8 Months & Still No Cash!!

What page are you visitors coming to?

How many visitors have you received so far? (order of magnitude)

Hello sharpturn. I am not an expert on websites, but from what i seen from yours it seems pretty nice.

I saw that you have been writing articles. Thats a great way to get backlinks. Are you only posting them on Ezine Articles? I searched for the best articles directories out there and found these you see below. If you have not post your articles, if you go the time, you should. Those are the top 20 articles directories. Hope this could help you.

• 1. ezinearticles.com 130
• 2. articlesbase.com 475
• 3. buzzle.com 1,347
• 4. goarticles.com 1,674
• 5. helium.com 1,872
• 6. articlesnatch.com 2,653
• 7. articlealley.com 3,132
• 8. articledashboard.com 3,306
• 9. ideamarketers.com 4,706
• 10. amazines.com 4,828
• 11. searchwarp.com 5,844
• 12. a1articles.com 7,571
• 13. isnare.com 8,454
• 14. articlerich.com 9,136
• 15. articlecity.com 9,270
• 16. submityourarticle.com/articles/ 9,624
• 17. articlecube.com 10,373
• 18. sooperarticles.com 11,150
• 19. site-reference.com 11,885
• 20. articlepool.com 12,403

Those numbers you see in front of each article directory is their Alexa Rating.

P.S. I tryed to put the article directory with links so that you just click and go the the website, but since i am new to Warrior Forum i am not allowed to post any links.

There are a few problems here.

#1 fat loss is an info seeking niche. People will read all day but there is so much information on weight loss on the internet they dont want to pay for anything.Trying to get this to convert through article marketing is difficult. You may make some sales but I can tell you from experience its a low converting niche as far as articles are concerned.

#2 The links on your landing page link to other articles. Consider sending them to the sales page. Each click to somewhere else is going to lose you buyers. write your landing page like you would an article and drive them to the salespage and not another article.

If people are coming to your site from ezine articles I would not send them to more articles, if they have clicked on what you wrote on ezine they are already interested, so send them to the salespage, instead of more articles. I can tell you they will just click away if you do that.

#3 if you are trying to get organic traffic you are going to find it very hard to rank for a lot of keywords in that niche. Its very competitive and you you will have have a very hard time doing that.

if you want to see how hard it is to get this product to convert through article marketing try this.

Get a cheapo info domain for 99 cents or whatever and put it on a redirect straight to the sales page. put up ten articles or whatever on EZA and send them to the info domain which is going straight to the sales page and see how many sales you get.

Personally I would try a different product to promote.

I have to completely agree with jazbo here. At the 8 month point, you should be a bit further along than you are. A few things I see when looking at your site. First, the design looks great so cudos to that.

Secondly though, you seem to be in an extremely competitive niche. weight loss is a tough niche to crack, and depending on the keywords your targeting, I can completely understand why you may not be making any sales.

If I were you, I might try a different angle with this one. Look to see if you can find any ezines that may specialize in fat burning and weight loss. In those, I would put a squeeze, preferrably with video to begin capturing leads. It may cost you a couple of hundred dollars, but I am sure it will give you better results then what you are geting now.

Also, instead of completely focusing on an seo componenet with this one, I would try to target more of a web 2.0 approach with social networking sites like myspace, blog catalog, and mybloglog (facebook i wouldn't worry about to much). Also look at posting videos on youtube and posting your youtube videos on your blog. When you post, make sure to ask you friends to tweet you, digg you or stumble you (I love stumbleupon).

Once my traffic went up, i could do a few things. I could monetize my site for advertising. I could put adsense on it (but once I got some decent advertising, I may want to take the adsense off though.) I could also promote different fat loss products on my site with reviews, not just one.

I know its kind of a long post but I hope this helps. I did something similar to this on a site of mine and took it from a feww dollars to about $1000 per month within about 90 days. Not a ton of money, but a nice little supplement to what I make from other projects (and every dolllar adds up)

As mentioned above, the weight loss crowd doesn't jump on every offer they see. They are a bit jaded and have been there and done that.

I started out just sending them to a sales page straight from the article and the conversion rate was terrible.

Then I took a different approach and sent them to a squeeze page with a free report and e-course that lasted 3 months. That is when things started to improve. For me, establishing a relationship in this niche was the answer. Once I did that, the money started to flow.

First, I'd like to thank everyone who's commented here. I was scrolling down, to see what I could add, and I soon started taking notes. This is useful information!

In addition, I think MRomeo09 hit the nail on the head. I also agree that more long-tail keyword articles are the way to go as you write more (and fail faster), learning with each success and disappointment.

Eight months is still very early in the game, with just 20 articles pointing back to your site. That's not so much about the months, but the volume of work in it.

If your schedule doesn't permit you to do more than that, this may be a very slow process for you. Something might click, but if we're looking at numbers and percentages: 20 articles in one of the most competitive fields online... that's not even close to what you need. 200 might make a dent in the competition, but even then, you may not see the results you want.

