Increasing traffic/sales in a narrow wedding niche

3 replies
Hi All ~ been kind of lurking with just a post here and there.

First of all, my site started out as an SBI site in 2009 but after I sold its "parent" site in Dec. 2010, I moved the spun the bookmarks off onto their own domain and another host to save a little money. I learned a great deal in the year and a half I was with SBI about keyword research, optimization, etc., etc., and for the main page and a couple of tier 2 pages I've already got a PR2 rank.

Google Webmaster tools shows 683 links back to my site. My Alexa rank is continuously improving, up to 418,622 from the 700,000s earlier this year. I've made a couple sales recently, most notably shipping an order to the UK last month!

My goal is to be making at least $100/day average (minimum) from my bookmark sales alone. The site is only optimized with my own products (the bookmarks) and the PopShops, nothing else as I didn't want to get into Google AdSense, thereby driving people away from site to my competitors.

A couple of days ago I finally got my WordPress blog set up, and today I finally got it looking the way I want it, more closely resembling my static site.

So this is what I've been doing for marketing, besides the site's own content, to drive traffic and hopefully sales:
1. Articles
2. Blog posts
3. Quality link exchanges with relevant sites in my industry (but not direct competitors)
4. Twitter
5. Facebook
6. Guest posts/articles on other sites/blogs
7. Free listings on some wedding directory sites as a vendor

So I guess I just need a bit of reassurance from some marketing pros that with my niche I'm headed in the right direction and I just need to be patient, all of my hard work will pay off. I've only been at this heavily since this past January, after I sold my former SBI site.

Thanks!
#increase traffic #increasing #narrow #niche #traffic or sales #wedding #wedding favors
  • Profile picture of the author RickDayle
    You mention your backlinks, alexa rating and so on, but nothing about traffic. The first thing I'd do would be to look at your web statistics (fixed site and new blog).

    Find out where the traffic is coming from. If you can't tell which of your marketing is producing what traffic, start coding each effort separately. That is, if it's articles on a particular site like EZA, code the link from there to a specific page. This page can have real content or just forward to your home page or blog. Similarly, every other place (or marketing effort) should have it's own coded link coming back to your site.

    Once you know what's working, you can tell where to place more effort, and what to abandon or put on the back burner.

    Bookmarks for weddings does seem to be a narrow niche. Perhaps a companion site that provides bookmarks for other uses would help increase sales. (A separate domain name and blog wouldn't seem to increase the work considerably considering the potential return.)
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    • Profile picture of the author ksmusselman
      Thanks Rick!

      Traffic-wise, according to StatCounter, I'm getting around 45-50 uniques/day with about 75-100 page loads. I just put the blog up this week and have 5 subscribers but I'm not sure what the stats are on that.

      Oddly enough, most of my traffic is coming from one site, a link on a high traffic, PR4 website about funerals and grieving after loss. The link goes to my memorial bookmarks, which is also one of my highest viewed pages.

      I haven't gotten any traffic from any of my articles in some time, and I have A LOT of articles out there.

      I branched out my bookmarks to include just about any occasion and I've made sales for anniversary bookmarks and memorial service bookmarks in addition to weddings.

      I'm not sure if getting a bunch of other domains would help though. It would make each site too small, wouldn't you think? Also, all of my designs are customizable; i.e., many of the bookmarks in the wedding category can be repurposed for memorial services, birthdays, anniversaries, etc., so I think splitting them up might be confusing.

      I'm not sure how to code links. I never figured that out so that's something I'm going to have to learn.

      Thanks so much for your input!!
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  • Profile picture of the author zhang9547
    Thank you for your explanation
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