Why doesn't this work?
This is a repost from the Website section. Steve suggested I bring it over here to get more exposure.
My wife and I have been trying to make this Internet Marketing thing work for two years. We've been online a lot longer than that but we've only been trying the marketing for about two years. And its been a frustrating experience, to say the least.
Here's what we've done thus far:
Put up 25 websites, and never got any traffic to any of them. Biggest mistake made--- not writing articles to promote them. Our SEO tactics weren't much, either. In short, we did it all wrong. So we took them down and started over.
We now have 4 sites up. This time we tried very hard to do the proper niche and keyword research (using mostly Micro Niche Finder). We collected lots of search data, but the problem is, if one misinterprets what the data says, the results are worthless. We tried diligently to follow James Jones' (program developer) instructions, and read every thing posted on his blog. I still like the program a lot. But it hasn't produced the kind of results we were hoping for. The results he gets from using the program are not the results we get. Once again, probably our fault, not his.
One thing we discovered is, there are at least two and maybe a lot more, schools of thought on how much competition is too much. The MNF program says 50,000 Google pages or less for a given keyword in a niche is OK. But last week I read a guy who said anything less than half a million pages is acceptable. Competition is good, he says. It means lots of search traffic, lots of money in the niche. Get in front of it, etc, etc
When we built these 4 sites, we went looking for daily 400-600 keyword searches. Our plan was to sneak in under the radar, grab a first page listing in Google, then build more sites doing the same thing. Collectively we should be able to generate organic traffic in the same niche enough to make a few bucks a day. Keep adding more small sites, without going head to head with the big players in the niche.
Seemed like a good plan but it hasn't produced much traffic, and no sales.
The other thing we did this time was write articles. My wife handles that part. She has written over a hundred articles, 90 percent of them targeted toward our website keywords. She has achieved "Expert" status on Ezine Articles. The articles have generated over 2100 reads and 110 click throughs to our websites. There's also about 30 articles in eZine's limbo, waiting for approval or disapproval. Been that way for many weeks.. She also has a ton of articles on Associated Content, again, with a relatively high number of reads. The click thru's are relatively few (about a hundred), which tells us most of the reads are folks doing nothing more than article surfing.)
Using Angela Edwards' backlink program, plus FTS, we have about 350 backlinks to 2 of our sites.
We switched from XSite Pro and HTML, to WordPress. (2.8.4) All of our sites are built on the WordPress platform. There seems to be a universal sentiment online that WordPress is the best thing that ever happened to the Internet. Maybe so, but for us, it's been one big pain in the ass. I've wasted many hours trying to learn, then fix something that doesn't work on WordPress. The WP Help forum is so huge if you post a question one day, and go back the next for the answer, you may never, ever find your question and whatever responses you got.
I have to admit, I dug out our copy of XSitePro 1 again. I don't know...we just might start using it. WP just hasn't been the solution for us. I've bought and got some free 'how to's' for WP. I DL'd some of their Help files. The sites are up and functioning. It just seems every time I try to add a widget or plug in, some sort of a problem develops. Another waste of time trying to figure it out..
Enough. I'd appreciate you going to one of our sites and taking a look. http//personalsecuritydevices.walkinsarewelcome.com If something jumps out at you that needs immediate fixing, please come back with your comment on this thread. Once again, we're apparently not doing something riight. But I just don't know what it is.. Many thanks. Sorry for the length of this post.
Wes
My wife and I have been trying to make this Internet Marketing thing work for two years. We've been online a lot longer than that but we've only been trying the marketing for about two years. And its been a frustrating experience, to say the least.
Here's what we've done thus far:
Put up 25 websites, and never got any traffic to any of them. Biggest mistake made--- not writing articles to promote them. Our SEO tactics weren't much, either. In short, we did it all wrong. So we took them down and started over.
We now have 4 sites up. This time we tried very hard to do the proper niche and keyword research (using mostly Micro Niche Finder). We collected lots of search data, but the problem is, if one misinterprets what the data says, the results are worthless. We tried diligently to follow James Jones' (program developer) instructions, and read every thing posted on his blog. I still like the program a lot. But it hasn't produced the kind of results we were hoping for. The results he gets from using the program are not the results we get. Once again, probably our fault, not his.
One thing we discovered is, there are at least two and maybe a lot more, schools of thought on how much competition is too much. The MNF program says 50,000 Google pages or less for a given keyword in a niche is OK. But last week I read a guy who said anything less than half a million pages is acceptable. Competition is good, he says. It means lots of search traffic, lots of money in the niche. Get in front of it, etc, etc
When we built these 4 sites, we went looking for daily 400-600 keyword searches. Our plan was to sneak in under the radar, grab a first page listing in Google, then build more sites doing the same thing. Collectively we should be able to generate organic traffic in the same niche enough to make a few bucks a day. Keep adding more small sites, without going head to head with the big players in the niche.
Seemed like a good plan but it hasn't produced much traffic, and no sales.
The other thing we did this time was write articles. My wife handles that part. She has written over a hundred articles, 90 percent of them targeted toward our website keywords. She has achieved "Expert" status on Ezine Articles. The articles have generated over 2100 reads and 110 click throughs to our websites. There's also about 30 articles in eZine's limbo, waiting for approval or disapproval. Been that way for many weeks.. She also has a ton of articles on Associated Content, again, with a relatively high number of reads. The click thru's are relatively few (about a hundred), which tells us most of the reads are folks doing nothing more than article surfing.)
Using Angela Edwards' backlink program, plus FTS, we have about 350 backlinks to 2 of our sites.
We switched from XSite Pro and HTML, to WordPress. (2.8.4) All of our sites are built on the WordPress platform. There seems to be a universal sentiment online that WordPress is the best thing that ever happened to the Internet. Maybe so, but for us, it's been one big pain in the ass. I've wasted many hours trying to learn, then fix something that doesn't work on WordPress. The WP Help forum is so huge if you post a question one day, and go back the next for the answer, you may never, ever find your question and whatever responses you got.
I have to admit, I dug out our copy of XSitePro 1 again. I don't know...we just might start using it. WP just hasn't been the solution for us. I've bought and got some free 'how to's' for WP. I DL'd some of their Help files. The sites are up and functioning. It just seems every time I try to add a widget or plug in, some sort of a problem develops. Another waste of time trying to figure it out..
Enough. I'd appreciate you going to one of our sites and taking a look. http//personalsecuritydevices.walkinsarewelcome.com If something jumps out at you that needs immediate fixing, please come back with your comment on this thread. Once again, we're apparently not doing something riight. But I just don't know what it is.. Many thanks. Sorry for the length of this post.
Wes
"May I have ten thousand marbles, please?"
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