I'm stuck -feeling like I may have put a bunch of work into a site that ain't gonna pay/rank/takeoff

12 replies
Before I begin, I'd like to thank all of you.

You are a tireless community that endeavors to help each other out, regardless of experience. I just read a poorly written post from a 20 year old that wants to make money online, and nobody batted an eyelid, instead offering fantastic advice and direction.

So thankyou, and thanks for all the fish (great reads).

________________________________________

Get Into My Life 2 months old

Target Audience

Okay, so I have started a review site in the same genre of uncrate.com, blessthisstuff.com gearculture.com

These sites are geared towards a male demographic, and I'm sure they do rather well.

My 9-5 is as an art director working in an ad agency, and I get to see some pretty cool stuff everyday. However, the items I post might not fall into the realm of men only.

Question One.

- Do I have to segment my TA and choose Male / Female.

Affiliate
So far I have signed up for etsy (zanox) Dwellstore, Urbanoutfitters, asos (CJ) shopsense and amazon affiliates.

However I have only really used the amazon affiliates and the etsy deeplinks.

- I've sent 240 clicks to amazon in the past 2 months and made nada.
- I've sent 350 clicks to etsy and made .30c
- I've sent 12 clicks to shopsense and made .70c

Question Two.

- I get pathway to purchase, and buying cycles, however should I have seen anything for my clicks? I'm starting to wonder if those bigger sites actually make money through their affiliate links from actually recommending stuff, or do you think that they only make money from the sheer volume of traffic they are sending collecting commission from secondary purchases their lead makes?

Traffic - Linkbuilding, Social, & the Serps

I'm seeing about 20 - 30 visitors a day (spiking and dropping here and there).

Linkbuilding

2-3 per post (nofollow)
Valuable comments - I'm only really seeing traffic from disqus enabled blogs when I post a picture of a product that I review that relates to the blog post I'm commenting on.

so I'm going to keep with just that one.

Outreach - I tried outreach to a blog I actually read that was up for sale on flippa, In my head I was happy to pay something for the link, but my praise and condolences seemed to be enough. +1 PR4 link (not up yet)

Purchase of one sponsorship.
Really nice PR9 for $10 I actually like the work that they are doing so parting with my cash wasn't hard, and the ensuing link to come is really a bonus. (not up yet)


Our Friends - I'm noticing on most of the larger blogs, on the footer they have a partners/friends link. I'm trying to build up some value to my blog before approaching them.

Organic -Web - Non existant Google sends me 1-3 peeps a week
- Images - Not bad 20 people a week.
Rankings - 4 items on page one.

bonded field case 7 (-1)
keepcup brew cork 12oz 8 (+4)
birch tree forest shower curtain 9 (+2)
keepcup 12oz cork 10 (+7)

The traffic I am getting from google seems to be on images and not webpages. I attribute this to rewriting the titles of all my images with LIS keywords and Exact match keywords.


Question 3

- Am I doing this wrong? I've read a fair bit about private blog networks, Tiered networks, GSAing the bejeezus out of your third tier. yada yada. I'm a little lost on this. Also bonus q. Once my dofollow links come into play are they really going to make much of a difference?



Social - Unfollowers / Instagress / tumblr / pinterest / Facebook / Viral Content Buzz

Got some sweet 7c likes from facebook ads. (India) now all my facebook followers are indian. So I'm not really focused on this one yet.. maybe I should be?

Tumblr - Using IFTTT I'm autoposting pics from instagram and linking back to my website, trying to build up a following worth something.

Pinterest, I'm enjoying this one, so I'm not going to use ninjapinner or something like that unless someone can make a compelling case on why I should.

Twitter 1 Post from me, 1 retweet from someone else. Seeing 20% of my traffic from twitter
Instagram - when someone comes over from insta, they are seen as direct by GA. 20% of traffic from them.

Question 4.
With the majority of my traffic coming from social, Is this really something that I can scale up into numbers worth talking about?

I feel like I'm doing okay for two months with the majority of my links nofollow (97.3%)
but I could be absolutely wrong

Question 5

Am I going down the wrong path. Can I really build this into an authority site that makes money or is this one a pipe dream albeit and enjoyable one?
----------------------


If you got this far thank you for sticking with me! Looking back at what I wrote it seems like a bit of a mess! I really need a little direction. So here are all the questions in a row. All criticism welcome!

