nibbledish contains around 3,000 recipes and gets around 165k uniques per month, while sparkrecipes contains nearly 170,000 recipes but only gets around 16.3k uniques per month according to quantcast.  Do you have any explanation as to why this is the case?  I would expect sparkrecipes to garner much more traffic since it’s more established and it contains more recipes.

It’s an outstanding question.  Competitive intelligence is so crucial when analyzing any market, so I got Gabriel’s permission to write about the process I would go through to find out the answer.  I’m no expert, though, so feel free to add your own thoughts and/or correct mine.

My first step when researching a particular topic is to look at the sites in that niche and see how much traffic they’re getting.  I always use both Compete.com and Quantcast for that in order to get a more accurate picture, and Aaron’s SEO toolbar puts both of those within easy reach.

Trying to estimate traffic based on just a sample can be highly inaccurate, though, so don’t take information from either of these sites as absolute.  I’ve seen both of them at various times be off by almost an order of magnitude.  Normally I take the Compete.com number and double it, and that usually gets me close enough for what I need.

Sometimes you luck out, though, and find a site that lets Quantcast measure them directly.  That’s the case here with Nibbledish.  Looking at the Quantcast stats, we see that Nibbledish gets 389,000 visits/month from 331,800 unique visitors.  (I have Quantcast on a few of my sites, and they are very accurate when they measure directly.)

SparkRecipes.com doesn’t have direct measuring by Quantcast, though, so all we get is an estimate.  Time to see what Compete.com thinks.

Wow, Quantcast and Compete differ by a stunning amount — maybe more than I’ve ever seen.  Quantcast estimates 11,000 visits/month, while Compete.com estimates 352,879!  Who’s right?

Well, let’s assume that Spark and Nibble have the same types of visitors in general.  If that’s true, then Compete’s estimate of Nibble should be roughly as accurate as their estimate of Spark.  So since we know what Nibble’s stats are, we can use that to extrapolate Spark’s.

And thank you, Compete, for making the math easy for my Auburn friends.  For June they show virtually identical Unique Visitor stats for both sites.  That means that we can estimate that Nibble and Spark get about the same amount of Unique Visitors: somewhere around 325,000/month.

Here’s the really amazing stat, though (at least to me): Compete estimates that Spark gets 2.75X as many visits as Nibble does.  Same number of visitors every month, but Spark visitors come back almost three times as often.  Wow.

Related to that: Nibble gets roughly the same number of visits as visitors.  That tells me that people who visit Nibble usually don’t come back.  I also suspect, because of that 1-to-1 ratio, that most of their traffic comes from somewhere else rather than people going directly to the site.  People end up at Nibble from a Google search or a link somewhere, but no long-term connection is ever established so they never come back.  Spark is different, but possibly only because they have an entire network of sites driving traffic to the other sites in the network.

But back to the original question: why does Nibble get as many uniques as Spark, even though Nibble hasn’t been around nearly as long or have as many recipes?

It looks like the answer is SEO.  Take Compete’s referral stats with a giant grain of salt, but Nibble appears to be getting more traffic from Google than Spark is — both from Compete’s stats and from the 1-to-1 visits-to-visitors ratio.  Nibble’s homepage is a PR6, too, vs. a PR5 for Spark, so Google clearly sees more link love for Nibble.

An in-depth look into exactly how Nibble is winning the search engine battle would take another whole post entirely, but it’s obvious right now that their challenge is turning those one-time visitors into regular visitors.

In most cases, our efforts to increase revenue center on increasing traffic.  In many cases, in fact, that’s the only method we’re using to increase revenue.  We get so close to our sites that we develop tunnel vision.  Everything is in place, and we think if we can just keep generating enough content, and growing our readership, and if we can just find some higher paying advertisers, surely, somewhere down the road, our sites will be really successful.  We can see the progress, slowly, day by day, so we know we’ll get there eventually.

Quite likely, though, we’re so close that we can’t see the forest for the trees.   Let’s take a big step back for a minute.

On average, what percentage of your visitors performs a revenue-generating action?  1%?  Half a percent?  For the sake of our discussion, let’s suppose that it’s 1%.  That’s probably a pretty fair guess.

Now, how easy would it be to raise that 1% to 2%?  That’s not a very big jump by any means.  Quite likely, you could jump to 2% or even 3% by doing nothing more than tweaking your AdSense colors, ad size and/or placement.  Little tweaks.  Nothing major at all.

Let’s say you make a few tweaks and get to 2%.  What just happened to your revenue?  Well, if you go from 1% to 2%, you’ve doubled your revenue — just that easy.  Twice the revenue from the same amount of traffic in maybe 30 minutes’ worth of work.

