What was he doing wrong? examination of a real site

(Edit: Kind of long but totally worth it!)

A friend of a friend recently asked me for some advice on why his website wasn't earning him any money. He has been working on it passionately for the last year and a half and is frustrated (who hasn't been there, right?)

Right there on the phone I went to his site and instantly saw things that needed to be changed in order for him to maximize the potential of his chosen niche.

I want to go over this for a few reasons. If you have made any of these mistakes, it's not too late to make some profitable changes! That's what trying, testing, and tweaking is all about. And that's how we make money.

Here's a quick over view of his site:

His niche is emergency preparedness (food storage, financial preparedness, etc.)
He's currently getting anywhere from 60 to 80 visitors a day from SEO and backlinks.
He has a few ebooks that he's offering for free.
For monetization he has adsense, an amazon store front, and an ebook he is trying to sell.

His site is at www.familylifeboat.com if you want to follow along!

The first thing I noticed when I came to his site was that he:

1. Isn't really building a brand. He has a very small slogan within a somewhat vague picture and doesn't have a logo.

2. Wasn't building a list (no opt-in offering anything of value above the fold)

3. Had way too many forms of monetization (no direction confuses visitors) and even made the ebook he was selling kind of hard to find

I asked him kind of information he provides in his newsletter (because I saw he had a small newsletter opt in toward the middle of the homepage).

He said that he has been writing really informative articles on current trends of emergency preparedness, but that he only had a few subscribers.

I then asked him what kind of visitors he gets and he mentioned that most of his traffic comes organically from targeted keywords.

During our conversation I talked to him about the importance of building an email list of subscribers and offering them something of value, follow up with a series of equally valuable articles that presell items like his paid ebook, relative affiliate products that will help his target audience, etc.

I also mentioned that he get rid of his adsense and amazon store front. Because when it comes down to it he'd make way more money with a focused sales funnel.

I told him to learn as much as he can about copywriting (or at least hire someone who does) This is something that is VERY overlooked in the IM world. As bad as this sounds, he needs to present his website and products as a SOLUTION to all the horrible things that could happen IF an emergency happens and people aren't prepared.

And then of course get a logo and slogan that represents his brand.

I reassured him that the information he was providing is increasing in demand as the economy worsens, as global disasters are more publicized than ever, as Glenn Beck's show stays on the air (JK! staying focused now...) and that his potential information product is viable based on what is currently selling on the market (obviously not as much as the big niches, but enough)

He left feeling better and as I've seen today (I've only had the one conversation with him) he's already made some positive changes to his site and approach.

So please remember these key points when creating a site...

Pick the right niche, build targeted traffic, create compelling free front end offers to build a list, follow up with content rich emails and occasional hard sells (a good content to pitch ratio is 3 to 1), and ALWAYS try, test, and tweak!

If you have any additional suggestions, please feel free to comment...

Also, I'd be happy to check out your site and make some suggestions. Just send me a PM and I'll have a look.

Thanks