Optimize High Traffic Pages To Reach Preset Goals

DoshDosh posted a really good article today titled “6 fool-proof steps to make more money with your website“. I suggest you read this article as it is a gold mine of clever ideas. While everything in his post completely makes sense, I actually hadn’t really thought about it before. The point of the article is to show you how to optimize your high traffic pages to generate sales or subscriptions. Right after reading DoshDosh’s article, I implemented some of his advice on one of my sites. Here is what I did.

This article on DoshDosh highlights the fact that you may have some high traffic pages on your sites but for some reason, you never thought about using them as a “money page”. For example, let’s say you have a great post on your blog that you wrote over a year ago that gets 300 to 400 visits a day. If you haven’t optimized this page to turn it into a money page, you might be losing money.

What’s your goal?

First, you have to figure out what you want to do. Do you want to make sales or do you want to get more subscribers for your newsletter, RSS feed, or more Twitter followers? In my case, I wanted to get more RSS subscribers to my iPhone blog and Twitter followers.

Identify your money pages

Once you have determined what your goal is (sales or subscribers), you have to find out what these money pages are. I went to Google Analytics and simply searched for the Top 10 most visited pages on my site, besides the homepage. It appeared that 9 out the top 10 most visited pages on my site were blog posts I had written months ago. I found out that visitors to these pages come for one specific topic but they usually don’t look around the blog and either bounce right away, or stay on these pages for a few minutes then leave. Over 90% of these visitors were new visits, which means they had never been on my blog before.

Turning these pages into money pages is very important because if I don’t act right away on these new visitors, chances are they will never come back to my blog again. Looking at these few stats, it was really clear that my goal to turn them into RSS subscribers or Twitter followers was spot on. These people came for a specific reason and sticking a big Adsense block or affiliate offer in their face wouldn’t change anything.

Optimize your money pages

So now you’ve identified your money pages, it’s time to pimp them according to your goal. In my case, it was really simple, what I did was adding the following blurb right before the beginning of the post: “If you like this post, please subscribe to my RSS feed or follow me on Twitter“. Simple, direct, and not too intrusive.

If my goal here was to make money, I could have added a 360×280 Adsense block, or a banner for an affiliate program.

I also analyzed what specific keywords and key phrases these visitors were typing in Google to get to these pages and I made sure that each keyword for the top 50 queries was somewhere in my article. I also made sure that I had added a good meta description for each article, using the top keywords. This will definitely secure my top spots in Google for these search terms.

Finally, I added a little Digg icon on each of these pages to increase my chances to be dugg.

Read DoshDosh full article

I really flew over what DoshDosh wrote, so again, I really recommend you read his post because it’s much more complete than mine and full of good advice.

I just finished implementing the changes to my pages. It took me about 30-40 minutes so I obviously haven’t had time to measure the ROI for this but I’m convinced that it can only benefit me.

As usual, if you liked this post, please subscribe to my RSS feed or follow me on the bird!