I know I’ve fudged up something bad with this site several times over now; for example, I created too much content too quickly. I added individual products to multiple wordpress categories which ended up with me having a shit load of duplicate, fairly thin, content. Major problem with this was that some of the details for individual products was literally just copied and pasted from merchant like Furniture 123 etc.

I thought I would be safe because the urls on the Furniture 123 site where the products were were showing as PageRank grey…which I thought meant that the page hadn’t been indexed and therefore if I nicked the content really quick, I could get MY content indexed before F123. Foolish thing was, I should have actually checked to see if the pages were indexed or not using the google site command but I always try and get to point b via the shortest route possible and in this case I paid for it. The reality is, F123′s content was indexed and all I did was fill up my site with poor quality copied content – then duplicated as I added the bar stools to different wordpres categories thinking I was smart.

If this wasn’t bad enough crack, I also came up with a graphically heavy design which meant that I had to hide quite a bit of text content using css – not via the css display:none mind you, rather by resizing the containing div to ‘cut’ off the bottom of the box where all the content was. I think this is actually a safe way to hide content but either way, a manual review would find me out and I’d be screwed.

Then I blasted the site by paying someone on Odesk to make me 100s of ‘high PR backlinks’ using Paul’s and Angela’s Backlink Packets – which basically consist of a shit load of forum profiles with links back to my site. Not saying this is bad andit did work for a time, but I didn’t really spread my link building beyond this too much and I think ultimately, it just looked a bit spammy.

This guy looks strangely a lot like my organic SEO strategy for Bar Stools UK

Anyway, the result of all of this has been that the Bar Stools UK site has not managed to secure organic rankings – which means that its had no traffic (not strictly NO traffic, but not enough regular traffic to sustain sales each day). It WILL evenually calm down and settle because it’s not banned but throughout all of this time, I’ve tested and chopped and changed and used different linkbuilding strategies and I think overall, it’s just made Google’s job to validate the site pretty hard.

The really annoying thing though is that when it has got traffic, it has worked pretty well which suggests that my page layout is well optimised for conversion and my products and merchants convert pretty well too.

Why Not Just Throw the Towel In and Start Over?

Believe me, I’ve thought about this lots of times. Just dump the site, leave it for a while, let it age and then come back to it later with some fresh ideas. And I have sort of being doing this these last few weeks and perhaps this is why I’ve been a bit quiet with it’s progress. BUT, what I don’t want to do is leave this site without ever figuring out how to FIX it. I think whatever I learn with BSUK will serve me well with my future affilite sites so what I’ve been doing in the meantime is try to understand why it’s messed up (see above) and then come up with a more coherent and planned strategy on how not to do the same thing for other sites.

In other words, I’ve been working on another site, very similar to BSUK actually (even using the same WordPress Template really), but rather than copy what I did with BSUK, I’ve been doing things a little differently based on what I’ve learned.

This is What Has Been Working for the Other Site:

1. Add content slower.
2. Write completely 100% unique product descriptions and write them using better presell techniques. This also involves learning how to write good sales copy. Every single piece of content I now write I ‘spin’ using The Best Spinner (aff). This helps me maximise my time and helps me turn one article into hundreds of unique articles. This extends to product descriptions too…actually, especially product descriptions. Using the presell and sale copywriting techniques, every piece of content I write, I write to convince people to buy. Then I re-write it with The Best Spinner and this means that I can re-use this content anywhere else in the future (like Ezine Articles, for instance) without any duplicate content penalties.
3. Instead of using wordpress ‘categories’ to represent product categories, I’ve created wordpress ‘pages’ that act as the ‘category’ page. On that category page, I then link into all the individual products with images (as you would see in a normal category page) as well as some more 100% unique content supporting the category. This also opens up the opportunity to pull in product feeds with mysql and php directly from my merchants to my category ‘pages’ – although I haven’t evolved to that stage yet. This allows me to cut out all of the duplicate ‘category’ -> posts.
4. Make sure I’d followed all of the WordPress SEO suggestions made by Joost de Valk.
5. Build links using a combination of paced article marketing (aff). When I say paced, I mean submit sort of 20/30 articles per day over a period of time, rather than submit hundreds or even thousands of articles all at once.