No matter what, long-tail keyword research is vital. I'd look at keywords/phrases that include four-word phrases but still get moderate traffic. Seriously, all it can take are ten people per day who find your website, see that it's exactly (narrow niche) what they've been looking for, fall in love with it, tell their friends, and buy everything you recommend. (Think in terms of "1000 True Fans" <-- search for that article online if you aren't familiar with it.)

Competing in the broader market is a quick route to disappointment.

1. Choose two or three long-tail keywords/phrases related to your market.
2. Write lots of articles about them, some of which you add at your website.
3. Narrow the focus of your site -- or a hefty section of it -- to appeal strongly to whichever phrase seems to be bringing them in. (If you're using WordPress, also use the Psychic Search free plugin, to see what people are looking for.)
4. Repeat from step one.

I'll give you one of my secrets: use the AdWords tool, put in some of your keywords and find key phrases that have 1,000- 3,000 monthly for local search volume. Then install the SEO Quake Firefox extension, turn it on and search Google for each key phrase that falls into the 1,000- 3,000 range.

Look for search results with BOTH of the following criteria:

1. At least one result from an article directory or other web 2.0 property (like Squidoo) in the first 20 (page 1 and 2) results.

2. Use the SEO Quake tool to view the Yahoo Page Links (not Domain links) for the first 10 page 1 search results. If you have at least 3-4 results with single digit backlink counts, you have a winner.


Ignore the number of search results. If you find a keyword that meets both criteria above, you have a good shot to rank on page 1 with an article on EZA, ArticleBase, etc.

I'm getting ready to do a video on my blog on how to do this. This is the best method I have found to quickly find rank-able key phrases.

SHARPTURN,

Hey man, listen.

You've gotten some decent advice here.

There is one thing that doesn't seem to have been addressed.

I took a semi-thorough look at your site and backlinks.

Your main issue is that you may just be misunderstanding the backlinking strategy. I know, because I was once in your shoes.

The problem is, a lot of folks misunderstand it.

You are doing some things right like submitting articles with anchor text backlinks of your keyword. Excellent!!!

However, there are not enough of those backlinks for each page. According to Yahoo Site Explorer, it appears that you have about 1 article backlinking to each page.

Every page has only about 1 backlink. There is no way you will rank on the keywords that you are using with one backlink to each page.

Also, the on-page SEO isn't focused enough. Each page shows multiple keywords in the META tags, but the page only mentions the keywords 3 or 4 times.


THE SOLUTION:

Here's my suggestion.

Google shows about 10 pages of actual content.

Take just one page per day and do the following.

1) Improve on-page SEO. If you don't want to add more content, at least optimize the pics and the links. Although visitors won't see it, the 'spiders' will. Increase the density of this page's long-tail phrase.

2) Build more backlinks with your keyword as Anchor Text. The place where you put these is up to you. Just build them correctly, which means, have the Anchor Text match the keyword that you are optimizing the target page for.

3) Improve the Sales flow. If you were a customer, who your page easily lead you from information to buying. This requires a level of copywriting expertise. Check out your competitors to get an idea.


Hey, we all start off and this SEO/SEM/IM stuff can be a lot.

This is a simplified version of how I have gotten my pages on the SERPs pretty fast.

Hope this helps a little more.

There are quire a few ways to produce more backlinks. You could write more articles with anchor text to the page. You could comment on relevant blogs with your link in anchor text, etc.

The thing with backlinks that most folks don't seem to get is that the backlinks don't really count until the Google 'spiders' visit the pages where you backlinks are located.

I've tested the mass bookmarking schemes and out of the multiple sites that I submitted my link to, I only got backlinks from a couple of them. Mainly digg.com. Digg gets crawled constantly and is a perfect place for your backlinks.

Maybe you could find some relevant Digg posts and comment on them. Digg may be nofollow though, but I haven't checked.


That being said, you should have a target for the number of backlinks that you are placing. It is crazy to try to get 1000 backlinks, when you may only need about 50 to topple your competition on the first page.

Plug your competition's URL into this website: backlinkwatch.com

It will show you all of the backlinks for the URL and also the Anchor Text, if any.

You want to see how many of their backlinks have your keyword in the Anchor. This should give you some idea of how many Anchored backlinks you need.

There are other methods of getting backlinks. Some, I won't reveal yet, since I haven't had the opportunity to personally test them, although I have seen proof on other sites of their effectiveness.

It's much slicker than what a lot of folks are doing. Once I test it myself, I may let you know.

Good

Keep posting on your site using long tale keywords and do what Troy_Phillips said above get the email address and do your selling using e-mail. Most people are not going to buy the first time they visit your site so just getting traffic from the search engines will not make you that much money unless you capture their e-mail address.

Clint