1. - Target Audience.
Do I have to segment my TA and choose Male / Female. (or am I not focused enough)

2. - Affiliates.
I get pathway to purchase, and buying cycles, however should I have seen anything for my clicks? I'm starting to wonder if those bigger sites actually make money through their affiliate links from actually recommending stuff, or do you think that they only make money from the sheer volume of traffic they are sending collecting commission from secondary purchases their lead makes?

3. - Linkbuilding.
Am I doing this wrong? I've read a fair bit about private blog networks, Tiered networks, GSAing the bejeezus out of your third tier. yada yada. I'm a little lost on this. Also bonus q. Once my dofollow links come into play are they really going to make much of a difference?

4. - Social and the serps.
With the majority of my traffic coming from social, Is this really something that I can scale up into numbers worth talking about? Will I ever see traffic from Google!

5. - The whole enchilada.
Am I going down the wrong path. Can I really build this into an authority site that makes money or is this one a pipe dream albeit and enjoyable one?
#advice #bunch #feeling #gonna #link building #newbie #pay or rank or takeoff #put #serps #site #stuck #target audience #work
  • Profile picture of the author RafaelThaGreat
    This guys questions are too much for me to handle....lol
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    I plan to rule the world.... Starting Monday.

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    • Profile picture of the author godunderyou
      Originally Posted by RafaelThaGreat View Post

      This guys questions are too much for me to handle....lol
      lol. I kind of expected that.

      Well, you've seen the site, pipedream or not?


      To anyone.

      If you feel you can answer just one question, I'm not expecting any essays!
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  • Profile picture of the author Synnuh
    You talk about your target audience, but don't talk about where you're going to find them. That's why you're sending clicks and not getting sales. Untargeted traffic.

    2 -- They make money from both. Volume and having targeted traffic. Sites that big have learned where their profitable traffic comes from, and milk those sources for what they're worth.

    3 -- The link building you wrote about in the end, PBNs, tiered linking, are actually better than buying $10 PR9 links that are going to be on a PR0 page and prob nofollow.

    Having a majority of your links being nofollow is going to end up hurting you. Nofollow means the sites linking to you aren't wanting to vouch for you. If you get them on high trafficked sites, good. Otherwise they're pretty much worthless.

    They're not passing any strength that Google is going to use to increase your ranks. That's the exact purpose of nofollow. If they're not going to send you visitors directly, that are going to purchase something from your site, nofollow links do not give you a benefit for your goals -- seeing money, not increased random traffic numbers.

    The "friends" page is a reciprocal link page, more than likely, and was outdated in 2010. If not it's a page where they're selling links. See if you can figure it out.

    4 -- I don't know the right answer for this. I really think you may have bitten off more than you can chew with your own experience and budget.

    That said, you're on the right track. Dial back the junk links, and figure out where you're going to get targeted traffic from -- usually developing a keyword strategy for the products you're trying to rank if you're going for SEO traffic, which IMO would work well for the site you're talking about.

    Use Quantcast to figure out where those big sites are getting their visitors from. Then try dissecting the campaigns.

    You've got your work cut out for you, but it could be hugely profitable if you stick at it.

    Good luck!
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    • Profile picture of the author godunderyou
      Originally Posted by Synnuh View Post

      You talk about your target audience, but don't talk about where you're going to find them. That's why you're sending clicks and not getting sales. Untargeted traffic.

      2 -- They make money from both. Volume and having targeted traffic. Sites that big have learned where their profitable traffic comes from, and milk those sources for what they're worth.

      3 -- The link building you wrote about in the end, PBNs, tiered linking, are actually better than buying $10 PR9 links that are going to be on a PR0 page and prob nofollow.

      Having a majority of your links being nofollow is going to end up hurting you. Nofollow means the sites linking to you aren't wanting to vouch for you. If you get them on high trafficked sites, good. Otherwise they're pretty much worthless.

      They're not passing any strength that Google is going to use to increase your ranks. That's the exact purpose of nofollow. If they're not going to send you visitors directly, that are going to purchase something from your site, nofollow links do not give you a benefit for your goals -- seeing money, not increased random traffic numbers.

      The "friends" page is a reciprocal link page, more than likely, and was outdated in 2010. If not it's a page where they're selling links. See if you can figure it out.