All of this hasn’t meant that Ive made it yet or am even close to earning enough money from all of this shit to resign from my job yet, but it has improved the organic rankings of my other site way beyond those experienced by BSUK. So if I’ve been quiet, it’s not ‘cos I’m doing nothing, I’m actually working really hard (good few hours every night and a couple before work in the morning) in the background to fix the problems with BSUK using the techniques above whilst continuing to work on the new site to get top rankings. I’m not there yet but I am hoping that with the new link building strategies in place, I should start to see real positive results before the end of the year.

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Confident that my site was now fully stable in the SERPs, I resolved to increase its position from the middle of page 2 to the top 5! Generally speaking, you can increase your site’s rank in the results pages by building more links to it and that is exactly what I had in mind here.

I wrote myself a couple of (yes, that’s 2) articles with The Best Spinner which meant that I could turn these 2 articles into hundreds of unique articles quite quickly. The plan was then to distribute these articles to as many article directories as possible, making sure that each directory got a unique version of the article. This went perfectly to plan with the aid of a fellow affiliate and some automatic article submission software. The problem though, was that it was so successful, I managed to obtain over 100 links in the space of 30 minutes!

Now, whilst this was a fantastic way to build some super fast, high quality links, in my case it caused a little hiccup for my site.

As many of you who follow this blog will know, my bar stools site is skating on very thin ice and is pretty close to being a spammy site (or at least it was until I made some wholesale changes tonight). I say spammy because there are a few things the site is doing that I wouldn’t do next time around like, for example, hidden text content, too many mentions of the word ‘bar stool’ throughout the site, duplicate content caused by wordpress posts in multiple categories, no privacy policy, contact us page or much text content on the homepage.

So when I say my site was skating pretty thin to being a full blown spam site, that’s what I mean. So, when I’m so close to being a spam site and already have extra work to do to convince google that I’m legit, how do you think the big G reacted when all of a sudden, 150 or so links to my site popped up overnight?

Yep, you guessed it. Smack! Back out of the SERPs again.

At Least I’m Learning!

I honestly can’t say that this has been a pleasant experience and if anything, the whole debacle has contributed to me buying a whole hanging bag of fruit pastilles and eating them all myself. Now I know wallowing in self pity and eating sweets isn’t the best way to fix things but honestly, after this happened I seriously wanted to throw the whole site away and forget AM altogether.

BUT...fortunately, over the last few months I’ve managed to build up a couple of good relationships with fellow affiliates and when things got bad, its really helped me to send an email and whinge about it. Sometimes, as in my case, it really helps to get some fresh eyes on a problem and in the last couple of days, I’ve had lots of suggestions from kindly souls.

Solutions Not Problems!

Armed with this fresh info, I decided to tackle my bar stools site again his evening and have spent the last 4 hours making amendments; the sum of which are:

1. I have added sitemap.xml to sitemap link in footer
2. I have removed lots of links in right hand side bar (they were duplications of links in footer for the most part anyway)
3. I have actually added MORE hidden content, replacing the WordPress tag ‘excerpt’ for ‘content’ in the hidden text sections on the homepage. This should hopefully round up the links vs text argument. Its worked for other sites before so I can’t see why it shouldn’t work here – I know it’s hidden and generally bad crack but I’m prepared to take the risk. I can’t think of any other way to get text rich content onto the homepage without spoiling the visual layout of the site. If it doesn’t work, I can always remove it.
4. Ive added a contact us page.
5. I’ve added in a ‘guides’ page which should hopefully make the real unique content easier to find.

I’m driving now to fix the on page SEO factors so that all my link building efforts aren’t made in vain.

I still might eat another bag of fruit pastilles along the way though….

