3 months in and 300$ in debt :(

Problem #1: It is a body building site that focuses its mailing list on weight loss.

Problem #2: The formatting is inconsistent.

Problem #3: The color scheme makes it hard to read.

Problem #4: Every article should direct the reader to a buy button.

Problem #5: Your expectations are higher than mine. When I first got started in business, looking at my early stats, I would have expected 1 sale for 1200 visitors, not 12 sales. You are expecting 1%, and most new sites perform in the 0.1% range.

Problem #6: In order to expect 25% opt-in rate, you will have to offer a more congruent message. Again, this number represents over-expectations, given the overall experience on your site.

Problem #7: 7search is a low-performing advertising channel. It has done alright for me, but it simply does not get enough traffic to be able to amp up business to a level that you want.

Problem #8: If you are getting a lot of junk comments, you are attracting the wrong audience, which in turn is skewing the rest of your numbers. Turn off commenting on your site, so that you can see the numbers accurately.

Problem #9: $300 is not a huge investment into turning a profit from your site. You have barely scratched the surface of your real potential, but given that you are missing on so many points, it is better to fix your problems before spending more money on this site.

Problem #10: Your choice of pictures suck. Men don't want to look like gay body builders, they want to look attractive to women instead. Only a few of your pictures are attractive to your target audience. The rest of your pictures look like they belong on a gay dating site.

Problem #11: You are throwing the towel in too soon on this site, and if you are willing to quit this one so quickly, you might do the same on your next site as well.

If you want to quit after only 3 months and $300, you are not cut out for marketing or entrepreneurship. Maybe try something else.

Well from what I see you have an interview/blog roll. Might try some testing. Slap a Static page Squeeze page style and go over the key points of your Ultimate list, what will they learn, etc. This will more or less help you funnel people to your opt in list and if they want to explore other details of your site, all they have to do is explore.

My suggestions.

1. Your opt in box is about fat loss tips. Yes this is important in body building but you need to focus purely on "muscle growth" something like

"How to get bulging muscles in 3 month days - guaranteed.
Grab your mini course right now, the girls are going to love this!"

2. Have a picture or two of bodybuilding women, this will tap into the emotional need and undercurrent of desire for bodybuilding.

Good luck

Test and test again.

Marcus

If your concern is conversion (sales rate), then you need to do A/B split testing or better yet multivariate split testing. See visualwebsiteoptizimer.com or convert.com for excellent products in this field.

Regardless of what ANYONE tells you they think you need to do in order to improve your conversion rate, there is only one way to know for sure, and that is to split test.

Bill just gave you a consulting session you could pay a lot of money for elsewhere. You should be able to get a lot of mileage out of that list.

Remeber you are trying sell to users not bots. Your site is pretty deflecting. I checked it out with the intent on looking deeper into your problem but simply didnt want to stay on the homepage for more than 5 seconds.

You seriously need to add some level of consistency.

Oh boy, where do I begin.

1) Get rid of the "Like this post, share it" toolbar on the bottom of every page. It's fine to have a share plugin, but realistically all you need is the standard "Tweet, +1, Like/Share from facebook" module. What you have now is a huge distraction.

2) Your home page needs to have summaries of the your articles, and perhaps 5 to 10 small summaries Not whole blog posts. It's nauseating to sift through all of that and unnecessary.

3) As someone mentioned, change the color scheme. It looks so...just awful.

4) You have broken code on your homepage, it's hard to be taken seriously (website wise when you don't even look credible)

5) Your title tags and meta descriptions need severe optimizing. You aren't a brand, so "ExtremeBodyFit" as your only title means that no one will ever find your website (if they do, it's not based on search...and again if it is based on search, it's not targeted whatsoever). It can be something like, "Start Your Fat Loss and Muscle Mass Building Now | ExtremeBodyFit". It's not the best, I didn't do any keyword research, but THIS IS BETTER THAN NOTHING and you will (hopefully) start getting some targeted traffic.

6) Get rid of the "Fat Loss Secrets" thing on the sidebar since it goes nowhere, and as someone mentioned with the email newsletter. All you have to do is say something like, "Subscribe to Get the Latest Killer Fat Loss Tips" with only an email submit request. There has been debate about whether or not you should ask for a name, I don't want to go too far into this.- To each it's own.

7) This is kind 5b, but every one of your pages needs to be better optimized on-site. All of your title tags need to be fixed, you need meta descriptions. Title Tags are pretty much the #1 indicator of relevance to whatever you are talking about when it comes to google search.

8) I do disagree with the notion of "too many guy pictures". I'm sure the target market of people who muscle build want to see other great physiques. But I do agree there should either be some before or after pictures of fat loss with women, or some female body building photos.

