Internet Income Challenge #002

Despite being lazy at the start and only have bought 1 domain and spent $47 dollars on adwords trying to drive traffic to an email sign up page I have kicked myself in the bum and become more productive and churned out 1 site focusing on hair product reviews and monetizing it at the moment via Amazon affiliate links until it ranks higher in google and build more links I will then add adsense in as well.

Since spending the $47 dollars on adwords it has taught me a lot about the content you should show on your landing/squeeze page in order or get users to sign up to your mailing list.

Here are three things I found out that were not true with consumer products when having just a squeeze page:

• People will not sign up to your list if you do not have any relevant products to show
• The nice landing page alone will not convince your users to sign up to your mailing list
• Do not use words like “Sorry”, “Come back later” or “We are not open” on your landing page as it will straight away defuse the interest of the potential sign up and they will click the back button straight away. Instead have everything as if it were meant to be there for a sale except they must sign up!

The Dirt

So this site will be called site #1(don’t worry I will reveal all domains soon) it currently has on it 4 posts and 3 pages including the about us and privacy policy. So far the rankings have been all over the place as I have experienced this with other sites I have been trying the rank in the past, I personally think it is Google’s algorithm going crazy trying to rank it somewhere amongst the millions of other pages as the site is only new. I’ve found that this behavior usually calms down after a few weeks but can take up to 3 months some people have been saying it just depends on how competitve your niche is and the harder the algorithm has to work and constantly re-evaluate your content against others.

This site is built on wordpress and I have since swapped all my sites over to Hostgator from Godaddy as they were absolutely crap and killing my rankings and my bounce rate was horrible due to the fact that it was taking forever for wordpress to load on Godaddy’s servers not to mention that they don’t use cpanel. With that little rant aside I have chosen to use the Azon theme by Chris Guthrie who sells massive amounts of stuff on Amazon and makes a killing so I thought why not use something that already works? Although I do not use all the plugins that he recommends because I’m a cheap ass and trying to keep this process as as low cost as possible so it is easily replicable in the future if it is successful.

Strategy

Most of the strategy and link building will be same the sites I’m building in this challenge the only thing that will differ would be the content on the site, different layouts and themes depending on what I am targeting and plugins also related to the latter. Great content is probably going to be my biggest SEO juice squeezer with solid link building as the recent updates to Google (Panda and recently Penguin have caused havok in the internet marketing scene, not that they weren’t needed!).

Statistics

After two weeks my rankings for Google are:

Main keyword

Exact match keyword

As you can see due to the search volume on the main keyword it is taking longer to rank and it is also no an exact match(it has a suffix on the end of the exact match). As for the exact match with the lower search volume it is jumping all over the place.

Here is the traffic for the site so far:

Google analytics site #1 27/05/12

4 visitors, nothing special! One of those was probably me as well. As the days and weeks roll on we should see this increase as the site gains ranks in the search engines.

Tools mentioned in this post:

• Rank tracking with SERP Fox free for 10 keywords great too to get started tracking your rank with!
• Google analytics – The best free tool out there for tracking any stats with websites.
• Hostgator – My personal favourite after moving from Godaddy, great speeds and support!
• Azon theme – Great theme built by top Amazon affiliate marketer Chris Guthrie over at make money on the internet, he also has a great podcast on itunes.