Affiliate Musketeer

For any of you that have been following this blog over the last few months, you’ll have heard about how my latest affiliate site experienced a nice boost in traffic in the first 4 weeks of its existence but then completely disappeared out of the SERPs. I explained how I believed this was due to Google testing the waters with my site and validating backlinks and content and domain age etc etc and probably lots of other things I have no idea about. Anyway, during the blackout period – that’s the name I’ll call the time when my site did not exist on google – I seriously struggled to remain motivated with this site and the one thing that kept me going was that I believed that one day in the not so distant future…my rankings would return. Today is that day!.

I launched the site in February 2010 and it experienced good long tail traffic throughout February (when I say good I mean it was getting 30 or so uniques per day for very targeted terms) until it vanished from all rankings in March. It’s now coming to the end of April (about 6 weeks after my site vanished) and as I sit here now and do a search for ‘bar stools uk’, I can see my site for the first time in over 6 weeks sitting pretty at position #9 on page 1 of google.co.uk. That’s great news. It could signal the start of a return to rankings and hopefully the beginning of some regular commission with this site which has so far earned £52 in two sales in almost 3 months – pretty poor you’ll agree.

This blog post is actually happening in real time as I continue to check my rankings and analytics for today and I am absolutely chuffed to say that it looks like the site is getting full credit now. Since the site blacked out, I had been lucky to get 2 or 3 visitors per day (and they were coming from yahoo) but today I’ve had 8 unique visitors from google for highly targeted keywords. This has really lifted my spirits because despite having my best month this year with my other affiliate site (my PPC-powered site), I was really entering a stage of hopelessness – again. Seriously, the life of an affiliate marketeer musketeer, at least in the early days, is one of extreme ups and downs. Actually, come to think of it, when I ran my first business (which I subsequently sold for a decent profit) it was no different. Some days I was buzzing and some days (those days where no sales come in) I was rock bottom. I’ve known since then that the life of a business-person, especially one who runs their own business, is exactly that, a rollercoaster of ups and downs and this affiliate marketing lark is no different. You just have to guts it out. I set myself a goal of getting an affiliate marketing company up and running by the end of the year and I really mean it.

Alas! With this site now back in the rankings, I feel like things are moving in the right direction and with a little bit of luck and even more graft, I am confident the site will start to make a little more money. It’ll never make me rich or sustain a full time salary but the whole process of getting it up and running and into a shape where it’s making a couple of hundred quid a month will serve as the perfect blueprint for additional sites moving forward.

To summarise, if rankings remain intact and solid (and I am trying to be prudent with my forecasts here but the excitement of actually returning to the SERPs is too much to contain), it took me 11 weeks from the time the site went live to now to get properly listed in the SERPs.

Factors that may have contributed to this:

• The domain was registered over a year ago but the site went live only 11 weeks ago. During that down time the domain had no hosting and was essentially just sitting there.
• I have written approximately 60 pages of unique content for the site.
• I have posted blog comments on related sites, written PR articles and took part in reciprocal link programs with other bar stools-related sites.
• The site is running on WordPress with a custom theme that I coded myself to have a strong SEO layout

If anyone else has a site around about the same sort as mine and about the same age, I’d love to hear from you to see where you are. I’d really like to hear from you guys who are perhaps 3 or 4 months ahead of me in terms of your ‘timescale’ compared to mine to give me a potential idea of how things could pick up in the next few months. Will I be running my own affiliate marketing company by the end of the year?

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