I mentioned in my last post about how I’ve been building links and content in September and this resulted in my Bar Stools UK site winning some 1st page rankings. As usual the ranking boost was temporary but when it dropped, unlike every time before, it only dropped back to page 5. It has been there now for over about two weeks. This, in my experience, means that google has finally accepted my site and removed the penalty and now it’s all about links and fresh content. This will be my October objective.

I also stopped my PPC campaign for my other larger affiliate site which had so far averaged about £400 per month in revenue. In the past, I’d normally spend about £250 a month on this site in PPC. Over the past 6 months I had also been working on building up organic SERPs for that site and now it has some pretty good #1,#2 and #3 rankings for key target terms. With this in mind, I decided to pull the PPC campaign altogether in September (but not after I’d dropped £111 on it in the first 10 days or so). I had always thought this may affect revenue but ultimatelybelieved that my profits (revenue less costs) would increase or at least remain the same.

Gross Profit for the last 6 months (rounded up to nearest £5):

• March: £160.0
• April: £275.00
• May: £413.00
• June: £320.00
• July: £350.00
• August: £200.00

September’s Earnings

So how did September go in total profits (I’ve not actually looked yet so you’re going to find out the same time as me as I calculate all my stuff now!)

Income:

• Affiliate Window: £20.00
• Amazon Associates: £7.00
• Commission Junction: £307.00
• eBay Partner Network: £68.00
• Google AdSense: £7.50
• USFreeAds: £25.00
• Others: £0.00
• Total Income: £435.50

Expenses:

• LinkBuilding (via oDesk at $3.59 p/hour): £35
• Google AdWords: £110.00
• Hosting: £100.00
• Total Expenses: £245.00

Gross Profit:

• £190.50

Ouch! That makes September my worst month since March in terms of profits. Maybe I was wrong to turn off the PPC campaign? Maybe so, in terms of revenue at least, but I can honestly say that I feel better for it. It’s great to know that in October, my sites’ only cost will be the hosting, all the other costs (linkbuilding etc.) will be down to me to decide whether or not I want to pay them, rather than having to pay them – like I thought I had to with PPC.

Overall, September was quite dissapointing because I always believed my PPC site would peak in September but looking back at the last 6 months, it definitely peaked in May – something to remember for next year – which is very interesting and accurate as it is a predominantly summer-time product. However, it does have great potential for Christmas too so looking forward, I think I’ll see a fairly low month in October but then a picking up of sales in November and December for Christmas.

I’m hoping that with families hosting parties for christmas dinner and New Year’s Eve that if I can build some serious linkage in October, then my bar stools site will climb up the rankings and with enough good links (I may yet have already built enough in the past two months because there are still a lot of links that have yet to show up) page 1 rankings will return and we’ll see some extra sales coming in from that. It would be long overdue if it was the case.

Great Month for Key Learns – Shame About the Money

Overall, I feel like I have learned more in September than I have for the past few months and am now sure and confident in an SEO strategy for my bar stools site and believe I now know the best way to rank quicker for new sites. I didn’t make much in September, but I learned a key principal that will help me earn more in the future.

I told you a while back that I’d started a new site but had left it off the radar until I was confident I knew why my BSUK site was bouncing about. I now feel confident I know the answer to this question and am going to blog this seperately in a few days. This means that my next retail-based affiliate site will achieve organic SERPs a lot quicker than my Bar Stools site. Whether or not it actually converts is another matter and I guess this is where you hear the shotgun approach being applied by so many older and wiser affiliates.

At least now I feel like I’m pointing the gun in the right direction 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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As all regular readers of my blog will know, the bar stools site has been bouncing around the SERPs since February when I launched it but for about the last 3 or 4 weeks (since it last bounced out of existence) it has maintained a steady 2/3 visitors per day.

Up until this last drop, I’d always maintained that the reason for the bouncing was that there simply was not enough ‘quality’ indicators related to the site. When I say ‘quality indicators’, I am referring to domain age, backlink types, backlink age, on page SEO, internal linking structure and just a general ‘trust’ perception of the site.

During this last 3 week drop, I’ve really been left reconsidering all my beliefs about why this page was not ranking but today, all my fears were put to rest when the site resurfaced at position #6 in google.co.uk for it’s domain name. This has always been an indicator of other longtail searches showing up too and a quick search in google for ‘john lewis bar stools’ will show you what I mean…

So as of right now, I’m back in the top 10 and sending clicks to my merchants (33 today, in fact – and that’s not counting the ones to amazon so all in all, it looks very positive right now (9pm Friday night) but I’ll have to wait and see stats tomorrow to see how the full day looks.

Don’t be fooled, despite the site sapping me of all motivation or desire to work on it, I have not been idle and I have stuck at it, continuing to add one or two articles, built a few backlinks and reorganised several on page SEO factors (added unique category descriptions, removed duplicate content category posts to show only the excerpts, removed category descriptions from link titles and changed product links so that instead of the product title linking straight out to merchant, it is now a text link to it’s own product page).

I am hoping that the combination of all of these things, plus the increase in ‘trust’ and ‘quality’ value google is applying to my site (as a result of all of these things + link and domain age) has contributed to today’s massive swing and reappearance in the top 10.

Now, if this can just stick, finally, I think the site will have turned it’s corner. Interesting, seeing as though the beginning of August marks the site’s 6 month anniversary.

I must proceed with caution, however, because I’ve been here many, many times before….