9) You give out workout routines that are very thin with content at times as to how to perform exercises. Perhaps you can talk about how to do each type of workout exercise, and you have a whole new section of content to write about. Heck, you can talk about the workout, and say you can give an ebook that has videos of correct forms of workout exercises, it doesn't really matter. Sure people can look on youtube, but if they trust you, they will download your ebook for free (and build your list) and watch your unlisted videos on youtube.

10) You have analytics software but it doesn't look like you connected it your analytics account. Try to fix that ASAP so you can find out what keywords people are typing to get to your site (which would be useful for new content later on)

This is stuff off the top of my head. I probably didn't need to go that deep, it's just a habit of mine.

Good luck!

Here are examples of some good Fitness Blogs.

• Crude Fitness - Training without gimmicks
• Dan Go - The Fat Loss Ninja
• Zen to Fitness
• TS Method - Very Cool Effective Workout Routines & Fat Burning Foods

I know all of these guys and they all make a decent income from their blogs. Follow some of the advice above, but also dig around these live examples.

It doesn't even have to look high tech to do well. My personal blog gets a lot of action and is pretty "old school" looking.

Fitness Black Book

One important thing too...I wasn't selling much until I hit 500-1,000 visitors per day. You will need more traffic than you think to make decent money in this niche.

Check out my sig...I can help you in that regard.

-Rusty

There is nothing out of the ordinary about your story. This isn't the "automated money machine" dream land you may have read about. You might actually have to run this site for a year or even five years before you turn a worthwhile profit.

The vast majority of websites online are a labor of love that make little or nothing. Stop focusing on sales this early in the game. Work on your web development skills (they need a lot of work). Contribute something good to the internet. Once you succeed in that area, only then does monetization become interesting.

That being said, I think your site's content is better than most newbie attempts we see here on WF. However, the presentation is awful. It all goes back to using pre-made WordPress templates. You've probably got an idea in your head of how you want your site to look, but you can't do it because you are bound to remaining within the limitations of your template. I'm not saying changing to a custom design will turn the site around, but it's a good step 1 in moving forward.

A lot of the issues have already been covered above, but one thing that really threw me off is that your article/blog post text is VERY small.

I can barely read it...and my inclination is that if people cannot easily read your content, then they are probably going to bounce off the site & find what they need elsewhere.

First of all, your expectations are way too high,
unless you've created a site like this before and
seen similar numbers.

Take a step away for a second, and try to look
at your site from an outside perspective.

If you were a stranger and you just chanced
upon that site, would you buy something from
it? Would you opt in?

I wouldn't, and you probably wouldn't either, even
if you're not ready to admit that.

It looks like an amateur site. The formatting isn't
great - I suspect the way the whole thing looks
is your main issue. When sites have ugly formatting
and bad layouts, it doesn't exactly send a strong
message of security for credit card/email details,
you know?

Something else - Your font is WAY too small. There's
just no point making the site so hard to read.

There's a learning curve to online business. The first
step is getting started, and making the ball roll. You've
done that, so good job.

Next job is to reach escape velocity.

Good luck with it - you've got a ton of useful information
in this thread, so don't get disheartened, just keep moving
forward.

-David Raybould

I struggled heavily at first. But stuck with it and discovered some ninja moves. Persistence my friend.

I think its too obvious what the site is trying to do. I mean you are flooding almost every post with ads, affiliate offers and amazon goods but you are doing it without providing any real value to the reader. Your interviews have hardly any work done on them and one of them was literally a wall of text.

I know you made the site to make money, but you simply have to build some kind of value to your readers before you start bombarding the site with affiliate offers and advertising.

I mean, good job taking action...but you have a loooong way to go. You have basically got all the help you need in this thread, so all there is left is doing it! Good luck.

TPW nailed it.

Aside from that I've chosen not to help you. Based upon the fact that when I find blocks of text this large:

____________ \/ \/ \/ ____________________________
I’ve been interested in bodybuilding since I was a kid. I don’t remember the first time I thought bodybuilding was cool, but as long as I can remember I have always been an Arnold fan. I do however remember when I decided I wanted to get into the scene. I was in seventh grade at a Portland Blackhawks hockey game. My mom got mine and my brother’s attention and told us to look behind us. There were the two most massive men I had ever seen. It turns out it was pro bodybuiler Dave Hughes and one of his buddies. I talked to him for a little while and he told me to look for him in the next Ironman Mag. Of course I did and there he was. Ever since then I was hooked. As a child growing up my parents were never actually all that supportive of what I wanted to do. In fact when I started lifting weights when I was 14, they tried to discourage me from lifting too much and told me I was too young. I worked out off and on through the years then joined the USAF in 2003. The careerfield I went into, TACP, was highly demanding, both physically and mentally. I was calling in airstrikes from battle and coordinating all sorts of aerial assets, from jets and helicopters, to drones and artillery. We trained extremely hard. We would do timed ruck marches where we would carry packs of 60-100 pounds for 12 miles with a time standard of 3-4 hours depending on the variables. Of course this plus all the running we did didn’t allow me to put enough food down to actually put on much muscle. Although, during my first deployment I no longer had the massive amounts of PT keeping my calorie expenditure so high, and now that I was able to fully dedicate myself to my lifting I hit a growth spurt. I left for Iraq weighing a mere 135 pounds and returned seven months later weighing 170. The change was absolutely amazing, to my friends, my family, and myself. If I wasn’t hooked before, I definitely was now. Throughout the rest of my military career I was not known anymore as “the little guy”. I had become the person I’d always wanted to be, the big dude people wanted to talk to about fitness, the one that inspired others, and that people came to for advice. Unfortunately due to my military operations tempo and the occasional injury I see-sawed back and forth. On my third deployment, this time to Afghanistan I was blown through a door while calling in an airstrike while being engaged in a fire fight. After regaining consciousness and finishing out what had to be done I realized that my back was in a pretty bad way. Unfortunately I was only a month into my six month deployment. I told my buddies around me, but made sure not to let my leadership get wind of my injury, so as not to be pulled from the line and shipped back to the states to heal. There was no way I was leaving my friends. Unfortunately I didn’t understand the extent of my injury, and my back declined greatly over the next five months. This was probably due, at least in part, to the miles of patrolling the mountains of the Afghan/Pakistan border with a full combat load plus all my equipment. By the time I got back to the states my back was in a pretty bad way. To make a long story a little less long, about six months after I returned I was told I needed a two level spinal fusion at the base of my spine (L4-S1). I was forced to retire completely from the air force and told I couldn’t lift more than 35 pounds and that I was not to do any sort of running or high impact exercise ever again since the doctors were unsure of how long the lifespan of the fusion would be. I couldn’t believe that I was being forced back into being the little guy again. Six months after my surgery, against all orders I started lifting again. Running was out of the question, but honestly I never liked it anyway. It was my mission to prove the USAF and my doctor wrong, and show everyone just how much I really could accomplish. Within 18 months of my surgery I had competed in my first physique competition and afterward successfully reached a new personal record of 186 pounds. My first contest was mainly to gain the knowledge and experience of how things operated. Now exactly two years after my surgery, I will compete again to try to win the men’s physique category at the NPC

\/\/\/ __________________________________________________ _____

THAT TELLS ME that you have absolutely NO IDEA what in the world you are doing.

If you went through all the work of setting this blog up, posting all this content, but you still haven't figured out what the "enter" button on your keyboard does, thats a pretty BIG problem afaic.

Everything about your writing screams mediocre. I'd say spend less time posting content, and more time POSTING QUALITY CONTENT.

Thats my only real recommendation.

7search will get you nothing. Stick to Adwords and Microsoft Adcenter. Your site is incredibly crowded and i have no idea what it is that you want me to do. What was your intent by picking the design that you have.

$300 in debt and you're thinking about quitting? I WISH I only accumulated that much debt!

Reminds me of a quote I came upon one day that says something like, "People don't fail in Internet Marketing. They only quit before 'the magic' happens." There's lots of good tips and advice above this post, so just pay heed and you'll be alright. Best wishes!

I recommend that you sell the domain name, then change your niche to something more profitable. Money Making is always a great niche to get leads for.

You need to treat IM like any other business. Name any other successful business that was built with $300?

You got a lot of great advice already - it's even better than what I could offer so I won't comment any further regarding that.

3 month aand $300 dollars and you're thinking about quitting already? I think you're just going through a rough stretch right now and you're thinking with your emotions and not your mind. I don't think you wasted that $300 - that money just bought you a real world education.

Keep tweaking with your site to improve you conversions and get more great advice from this forum to help you with your issues. I would keep my wallet closed at this point though; a lot of problems you're facing can be fixed with a minimum investment at this point going forward. Once you start converting and making money; then that's when I'd think about spending more money. Good luck and keep it going - you'll be fine.

If I were you I would spend some time on Rusty's site (he posted above). He has a wealth of information that will help you get the ball rolling.

How do you know you are getting REAL traffic? Those 1200 could largely be bot traffic.