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When I say rolling around, I mean from ranking on the 1st page for no more than 24 hours to then rolling off the edge and into the abyss of nowehereness. This was the pattern until 3 days ago, that is. This time though, I returned to the rankings higher than I’d ever been before and things really felt different this time. Was it too good to be true?

Well, what makes this even more fascinating is that in the last 3 days, whilst its held its rank, my site has sold 4 items (at least 1 each day). Now, I always believed that if I could just get traffic to the site, it would convert. I had glimpses of this here but these last few days have absolutely cemented my belief that this will be a nice little site when it manages to capture its page 1 rankings permanently.

But now for the bollocks. There’s always bollocks involved! Tonight when I did my checks, the site had dropped from #5 to #58….

But I think this is a positive thing! I know I should never take day to day rankings too seriously because Google is in a constant state of flux but in the past, when my site has appeared in page 1 results, it has only ever lasted approximately 24 hours before being removed completely (at least from the first 10 pages of results) but this time, I’ve only dropped to position #58 on page 6….and it’s the same page that was ranking at #5 earlier today.

This to me feels like a good sign. It hasn’t been banished completely and this gives me great hope for the site. If I try and imagine how the inner workings of the SERPs go in relation to my recent work, I think this is the appropriate behaviour.

Imagine I outsource some backlink building. My virtual assistant manages to get some key links on profile pages, comments and forums. These links all get some form of highlighting on their respective homepages which adds to my total link popularity in quick time. Google likes this and after a month, it starts to ‘believe’ in me. It then ranks me at #5.

A few days later, some of the profiles get banned, some of the blog posts get deleted and all of the home page links to recent content fall off the homepage and ‘move location’…Google now takes a second look. ‘Whaooo,’ it says, ‘what’s going on here like?’ and a huge question mark over the integrity of my site is raised and subsequently, I lose my ranking – but not all the way…it likes some of my links because I haven’t been completely banished.

The solution to my dilemma here HAS to be to, quite simply, build more links. But not spammy ones. I need solid, longlasting, trustworthy links. So…

1. I could buy some links for a year to get guaranteed placement (I have some cash in the warchest now from previous months so I could afford this investment – especially if it’s going to result in one sale per day for the site!)
2. I could write some articles with unique content and get them on sites that will pretty much guarantee placement. Afterall, once the article has been aproved, it’s pretty much going to stay there, right?

I believe either method will contribute towards solving my ranking issue, the only question is, how many links will it take? I’m also one for the easy way out of any situation and I have to admit, buying links for a year sounds like a great option…

Do the experts out there agree with my analysis? Maybe even noobs like me have a better idea, let me know if I’m finally on the right track with this one!

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With this being such a momentous (perhaps temporary) moment, I though it an apt time to go through my top 5 reasons to keep going:

I hate to gloat, but I told you I’d manage to get back in the rankings at the end of last month by following some key SEO guidelines. Of course, at the time I was guessing and running with gut instincts rather than proof but maybe (just perhaps) I was actually right.

Anyway, I want you all to share in this moment with me as you look at the screenshot….

(10 second pause to bask in the moment……)

There, wasn’t that worth it?

Now Onto Some Real Stuff and Why This is Good News

So what? What’s the big deal with being a lowly #5 in google? Well, here’s the thing; historically, when my site has ranked for this term in the past (although admittedly I’ve never ever been this high), it signals the removal of some kind of sitewide penalty and the site starts to rank for a whole host of extremely targeted keywords (actual bar stool names and shit). Now, this isn’t me just sitting at home at 2am picking a bar stool name from my site and googling it, no, this is real searchers looking for actual product names.

Most of you will know that this kind of search is normally a search by a buyer who is pretty close to making a buying decision and that means good news for my commissions (a buyer searching for ‘john lewis flower bar stool’ is much more ready to buy than a buyer looking for ‘chrome bar stools’ because they have a clear idea of the product that they want and chances are they’re just looking for the best deal from here on in).

Still Not Convinced it’s THAT Big of a Deal?

