The Month In Review
After writing a whopping 45 articles last month and wearing my fingers down to nubs I felt I had set the groundwork for a very solid, albeit unfocused website.Now as you are no doubt aware, great content is worthless if eyeballs don’t read it. So this month I split my time 75% to content 25% to outreach.
Because my websites are usually focused around a single niche it is easy for me to come across as an expert in my field, especially to the person you are reaching out to who will only casually glance at your website. As you will see, having an unfocused website hurt me in outreach. The goal of outreach should be backlinks that DRIVE REAL WORLD TRAFFIC. Yes backlinks help you eventually rank in Google but real people have real wallets that buy real products. Kill two birds with one stone.
While I do have some link building tricks I do not share, they do not work on this style of website. So for this website I just stuck with what works.
http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies
For this website I refused to do guest posts. I am already writing so much content on my website that I do not want to write more content for other people. This is a personal choice, not a business one. Guest posts are probably the easiest way to naturally link back to an entirely review website since you are fully in control of link placement and where you link to. This whole case study is not how you should build an affiliate website but rather how I am choosing to create one. As a result some of what I do won’t be best practice. Shooting myself in the foot? Absolutely.
First I went with my tried and true method of chasing down “resource” pages. I found 200 loosely related resource pages and emailed each site owner informing them of my awesome website. 15 responses, no bites. A good bit of feedback stating that the section relevant to them was not built out enough, or the site was a throw shit at a wall and hope something sticks approach.
Failing that I tried my next one, broken links. I found two dead sites that had hundreds of backlinks pointing to them and crafted 300 emails to various webmasters. Of that I got 22 Responses and again no bites.
This is not unexpected. Supplementary content is the easiest way to get links. Who wants to link to a review? I stress this often “how to guides” and the like work best when pitching to other people. But this is not how I am creating my website, so I had to come up with something else.
If you read my last case study you will know that I have been spending a lot of time on forums and social media where people discuss the products I have reviewed. I noticed something quite funny for one particular product and it was completely unexpected. Fanboyism. Now as you know there are diehard fans of Apple iphones and Android phones. And they love to argue about why the particular product they spent their money on is superior to yours. You may have even come across a heated exchange between the two “warring” sides in the comments of related articles.
Well I was surprised to see this same level of fanaticism surrounding one of my products. If someone cares about something a lot, it’s not too hard to rustle his or her jimmies. So with this in mind I actually bought the highest model of this product, one that is particularly popular and gets exceptional feedback from its cult following, just to review it.
And I absolutely roasted it. Not in a troll way. In a legitimate way. You should know that for every feature a product has, there is someone who is going to find it useless. I wrote the review from the mindset of someone who wouldn’t like or need every feature. It was scathing. I finished the review with something similar to “Do not buy this product, it is broken in it’s current state” I then went on to recommend the competing brand.
Pretty happy with my dirty work I now had to make my opinion known. So I posted it in one of the forums where the product was routinely praised. Boy, didn’t that open the floodgates….
No my Akismet is working fine. This is the amount of responses I got on my article. Over the next 24 hours I received over 200 comments on the article itself. I also posted forums where the opposing fanboys lurked. In addition to this I reached out via social media and email to anyone who had reviewed the product, informing them of my findings and questioning their odd choice to praise the product. I also reached out people who reviewed the competing product and praised their decision to recommend it over the one I had reviewed, linking back.
My article was being talked about. And posted. And argued about. Not just in the comment section of my website by right across the web. I had links to this post appear naturally in comment sections of big brand review sites, forums. Two influencers even amended their article to include my review as an alternate opinion. Not to mention all the social media shares.
Now the product cost between $80 and $250. And out of that I got 32 backlinks (that I can find) pointing back to that one page of my website. Now while the majority are blog comments and forum posts there was some real juicy ones as well. But the juicy links only pointed to that one single page. It’s here that internal links come in. Linking to related articles from your link magnet helps give a boost to them in the eyes of google. It’s NOT instant. But it is noticeable. So I linked different reviews which in turn linked out to other reviews. Internal linking is a must, not just for google but for your user. If they are enjoying reading a review but the product isn’t right for them, recommend one that is. You may find this gains you a sale.