Don't quit, just stick to ONE thing and it will work.

I am sure some one can make an WSO from all the awesome help you there man.. So nothing to add with regards to the site etc... Whether you continue this or not and you should continue if you are passionate about this topic , if you are doing only for money then it is difficult to motivate yourself day in and out ... First focus on creating great value and think of it as establishing your real estate, you are building it now and after it is completed (creating free gifts etc..) then you expecct rent a.k.a sales :-). Good luck and dont quit ever and 3 months is too soon to do it anyways...

Maybe straight men don't want to look like gay body builders, but presumably gay body builders don't object to looking like themselves.

Heterosexual men, I suppose?

Good spinoff idea for extra monetisation?



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You might want to remove this at the top of the page:

class="home blog" style="background-image:url(http://extremebodyfit.com/wp-content/themes/intrepidity/uploads/fitness.jpg);background-repeat:repeat;font-size:12px;">

If you can make the site look more professional/good looking that would help.

But even that is of minor importance. You're in the SEO game so master SEO and get your site ranked for good terms.

Personally I wouldn't recommend going this blogging route.

I would:

1) set up a squeeze page
2) send traffic to that squeeze page with paid media, Youtube, and forum posts.

Goal: build your list in the fitness market.

If you are going to go this blogging route:

1) Write one original content post EVERYDAY for the next 90 days. Follow basic onpage and offpage SEO.

I've done this before and around the 60th day or something you're going to find your site ranking for more and more things.

Even though it may be brutal to get critiqued, it's a neccesary evil. You don't know what you don't know, so until you put it in front of the eyes of people who do, you'll never "really" know how to fix it unless you get some proper guidance. There's a slew of opinions above (which in a forum this big with this many voices can be overwhelming), so just take it one step at a time. Worry about correcting onpage stuff first before digging into your pocket to find more traffic.

The best thing you could have done is come here for advice versus just giving up, so atleast pat yourself on the back for that. It takes time.

It hurts to get criticized even if what people are saying is true. Good on you for being open about your site. Listen to what people are saying and take their wisdom to heart.

i think I never spend a money to backup my marketing online, except the internet bill.....lol

I don't spend money on my internet business until I first make money from it. Then I re invest in the company. Maybe try free forms of marketing, or providing a service for other companies and then reinvesting...

Seriously... you have a picture of a muscular dude that looks like he fell asleep inside a tanning booth, he looks kinda strange, and you wonder what's wrong with your site??

Dude, have you looked at your own site?

It's pretty obvious that everything on it has been outsourced to writers and designers working for $3 an hour, built on templates that cost $5 to buy, or created top to bottom by an obvious dabbler/non-expert.

I don't really want to get into a debate about outsourcing here or anything, but dude, have you ever checked into a high-profile Guru's site and seen 500 word articles that look like they were written in 10 minutes?

It's just not gonna work.

Internet marketing sites need not only to look professional, they also have to convey enthusiasm and energy.

Your site does neither of these things.

There are lot here who have spend more than $10k and got nothing in return. But thats how business works. You got to have 1000 failures before you jump to profits.

If you want to focus on increasing opt-ins, then use a squeeze page instead of a blog. The blog should be a supplement of your squeeze page. You want people to subscribe first, then after they subscribe, you can tell them about your blog and the posts in there.

The money is in the list. Focus on that.

Step 1: Focus on building a list. Count optins not traffic.
Step 2: Build a relationship with the list
Step 3: Don't worry till you do step 1 and step 2. 99% never do them.

When I started out I always avoided spending money whenever I could and even now, if I'm starting a new project I:

1. Start small and test it on free traffic
2. Scale it up slowly
3. Test EVERYTHING (headlines, optin pages, offers, prices, OTOs etc.)

It's easy with hindsight but whilst you may think you've "lost" money here you've maybe just invested in one of the most valuable lessons and IMer can have. Stay positive!

I understand many newbie frustrations as i have been in that position myself. After a few years struggling with Google adsense sites and Affiliate Window products I discovered Amazon promotion and i haven't looked back but it has been a hard knock road.

My advice to relative newbies is to focus on one path and in my exeperience have a look at the Niche Profit Classroom' course - this made the difference for me and i am making a full time living now online. Also, combine the NPC course with Amazon product promotion and you really can't go wrong.

Carla J

Patience is a virtue. Don't rush on everything you do. $300 is way too small compared to what others have spent and have not recoup in a year or so.

Stay focus and take the suggestions of some Warriors here. For sure you will see a big difference in few months' time.

Sorry to hear that man.. I myself in this problem.
Try to focus in one thing, don't give up untill you get your goal!