Does SBI! Really Work?

I’ve been spending my time trying to monetize my husband’s site, http://www.ballineurope.com. He gets much better traffic on that site than I do on any of the ones I maintain. And I was itching to get my hands on it, because what I learned from SBI is that you don’t put the cart before the horse and you do not start monetizing before you’ve built up decent traffic.

What is decent traffic?

Well, according to the Action Guide, it begins around 20 visitors a day and 30 pages built, if I recall correctly. I think that’s the earliest they recommend that you start putting Google ads or any other form of monetization to your site.

Not many of my sites meet those criteria… And you know how some women get with shoes? I get that way with websites… but that’s another post in itself.

Because my sites get nowhere near the traffic that my husband’s site does, I’ve been chomping at the bits and trying to get him to put Google ads on it.

He gets 2000-5000 visitors a day. His traffic is not even because most of his traffic comes from referring sites, and traffic depends on whether they pick up a hot story off his site or not.  But he usually does make 2000 a day.

He used to be able to monetize this site better in the past, but advertisers are reluctant to pay flat monthly rates these days. And even when people were clicking on the ads, they weren’t converting to customers.

So I felt that Google ads would be the answer, since there don’t need to be conversions, there just need to be clicks. My husband disagreed, he felt that nobody would click on Google ads, and they would look cheap on the site. I silently agreed with him on the looking cheap bit, but figured it was a price worth paying IF they made money. And I loudly disagreed with him over the idea of at least trying Google ads on the site.

I was under the impression that all you needed to make money with Google ads was sufficient traffic.

Guess not.

We put Google ads on BallinEurope, and the results were pitiful. Almost zero clicks for the week or so the ads were running. A 0.07% CTR.

I was completely stunned, and I must now publicly admit that my husband was right all along.

But I still didn’t get it. Why weren’t these visitors clicking? I have a higher CTR on my other websites, they just don’t get anywhere near the traffic that BiE does.

So I tried a different approach. I signed up with Commission Junction, and searched for affiliate programs that would match the site. I made sure there was an affiliate link under every single new post. Ones that were – I felt – highly targeted to the site’s primary audience, which was Americans interested in basketball. (More than half the site’s visitors come from the US. The rest of them, the “hardcore” BiE followers, are scattered all over Europe.)

And NO conversions. I was completely flabbergasted, and not to mention disappointed. I thought traffic was all that mattered!!

And then I remembered the C-T-P-M process. It’s NOT just traffic that matters… it’s also what those people are looking for. They must be looking for something when they go to your page, and they must GET that something from your page when they arrive there. My husband has great content, he has decent traffic. What’s missing is the pre-selling, the P of the C-T-P-M process.

SBI’s concept is that you don’t even start writing content before you research whether people are looking for that information, and even if there are tons of people looking for that information, you don’t use the keyword unless you have a chance of ranking well enough for it AND it has good monetization potential. So you do all this research before you even start writing a single word. And when you do write your content, you of course follow their advice to write in such a way that the search engines can’t help but take note of your keyword and rank you high for it. But the real important stuff comes from the human visitors. Ranking well with the engines is just the entry ticket, if you will. It helps people actually find your content, but unless that content impresses your visitors, they are not going to remember you or come back for more of it. So your content needs to please both the search engine spiders and your human visitors.

And what human visitors want most of the time is solutions to their problems, answers to their questions. That’s the kind of content they are willing to pay for. If you use SBI’s tools to figure out WHAT information people want, then impress them with your amazing knowledge and wonderful personality in trying to help them with it, then people will be far more willing to follow your recommendations. But these recommendations must still provide solutions for the original question/problem they came to the site to research.

See the problem here? BiE is not about answering questions or providing solutions to problems. It’s about entertainment for basketball fans. (And as my husband likes to keep pointing out, he is a writer and he writes artistically, not for search engine spiders.)

So the traffic BiE gets are random people looking for 15 minutes of break from their busy lives. They come in not through searches for some specific question or problem, but from referring websites because the headline seemed interesting and caught their attention.

How do you monetize that kind of traffic? Is it even possible?

My hunch is that if we only figured out what these people are interested in, other than a short break from work, we could use that info to more effectively market to them.

But the take-home lesson was that SBI’s process really is designed around making a site that makes money… and I keep coming back to how well-designed their tools are for doing just that.