More Content
Because you can never have enough content I created another 35 articles for my website. I am slowly moving towards a cohesive theme (making all the different categories make sense) but it wont be until 200ish posts before this is apparent. Lots of work to do. Content is where the money is at so it is where I am spending most of my time in an effort to reach my lofty target.
Content this month went back to me just using stock images from Amazon. Not my preferred method but it allowed me to churn out 35 articles in addition to the outreach. Because I am using basic images available to everyone my key differentiator is my copy. It has to be on point. Remember, you HAVE to add value SOMEWHERE. So far that gives me 80 articles. Content is the thing that makes you money. And having scored a handful of links, next month will see me entirely focus on content. While I am not looking forward to another full month of writing, it needs to be done otherwise I won’t even come close to my goal.
Ranking
Now it may surprise a lot of you to learn that my website is already ranking in google, I am hitting some incredibly unpopular keywords on page one but the stuff I want to rank for is starting to creep through to page 3 and 4 (and higher).
Now say this with me “there is no google sandbox”. There is however a major difference in the amount of data google has on your BRAND NEW website and one that is 3 years old. So google slowly shuffles your site around until it gains the data needed to give you a stable rank. There was a reason why I did not look at my analytics in the first month. The Data is bogus.
Let me show you what I mean:
At one point last month I was ranking 7th for the search term “b”. And 6th for the word “John Brush”. I don’t need to tell you that both of these are irrelevant to my website.
Now this may have only been for two individual searches. It definitely wasn’t consistent and it was just google shuffling around my website. You CANNOT draw any conclusion from these findings. IMO you need a good three months of data (following the movements of the keywords), before you know what google thinks about your website.
So Far I am consistently ranking for zero relevant search terms on page one, 9 semi-relevant unpopular long tails on the bottom of page two and the rest all page three and onwards to infinity. This is normal. Ranking on google is the long play. Normally I would start out by attacking social media to drive my initial traffic but my lack of supplementary content makes it difficult to create clickbait.
For this website my goal is to drive 90% of traffic through google. I will not be focusing on social.
So to date my average on page time is 2:03 and a bounce rate of 78%. Pretty happy with this and it is a big clue to Google that my content is worth something. But man is this lack of progress a drag. Even though I know it’s temporary, working two months for little to no result isn’t all that impressive.
Earnings
Now with the google starting to shuffle my site against keywords, I am starting to see a trickle of targeted traffic reach my website with me having to rely on outside sources like forums.
And you all know why we want targeted traffic. Because if someone finds something extremely relevant to them, they are more likely to open their wallets.
So while inconsistent, the targeted traffic this month actually bought products related to my site, which is a good indication of things going right.
Above you can see the new reporting screen from Amazon. I’ll be honest, I hate it. While it works fine if you selling less than 30 items, it is incredibly poorly set out for those who sell hundreds of products a day. Once I exceed 30 products sold/ month I will be reverting to the old reporting system.
As you can see, the targeted traffic brought in a little more money this month. Nothing to scream about but it shows everything is going according to plan. I am confident I will hit the thousands before month 5.
You can see the spike in clicks on the 17th. This was a result of my outreach efforts going semi-viral in the niche. Unfortunately the traffic was mostly people looking to argue so it didn’t result in many sales. Untargetted traffic sucks, remember?
Expense Report
Only one major expense this month, the product I purchased for review. Since I am giving it a price range to obfuscate the product, I will simply list the expense as the upper end of this price range. Yes this makes my report inaccurate, but in the coming months being $100 or so out shouldn’t make a difference.
Last months expenses, carried forward $341.77
This months expenses:
Product: $250
This Months Earnings:
$51.20
Total: -540.57
Wooo, one step forward, two steps backward. Still in the red. While it looks discouraging, growth in this field is exponential and this is exactly what I would have expected to see at month two. Looking good. Until next time.