So, you’ll get a few more visits from longtail keywords, where’s the money in that? The great thing about this site that so far, I’ve only had glimpses of due to it’s position in the SERPs, is that it actually converts really, really well. When the site has sent visitors to my merchants, it turns one of those visits into a sale 16% of the time! That means for every 100 people who click on one of my site’s products and land on my merchants’ site, 16 of them buy! Maybe some of the other guys who are in the game can verify this but 16% is pretty awesome.

So this all means that when my site sheds the penalty, like it has done at the moment, I get more visits (actually, I get visits!) and this means that I make more money. I’m still in the baby leagues of money making but this is a huge step forward for this site, trust me.

Now for the Bad News…

The only ever times my site has managed to appear in the SERPs in the past, it has only lasted 48 hours maximum before being removed completely from the index again. I wanted to shed the penalty that was holding the site back, I’m crossing my fingers now, hoping that I’ve finally managed it. If I do, I’ll tell you all about it and how I did it but I won’t get too comfortable just yet….

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This week I have been putting the pedal to the metal by just writing lots and lots of content. I have done this by buying PLR Articles and then re-writing them quickly using simple ‘Find and Replace’ in Notepad. For example, I bought the bar stools PLR pack for my bar stools site and have managed to come up with a great technique for quickly re-writing articles.

I open up one of the aryicles in notepad, I use the find and replace function to replace ‘bar stool’ for my target keyword ‘bar stools uk’ and then save the article. Because the content I’m writing is not for my own site but is for article directories, guest posts and pr sites, I’m actually not that bothered on the quality of the article so I use google translate to ‘re-write’ the article.

I stick the english in, translate it to another language (any will do), copy the new translation into the translate box then translate once more from the new language to another new language then copy that version back into the translate box. I now go from the 2nd translation back to english and usually I get something 70% quality out of the other end.

I then rewrite the 1st paragraph (you don’t have to do this but I think it helps with manual approvals) into very good english and then do a quick google search for article directories, free article directories etc etc. I submit the article to one directory (maybe 2 if I’m feeling good), then go back to translate and rewrite it again using the method above.

I then submit the new article to a different article directory, each time making sure that my resources box is targeting my keywords. I have made sure that my anchor text is never exactly the same in each case.

So far this week, I have written about 15 articles this way and submitted them all to directories. I’ve yet to see my site re-appear in the SERPs but I’m sure that this new found energy will see me returning one day soon.

If I do this at the same time as outsourcing some profile links, I think the strategy will pay off for backlink building.

I am now looking into outsourcing this task to someone from oDesk for about $3 per article re-write + submission so that I can focus on adding new products to my actual site along with good quality content for conversions.

I am finding that the biggest restriction on my progress at the moment is the limited time I have to do all the things I know I need to and the logical thing to do now is spread the load to keep things moving forward.

Anyone else found a better way to achieve the same kind of thing?

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Here’s what I did:

• Submitted 2 articles to ArticlesBase.com
• Made 3 comments on ‘bar stools’ blogs (searched for ‘bar stools’ in google and then used the funky nav thing at the left hand side to sort them into blogs. All 3 comments were made on blogs where the comment needs to be moderated and will probably come out the other end of moderation (if they succeed at all) with ‘nofollow’ tags attached to the links. I’m not that bothered about this at the moment, I just need to to mix my link profile up a bit and this is suitable for my needs at the moment.
• Submitted my site to one free directory that required a reciprocal link exchange

I’m currently ranking #136 for my new target keyword in google.co.uk so I’ll be able to measure whether these methods are working are not.

This is particularly useful for me because my site has been online for 6 months now and has gained no sustainable rankings. I’ve had a few suggestions as to why this could be the case but I still remain stuck in my ways that the reason for no rankings is because the site does not have a strong enough quality profile and that includes the incoming links and the content (pages) these links link back to. With this new keyword, I have focussed on one particular niche within ‘bar stools’ and am building an SEO campaign up around that. If this works, I can move into other niches such as chrome bar stools, designer bar stools or leather bar stools for example.

