has made $0 so far!

From the about $8 invested in each domain (except ToddlerBoots.net), I think it is a nice return. I have totally made about x10 return on my initial investment… And that is including all the domains not yet launched, which is 6 more ToddlerKeyword domains.

One thing that I’ve focused on lately is product domain names. I’ve mainly looked at getting .com and .net domains, as I don’t think the .org fits that well into product/shopping mini sites. But I have made a few exceptions though when the other extensions have been taken; ToddlerSlippers.org is one of them…

I got the idea for the domain while browsing through a list of expiring domains, where I saw ToddlerSlippers.net. I didn’t think it was worth the $69 NameJet price though compared to the reg fee price of the available .org version, so I bought that one instead. I don’t have any big plans for this domain, but I do own some related domain names that I’m going to develop, and I think this one might be a nice addition in the future.

Affiliate Mini Sites

I have a few other product domains that I’ve turned into mini sites, mainly promoting the Amazon affiliate program. Some examples are Portable Mini Fridge and Dual DVD Player, where I’ve tried quite similar setups. So I decided to do some experiments with the Toddler Slippers site and trying out some new techniques. I took the money that I “saved” by not getting the .net domain, and bought myself a copy of the ReviewAzon plugin (not an affiliate link) for WordPress to test it…

Ranking High on Google

Usually when I develop a site I like to do the design/template myself. But since I didn’t want to spend too much time on this little project, I decided to go with a free theme. All in all, installing WordPress and ReviewAzon and making some adjustments to the theme – I spent no more then 45 minutes getting the site online. Adding products to the site is also a really quick task with the plugin, so after adding some products to advertise I’ve totally spent about 1.5 hour on this site.

One of the things that I like about product domain names, is that it is fairly easy to rank well on Google with them. The ToddlerSlippers.org was launched in the middle of November, and it currently shows up on the first page for the search “Toddler Slippers” (with quotes) of about 227,000 other results. I think that is great for a site that I’ve only spent 1.5 hour on, and with no link building or promotion at all. I should also mention that the keyword “Toddler Slippers” has a monthly search volume of more than 22 000 exact searches, locally in the USA.

Revenue So Far

I realize that December isn’t the best month to get any statistical info from, with all the extra Christmas shopping going on. But in the 1 month that ToddlerSlippers.org has been online it has made me around $40 in revenue to my Amazon affiliate account. It´s not a fortune, but it has at least paid for the registration cost and some more!

Toddler Slippers might not be the best paying product as it is quite cheap – But often the visitors buys other products at the same time, and the commission is a percentage of the complete order, so it adds up. As an example I recently had one visitor who bought a pair of $13 slippers along with a $130 compound miter saw. A quite strange mixture there, but I’m not complaining about the generated commission!