It has been a while since my last post – as I have been focussing my efforts on getting a new site up and running and filling out the content on my fitness site.
Definitely the biggest area of learning for me in the last month and a bit has been link building – there are a huge number of ways to get links out there and it is really a minefield as so many methods can harm your SERPS position instead of helping. I am thinking of writing a summary of these methods as I know this would have been helpful to me about 6 weeks ago!!
In other news – I have been surprised to see my fitness site continue to bring in long tail targeted traffic but not convert into sales – in many cases not even converting to clicks to the merchant. After a few weeks of feeling very disheartened by this I have taken a good look at the product pages as I realised I am obviously not doing something as well as I could be. Affiliate marketing seems to be full of these realisations, where you think you have done something fine, but then return to it after a few weeks (or days) hindsight and realise you could do a whole lot better. In the case of the fitness site – I really needed some images on there, as relying on the product images that were on the ECU’s (easy content units) just wasn’t attracting enough attention. I also reformatted the ECU’s themselves and moved them up the page, as often they were falling below the fold – meaning that visitors were likely just to disappear from the page before even seeing the link I want them to click. So with those changes made, I will let you know how the new pages fare!
CSV to Post and improving conversions
Its been a while since my last post and I have been busy!
My two new 2010 affiliate sites are doing OK I think – though I would like to see them driving more traffic and ideally more conversions! (wouldn’t we all?!) They are both getting about 10 uniques a day at the moment, and converting at about 1% despite probably about 50% extremely highly targeted traffic.
To improve this I spent a while looking at the visitors journey on both sites – and asked simple questions like “would I actually click that?”. In many cases I was failing massively – so some work was needed. Some of this focussed on adding images and giving product pages the feel of an online store – to try and get rid of the blog atmosphere.
Once I had done this it seemed that the next logical step would be to add some more content – as I hadn’t updated this for a couple of weeks. I have previously tried loads of different approaches to this – obviously trying to automate as much as possible. Returning to using a CSV to Post plug-in for Wordpress, I decided I would try to do the whole layout for a product page in Excel first and have this all import – so that nothing was left for me to do once it was in Wordpress. In practice this turned out incredibly well and I will probably put up a whole post on this. But certainly check out the plugin as its a great timesaver – especially if your any good with Excel!
Along side this I have been persevering with back links as well as developing my web design skills. I have built a couple of sites for small businesses locally – so am planning to turn this into a small business – watch this space for my portfolio site!