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So basically, my battle is that I’m struggling to rank organically for anything at the moment – even my site name – and my google webmaster tools is showing indexed urls: 0. This would suggest Ive been totally dropped from the index for being a ‘thin affiliate site’, however there are some rankings left for other terms and I am still showing up under the site: command. This gives me a very small hope that perhaps what I am experiencing is no more than some sort of filtering process as google familiarises itself with my site, its age, its backlinks and its content.

So what can I do about it? I have no idea really but my gut is telling me to put some time into creating 1 or 2 really useful articles (I mean, really useful, not just 500 words of relevant text that sounds sort of useful) and to write a couple of original ‘news’ items for the site with some outgoing links to sites that rank in the top 5 in google for my target keywords to ‘associate’ myself with some respectable sites.

The salt in the wound with all of this is that last week, when my site enjoyed a 2 day return to page 1 of google, I sold 3 items….

Anyone else been through this? Am I overreacting? Is the indexed urls: 0 thing normal? How can I fight this?

- Edit – I’ve just been trying to read about why my indexed urls could be 0 and I’ve stumbled onto a Google Caffiene update thread….could my rankings drop have anything to do with google’s long awaited ‘caffeine’ update?

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This means I’m back at the start – albeit a few sales better off. I’m not going to write too much more in this post because there’s not much more to say other than that I am extremely frustrated but know that I should have known better when the search engines are concerend. You’re never on top of the game and every day should be another day of work that will sustain your rankings.

Now it’s back to the grind with links, content and more links.

Here’s to affiliate marketing!

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The difficult part though will be to keep the sales coming in and I think the only methodical way to approach that goal is to aim to continuously increase volume of traffic to the site. I’ve always been decisive over my choice not to use any form of paid promotion on this site because the pay off just won’t cover the expense so the only option left open to me now to fulfil my objective for the site is to increase traffic organically.

That means lots more links and lots more content…

And, just so you all know I’m not making this stuff up; here’s the referrer keywords for the last two days:

mathilda bar stool
bar stools uk
retro bar stools
“first year”+furniture+store
bar stool height
bar stools manhattan
bar stools sale furniture village
barstoolsuk
bella bar stools
blue bar stools – kitchen uk
bombo bar stools
bombo stools uk
breakfast bar stools
decadence bar stool white
falco folding kitchen stools
flower stool aero design
gas adjustment for stools how it works
home living manhattan bar stool
john lewis bar stools
manhattan bar stool
red bombo bar stool
review dolphin black & chrome breakfast bar kitchen stool
z bar stool
z stools

Here’s to the little things in life!

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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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Anyway, to add to my woes for the month, all my stats this month are down on my new site and here’s the analytics traffic trend screenshot:

Now, I mentioned earlier this month that my previous high rankings for some pretty good looking long tail keywords had completely vanished. This graph just reinforces the discussion. You can see that shortly after turning the site on, there’s a hump of traffic for the first 4 weeks or so which then dies down to practically nothing as google decides to remove the site from 1st page rankings. This will be down to the site’s age. When a new site first enters the google index and it has been well optimised, it tends to perform very well. I guess that as more google bots crawl the site, more algorithms are applied until eventually, the ‘age filter’ algorithm kicks in at which point the site is dropped from the SERPs.

As you can imagine, this has really dented my traffic for this site this month and not surprisingly, commission for the month on my new bar stools site is £0.00.

So, what should I do about it? Should I give up all hope now and go back to the next big idea?

The answer is no. When I set this site up I made a commitment to get it earning and that is exactly what I intend to do. I will make this site make some money and I will keep going until I do. I have to forget about the google SERPs. The rankings will return if I stick to my original plan of writing regular content, adding fresh products and building backlinks. So, have I stuck to this plan this month? I have to admit I haven’t. I did pay someone to write me a press release though which I have yet to distribute properly. I had distributed it to one site but now that I have the content in my hands, I should make more of an effort to get this out there on a much wider scale…here I come all you free PR sites….

So the point of all of this is that if I really want to get through this especially low, disheartening period of my life as an affiliate marketer, then I have to get my head down and just keep going. This is a really hard thing to do when you feel like hours worth of work are simply lost with no earnings coming in as a result. I am confident that I can turn this round but that is due to my past experience in SEO and PPC and my understanding of how the ranking issue works. I know my site will regain its rankings in time but I am now starting to understand how difficult this period would be for affiliates who have no experience in SEO and I imagine that this point is where a lot of newcomers simply give up. I’m determined that I won’t be one of them. Not yet.

I’d be interested to hear how other affiliates get through this period, this exceptionally depressing and disheartening affiliate limbo…

If your site was made by humans, for humans, then you’ll probably receive many promotes, but if you’ve got your rankings underhanded, chances are you’ll get a fair few ‘deletes’ against your site – that’s not to mention how competitors will react….

Of course, whilst the initial reaction to his googleism is panic, after a breather you come to realise that the promotion and deletion of websites is only applicable to google IDs, which means a LOT of your potential customers won’t have them. The other point that reassures me is that even though the ability to promote and delete is there, the SERPS are there first; meaning that page 1 rankings will still be page 1 rankings for that first search.

So, what does it mean for your site?

• Content rich, relevant sites for users will win
• You’ll need to write catchy meta descriptions to try and encourage those early promotes
• If you’re a scraper, you’re fu%%ed
• Nothing if the majority of your customers won’t have Google IDs
• Business as usual : write for humans, provide relevant content