      4 -- I don't know the right answer for this. I really think you may have bitten off more than you can chew with your own experience and budget.

      That said, you're on the right track. Dial back the junk links, and figure out where you're going to get targeted traffic from -- usually developing a keyword strategy for the products you're trying to rank if you're going for SEO traffic, which IMO would work well for the site you're talking about.

      Use Quantcast to figure out where those big sites are getting their visitors from. Then try dissecting the campaigns.

      You've got your work cut out for you, but it could be hugely profitable if you stick at it.

      Good luck!
      Wow! Thank you.

      Well it's time to build links then. good one way dofollows.
      I'll do some guest posting then, I think.

      Do you have any recommended reading on building tiered networks? I'm happy to put the time in to build them myself. It just seems alot of the stuff I'm reading is a bit outdated with alot of squidoo infobarrel article writing stuff as the pool of link juice to tap into.

      Keyword strategy stuff. (are you hinting towards silo structuring?) I'm getting my keywords with Market samurai, and then using them with the yoast plugin. I'm also trying to up my LIS score by using other relevant keywords. If you have any recommended reading on this too?

      Thanks for getting through my pile of words and coming up with some really good direction.
      It is really appreciated. I'm going to quantcast up and really spend some more time on my TA aswell.
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  • Profile picture of the author Eagle07
    Hello,

    I tried to browse your site. It is very generic to me. It would be better to focus on a group of related products.

    I recommend you start with that. Focus on a group of related products then funnel your target audience into your site with targeted ads.

    Example:

    Site offering car accessories targeting car owners

    Site offering home improvement products/services targeting homeowners

    See knobgallery.com, they are focused and they are very successful in that particular area.
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    • Profile picture of the author Jennifer Hutson
      Originally Posted by Eagle07 View Post

      See knobgallery.com
      Am I the only person who laughed out loud when I read this, or am I just a terrible human being?
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      • Profile picture of the author Eagle07
        Originally Posted by Jennifer Hutson View Post

        Am I the only person who laughed out loud when I read this, or am I just a terrible human being?
        You might be laughing with how knobgallery.com established their site but their revenue are in the millions.

        I mentioned this as an example for a focused site. We can call it a micro niche site under Building construction market.

        There is nothing wrong with having a very focused site. In fact it can be the model that will last in the long run as compared to generic markets as AMAZON and WAL-MART

        I think, you might want to consider your last phrase.
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  • Profile picture of the author Synnuh
    I'm on my phone now but yes you read me right. Siloing with tiered links.

    You don't really need to read.

    Tier 1 pbn and real guest posts. Get a unique angle so your legit guest posting is easier.

    Tier 2 fcs networker. Watch a youtube video on how to use it.

    Tier 3 GSA gigs on fiverr. In my opinion its more effective to pay someone on fiverr than to learn hohow to use gsa the right way. You want to do it eventually but your time now is better spent giving someone the $5 to hit your 2Nd layer with.
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    • Profile picture of the author Jennifer Hutson
      Originally Posted by Synnuh View Post

      I'm on my phone now but yes you read me right. Siloing with tiered links.

      You don't really need to read.

      Tier 1 pbn and real guest posts. Get a unique angle so your legit guest posting is easier.

      Tier 2 fcs networker. Watch a youtube video on how to use it.

      Tier 3 GSA gigs on fiverr. In my opinion its more effective to pay someone on fiverr than to learn hohow to use gsa the right way. You want to do it eventually but your time now is better spent giving someone the $5 to hit your 2Nd layer with.
      Scrapebox is a good alternative to GSA and there are plenty of Fiverr gigs for it, as well.
      Signature
      Know Amazon Sellers? Make 15% LIFETIME Referral Commissions
      theamazonwriter.com
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  • Profile picture of the author NeedBucksNow
    The site looked alright to me but could use some work. You are also going to need to keep adding content and giving it alot more time before you start to get any decent traffic from Google though. I would say if you truly want it to be successful and get to the top ranks, you are going to have to be willing to give it another year or two to really start paying off
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    • Profile picture of the author discrat
      Hey god,
      It looks to be fairly professional looking site. But you are all over the place, for me at least.

      I would become more focused in what you are trying to offer and write about.

      Iam not saying this will not work.

      But from my experience, success is more easily attained and potentially greater if you narrow and focus on a mere 1 or 2 niche products



      - Robert Andrew
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