They say that there is no age limit in riding a bicycle. It doesn’t matter if you are 5 or 65 as long as you enjoy riding it. That’s why we are always amazed by the idea of riding a bike. Maybe this is the ideology behind the birth of our next website to review. It’s a cycling products review website and it basically posts articles about cycling, products for cycling, and other cycling related stuff.
Basic Information
| Business Type | Niche | Platform | Age of the business |
|---|---|---|---|
| Affiliate Marketing | Bicycles | WordPress | 2 years |
The idea behind the website is pretty simple – cater to people who want to know more about bicycles and cycling in general. The website works because there are a ton of people who are constantly searching for the best bikes. These people don’t just want to know which one looks good but which one is more comfortable, faster, or maybe lighter. If you try to visit the site, the reviews are pretty comprehensive and they would really be a good read to a budding cyclists. There are bikes for professionals, amateurs, and even bikes for kids.
Aside from reviews, the website also contains a number of articles geared towards cyclists. Some of the articles include how-to’s and listicles that give some tips on choosing the best helmets or bicycle seats. The only thing to notice with the articles is that some of them are a bit outdated and that the reviews or tips might not be applicable. Still, this website can still be considered as a good resource for bike enthusiasts.
The website itself made using the WordPress CMS so this means it will be pretty easy to change it or customize it anytime you want. The site is 1 year old and it has a Google PR of 0/10 which is unavoidable because the articles are a bit old and the site only gets updated at least twice a month. It gets a good amount of page views on a monthly basis mostly due to the fact that the owner did a good job in targeting product keywords.
Traffic
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According to the stats, the website got around 5,300 page views on its best month (the latest as well). Out of this number, 4,086 were uniques meaning a good number of the page views were from different people. One thing we have to look at would be the quality of traffic the site gets. Google Analytics tell us that the average session duration is below one minute. What this basically means is that whenever a person visits the site, they spend only 54 seconds on average before they leave. This does not sound good because it means one of two things, one would be that people realize the site is not providing the information they need or that they think the website is wrong. Either way, people are not really staying on the website. The average page per session is also around 1.22 so this supports the two possibilities I posted above. The bounce rate is a bit high at 82.52% which means people leave the site after reading one article.
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As for the source of traffic, 90% can be traced down to organic search. As what was mentioned above, the owner did a good job of targeting the right keywords. This pretty much puts the owner on auto-pilot in terms of SEO. All he/she has to do is to publish an article or two every now and then so the website stays relevant. Personally, I believe this much foothold in the traffic share can be nothing but good news. Targeting a new set of keywords can only mean new traffic from a different set of people. Just make sure you don’t forget to keep the keywords you already rank for stable.
Financials
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| Revenue | Costs | Profit | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sep 14 | $70 | $5 | $65 |
| Oct 14 | $86 | $5 | $81 |
| Nov 14 | $105 | $5 | $100 |
| Dec 14 | $160 | $5 | $155 |
| Jan 15 | $92 | $5 | $87 |
| Feb 15 | $74 | $5 | $69 |
| Mar 15 | $135 | $5 | $130 |
| Apr 15 | $172 | $5 | $167 |
| May 15 | $274 | $5 | $269 |
| Jun 15 | $268 | $5 | $263 |
| Jul 15 | $313 | $5 | $308 |
| Aug 15 | $346 | $5 | $341 |
According to the owner, the website has two income streams. The first one is Google AdSense which is basically placing ads on your website while the other and much bigger income stream is from Amazon Affiliates. The adsense revenue is just enough to pay for the yearly domain and hosting renewals so you can consider it negligible but what you need to pay attention to is the affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing is quite easy on paper. Simply put, if people buy something from Amazon through your link then Amazon will give you a commission. It’s like selling something without actually selling. The best part about affiliate marketing is that you never have to worry about stock, pricing, or discounts. All you have to do is to direct people to the right door and Amazon will do everything for you. Take this website for example. It’s not very obvious that they are selling something because the owner is basically just reviewing products. But the reality is, the articles actually influence you as a consumer. The website owner then just places links somewhere in the article (usually on the H2 headers) that would take the visitor to the item page on Amazon.
This method of earning gives you a total freedom in choosing what items to sell as long as the item is within your niche. You can even review competing items and sell all of them to your visitors. That’s how great affiliate marketing can be.
Conclusion
My score for this website is 9/10 and for very good reasons. I only deducted 1 point because there’s a fairly large hindrance along the way. To further explain this, read the pros and cons:
Pros
- The niche is just great. Someone somewhere in the world is learning how to ride a bike right now and that’s not going to change. That means there will always be people looking for the best bikes on the Internet. Biking is also now growing as a way to exercise and have fun for adults. This means there are now bikes worth tens of thousands of dollars that you can review (and sell!) on your website.
- The main earning stream (through Amazon Affiliates) is pretty relaxed and easy. All you have to do is to create a good article, make sure it is keyword-targeted, and enhance your site SEO and you are sure to have traffic. Conversion will still be an issue but putting into action a good marketing campaign can easily create conversions for your site.
Cons
- The owner tells us that he updates the website only twice a month. Although passable, this can easily be changed. You can target new keywords or you can enhance your ranks on the SERPS with your selected keywords. This can only mean more traffic as you will be targeting more people. So adding 4-6 more articles a month to make it 2 articles a week will be great for the site.
- Albeit not a total negative, but the idea of keeping a quality site can be a bit daunting for some. The secret to this kind of website is quality. You have to make sure that the reviews are realistic and helpful. Most readers don’t like it when you are clearly biased towards the more pricey models or the ones that give more commission. Keep the reviews fair at all times.
Aside from providing unbiased reviews, a website like this should also be a total resource spot for customers. Your priority is to provide top-quality articles with topics that should be of value to your customers.