Wish me luck!

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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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Despite my lack of posts in the blog, I am keeping the motivation factor up for this site and trying to keep working through this very tiresome, depressing time of its lifecycle. I have to put a name to this period and all I can think of is limbo.

How do I keep going when the site just isn’t doing anything? I have some good, well chosen and well priced products up there and everything is in order except 1 thing – there is no traffic hitting the site. Rather than bitch and moan about it (which I do do), the only solution that I can see (assuming my site is still in the google index – and it is according to site:www.barstoolsuk.co.uk) is to keep adding value to the site by writing new, fresh content whilst simultaneously continuing to build links.

This next section of the site is possible worth a blog posting of its own but I’ll stick it in here for the time being and hope it comes up useful for others.

How Am I Getting Links on High PR Websites?

I was browsing through another affiliate’s blog the other day (ShaneBrown.co.uk) when I came across his post about building links to his website. I won’t repeat the method he describes (and reviews) and will let you visit his blog to find out but essentially, I have used the same method over the last week for my bar stools site and have increased the links showing up in yahoo to the site from 23 to 37. All of these links were added to high PR websites using the method described and I can only hope that this method will contribute to my site returning to Google’s search results pages – preferably page 1!

This link building process has taken me about 2 hours each night for the last week as each time I add a link to a site. It takes me this long because I also add a few comments, posts, profiles and just generally give my links the best chance of being crawled by google without looking spammy to the site’s owners and this takes a little extra time over just whacking in anchor text and links which often get spotted pretty quickly and canned without question.

Essentially what I’ve done is used my site’s url as the keyword ‘bar stools uk’ (and a few variations of it) in order to try and rank for the exact search term. With the anchor links matching the site title and url, I really can’t see how this could fail to rank over time unless G somehow has some sort of filter or penalty or flag against the site – which at the moment I don’t think it has.

There is, however, definitely some sort of age thing happening that is preventing my site from ranking for its url (its not in the top 200 at least). As I said previously, the only solution I can think of is to continue building links and adding content and now that I’ve mentioned how I’ve built a few links over the past week or so, it’s time to move onto content.

I’ve Found a Quick Way to Re-write Articles

Well, it’s not really a ‘find’ as such, more of a use of tools that somewhat contribute to making this article re-writing process a lot quicker and less painful:

1. First of all I bought 20 ‘bar stools’ related PLR articles from a plr articles site for $5.
2. I copied the text from the PLR article into Google Translator
3. I translated the article from English to Dutch
4. I copied the Dutch version of the article back into the Translator
5. I translated the article from Dutch to Spanish
6. I copied the Spanish article back into the translator
7. I translated the Spanish version back to English and voila!

I ended up with an article that was similar to the original but not the same. A few quick exact match and phrase match searches on google for a few lines of the new article revealed that it was, indeed, unique. Sometimes the sentence went a little whacky but mostly these grammatical errors were able to be fixed within seconds.

Once I was happy that the article was unique, I submitted it to Ezine Articles and it was approved first time. The bar stools article is now live and sending me a backlink. The content isn’t really that useful but the link will be. If I had some sense I would actually use Ezine Articles to write articles targeting long tail products on my site for conversions but at the moment, I am merely trying to build links because I’m desperate to feel some love from the search engines.

Summary of Progress (or Lack thereof!)

• Built backlinks using High PR websites using this method
• Created a few unique articles with Google Translate and posted them to my site and submitted one to Ezine Articles

Anyone got any other reasons (preferably with solutions) as to why my site is still nowehere to be found in organic SERPs for its own url?

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I paid $90 to a press release writer who I was hoping would be able to whip something up for me in no time. As it happens, he did manage this and I am fairly happy with the result. Now press releases are a funny beast. They can be written directly to your users, unlike traditional press releases whose content needs to target journalists and industry analysts to get picked up and published. Using the internet, we all have the power to communicate directly to our users and there’s always the off chance some blogger somewhere might re-publish, re-tweet or use a wordpress auto post plugin to automatically scan for posts related to ‘x’ and post them on his own blog without ever lifting a finger. This is all good because even the auto-posting blog setup specifically for adsense is worth the backlink it could provide you.