Not bad, huh?   In less time than it takes you to go grab some lunch, you’re suddenly generating twice as much revenue every day.

Here are two quick-hit areas to look at.

Advertising

Is your advertising working as well as it could?  Could those ads look less like ads and thus get more of your visitors looking at them?  Are you choosing ads that appeal to your users?  Have you tried different placement?  Different presentation?  Different ad networks?

Are you running advertising at all?  If not, that’s easily the fastest way to boost your revenue.  Sign up for an AdSense account and get some AdSense ads running ASAP.  Then go back and learn more about advertising by reading the articles here and the resources they link to to learn how to tweak your advertising for better performance.

Conversion Rates

What keeps visitors to your site from generating revenue?  Where do they stop short?  Take a good look at your site, and you can probably make some good guesses about where they might get hung up.  If you’re unsure, ask a few friends what they think.

Then once you’ve identified some problem areas, figure out what needs to be done to fix them.  For instance, you may have a form that’s way too long.  How about splitting it into two steps?  Making the first step significantly shorter will lead to more people starting the process, then once they hit the second step, it’s not so much trouble to finish it out.

Fix a few of those problem areas, and you could see a significant jump in your conversion rates.

Conclusion

Does this work?  Absolutely.  In fact, I’ve personally seen it work on countless sites over the past few years, and it was never more than just a few minutes’ work.  And the best part is that I didn’t trade anything to get it.   The users who clicked away were evidently going to leave anyway, because click rates on the rest of the elements of the sites stayed consistent.  So, by giving them some options for leaving the site, I actually got paid when they left, rather than just losing them for nothing.

So spend a few minutes today taking a fresh look at your site.  You’ll be very glad you did.

What about just adding some life to your domain name, though?  Literally.  Could you just add “Life” to the end of the domain name you want and suddenly have a great, memorable domain name?

Let’s say you wanted to do a site about NASCAR, for example.  NASCARLife.com is just sitting there waiting to be registered.  Prefer open-wheel racing?  How about Formula1Life.com or OpenWheelLife.com?

Those domains are descriptive, memorable, and available — at least right now

There are three big things that could be holding you back.

Your Content is Forgettable

Is your site unique and/or better than other sites in the same niche?  If not, you’ll always be swimming upstream — trying to get people to visit your site when there’s really no reason for them to.  It’s a loser’s game (unless you’re just a really strong swimmer with a stubborn streak).

Get a few people who are familiar with your niche to give you an honest opinion.  If your content just isn’t as good as it needs to be, either fix that or do something else that you can be great at.

You’re Ugly on the Outside

Ok, your content is great.  Now what?  Your site has to look good too.  The Craigslists of the world aside, you’re crippling yourself unnecessarily if your site isn’t easy on the eyes and easy to use.  Most people won’t hang around to see your inner beauty — your outer appearance has to match or they’ll just click away.  Good design can have a stunning ROI.

You’re the Great Unknown

If you’re creating great content — and looking good doing it — then your problem is that no one knows about you.  It’s time to start working hard on generating traffic to your website.  If you’ve truly taken care of the first two things, it shouldn’t take long to get that snowball rolling.

Be careful, though: Lots of people think they have a great site that looks good, but they’re fooling themselves.  Compare Campus Squeeze with College Humor or Cracked.com, for instance.  Think they’re all equally good?  Sucker explains why they’re not.

Spend some time getting some honest opinions from your target audience to verify that you’re on the right track — or to discover what you need to do to get there.

Great brands and projects are built on real value and a real advantage, but great marketers use this as a supporting column, not the entire foundation. Instead, they build a story on top of their head start. They focus on relationships and worldviews and interactions, and use the boost from their initial head start to build competitive insulation.

If you’re not building true value, you’re putting your business at real risk.  But true value isn’t the finish line — it’s only the beginning.

I just recently completed another redesign with outstanding results, so I thought it would be a good time not only to talk about how important good design is but to show some real-world stats on what kind of ROI I’m talking about.

Post-Redesign Metrics

The first stat that was important to me was Visits per Registration — that is, how many visits did it take for the site to get a user to register.  You can see from this graph that the ratio sometimes approached 400 visits for 1 registration before the redesign rolled out in late March.  Then it suddenly plummeted below 100 before leveling off around the 110 range — a huge improvement.

Conversions per Week was the other stat that was critical.  A conversion is worth quite a bit for this site, so I wanted to know just how much the redesign was able to move the needle.  You can see that the change was significant and immediate.  The site went from averaging less than 20 per week to more than 40.

Total ROI

I spent well less than $2,000 on 99designs and have so far reaped improvements approaching $100,000.  Nothing else changed other than the design, so that’s a 5,000% ROI — and it gets better every day.

There are few things that will give you a better ROI than giving an ugly site a good facelift.