Yet Another Newbie Journal!

Tireswing

New member
Apr 2, 2009
61
0
0
East Coast, USA
I've been a member here for a while and I've done a bit of article marketing in the past, with some success. I'm trying to move into more lucrative endeavors and, hence, I'm starting a log here to (a) keep me motivated and (b) to hopefully get some feedback on what I'm doing.

Here's where I stand today:

I have one website that I've been slowly building links to. It's an Amazon affiliate product review site, ranking right now on page 3 for my main keyword. Honestly, there is more competition than I thought, but I think I'm making some headway. Right now, I have about 8% of the people reading the site clicking through (240 visits according to Google Analytics), but zero sales. That's a little discouraging, but I figure that it probably has to do with my pre-sell being crap.

My other project is through MSN Adcenter, advertising a CPA item. I've only run the campaign for a day at this point and the numbers thus far are:

Code:
Spend Clicks Impressions CTR Avg Position Avg CPC
28.84     21     550     3.82      2.62        1.37

So far so good I guess?

The other project I've been thinking about is a datafeed merchant site. I've found some pretty uncompetitive keywords for a small (but relatively high-ticket) niche. I read somewhere that Google has started cracking down on these type of sites specifically. Is there any truth to that or am I just fighting through the duplicate content filter? I've been giving myself SEO breaks by coding a parser for the datafeed, but I'm not going to launch the site unless there's some chance of actual success.

Thanks for reading!

-TS
 


Hey guys,

So far I've been commenting on related blogs. Those are slowly trickling in. I did a bunch of Social Bookmarking stuff too, and that's helped. The least successful thing I tried was spinning my content (which actually came out about 50% unique, and readable) and posting it on a bunch of "2.0" sites. Most of those haven't been indexed.

The weirdest thing is that I've jumped about 10 places in the results, but I haven't seen a significant boost in traffic. I'm also having a bitch of a time getting people to actually click through to Amazon.

As for updating content, I haven't done much. I rewrote a few of the articles and changed a few pieces of the layout around, but the core of them remains the same. Each article contains two images and at the bottom has a star review with a link below that to buy it.

I'm not too worried about the conversions until I start getting more traffic.

Oh, my bounce rate has been hovering around 50% lately. I've tried finding out what a "normal" rate is and discovered that it varies widely from site-to-site. The changes I've made seen to have little to no impact on the rate either.

FINALLY, I just signed up with a new affiliate network and I'm trying to find another good offer to run. Any general advice about choosing one to run on Search? I know it's a vague question, but I'm shooting the dark without guidance. I've spoken a few times with my Affiliate Manager and he's been really helpful, but I also don't want to bug the shit out of him before I start making him money.

Thanks for reading guys, I'll update again in a few days.