Anyway, so the point of this post is just to say that I paid a PR writer $90 today to write me a press release for my affiliate site and you can see how “Bar Stools UK Launched to Popular Response” from the main website. There were a couple of little white lies in the content of the release (particularly around volume of sales!) but you’ll notice a well constructed release overall with the all important backlink in the footer section.

I posted the release on PR Log (a free press release distribution site) because from my experience, releases posted here get tracked by Google News/Alerts and that’s all good for me.

The other thing to note here is that for press releases to really take off, you do actually need a good, newsworthy story and a few lucky strikes with some ‘in your niche’ bloggers or local journalists who will pick it up and run with it. My release will not achieve this but I am hoping it will get tracked and possible a few pingbacks on some blogs and be worth between 5-10 backlinks to me. I’ll write an update to this post later where I’ll discuss how many backlinks it did actually create for me…

So here’s my analytics stats for the last two weeks…

As you can see there’s a definite upward trend but that’s to be expected from a site so new. If you click on the stats, you’ll see 75% of traffic is coming from the search engines – or, rather, google. I showed you the other day a list of keywords that were hitting my site and how I was dissapointed that none of them had turned into a sale because they were highly targeted, long tail keyword searches for specific products that I (my merchants) were selling. I have absolute confidence in this website but the no commission thing was really bugging me so I set about contacting a few other affiliates via the Affiliates4U forums.

After driling down a few of my traffic results to a fellow marketeer musketeer, it was refreshing to hear the thoughts of someone else outside my head. Basically I was whinging because my site received 16 visits and only sent 2 clicks to my merchant. I showed this to my colleague who came back at me with some sound logic.

“Yeah, but if you take out the searches that were instant bounces (because you aren;t selling what they want), you’re down to 10 relelvant visitors. Then when you work it out % wise, you achieved a CTR of 20%.”

A 20% CTR sounds good but I was hoping for 70/80% due to the highly targeted traffic and relevant landing pages. But am I being over ambitious? Is a 20% CTR a good amount? I also asked of my fellow musketeers and of myself what the average clicks to conversion numbers are and there was a clear, “around 100 visitors per sale” message. This doesn’t really bode well for me at my current volume of traffic and if it remains as it is, I’d need to wait 50 days to send 100 visitors to my merchant and then hope that I get the 1% conversion…

If this is the rule of thumb moving forward then clearly I need to ramp up traffic significantly so that I am sending 100 clicks to my merchants every day. This means that my target in terms of visitor numbers should be up around 500 visitors p/day.

I now have two options to push this site forward which must be taken in order to make this all worthwhile.

1. Use PPC to increase visitor numbers
2. Improve my organic rank of 11

Now with my product paying an average 5% commission on an avge order basket of around £130, that would net me £6.50 in commission per day. To make this anywhere near worthwhile, I’d neet to cap my PPC spend at £3 per day to come out with over 100% gross profit and even then I’d only be looking at £105 a month. I mean c’mon, really, is it worth 2 hours a night for £105 a month?

The answer is, of course, no. The numbers I’m throwing about here are simply too small to get me going and I need to be much better than my little model above. I’m looking for £1000 a month in commission from this site and that means (at a rate of 5% per sale) that I need to send £20,000 of revenue to my merchant. Now the math on that means I need to refer 154 conversions a month, or, to make it easier for me to comprehend, 5 per day.

The result of all of this is that I need to dramatically improve my CTR to my merchant to give myself a chance. I also need to dramatically increase my traffic and I don’t want to spend on PPC to do it. That leaves me with no option but to get link building and writing content every day for SEO.

As to why I’m still waiting for my first commission, the answer, at this point, is simply that I’m not sending enough traffic to my merchants.