Affiliate Musketeer

I’m always whinging on about how my affiliate website has yet to start earning properly. I’ve moaned about how I set up the site in February and it’s only earned about £50 since then, £45 of which was accidental…I’ve moaned about how it got an initial rankings boost when it was a new domain and how it subsequently lost its ranking after a few weeks and I’ve moaned about the continuous bouncing about the SERPs from page 1 to 15 over the last few months. Today though, I truly believe something special happened…

I made a good, solid £4.45 commission from a perfectly targeted (and I have to say, planned) long tail keyword. In the style of one of my fellow marketeers musketeers, feast your eyes on this baby:

It’s not world beating and I’m still not living in a wooden hut with clear blue sea views and a white sandy beach for a back garden but it is definitely my most positive step forward with this site in a couple of months. Why now? What has changed? Not much, really, other than SERPs. As I said earlier, Google’s been bouncing me around its first 15 pages for the last 5 months but recently a pattern is starting to emerge. In the past, my rankings have popped onto page 1 for a day, then mysteriously dropped off the radar the following day. Last week, I appeared on page 1 and held the position for 4 or 5 days before dropping again.

The drop only lasted a couple of days and today, I’m back on page 1 for a few long tail keywords (one of which converted today). I have said this so many times before and for anyone who has followed this blog for a while, you’ll have heard this before; but this time, I seriously want the rankings to stick! Today’s commission is a glimpse of what this site could be – and even if it is only £4.45 per day, I’d be more than happy with that!

This may help you understand what I mean:

As you can see, something looks like its starting to change. I am fairly confident it is down to two factors:

1. The site’s age (or the age of the links pointing to the site)
2. The number of respectable links showing in G’s index for the site

In the past couple of weeks I have added a few incoming links (actually I didn’t, I outsourced them) and I believe these have had a positive effect. Taking a lesson from this, I can only redouble my link building efforts in the coming weeks to help this site start realising some of its potential.

I’m just windering though, have you ever seen a site bounce around like this before? What is the cause?

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