Soucha's Journey To Nowhere

[Soucha]

Soucha's Journey To Nowhere

Hello.
Many of you probably know me from my mediocre posts around here over the last 10 months.
I have been doing e-commerce, via primarily online marketplaces for 7 years and I am close to 30 years old. Unfortunately when I started I did not know a single thing about marketing. Despite amassing a modest, yet reasonable amount of inventory for a home-based business, I am still broke as hell. Honestly I didn't know much about internet marketing until a couple years ago after I went through a bad break-up and I began spending all my time trying to improve my business and my life. I guess everything has a silver lining.

At the moment, I own 3 websites.
1.
This is a 7 year old domain that has only been indexed on google for 2 years because that is when I began learning about SEO and real IM tactics and for 5 years I had no idea I even had to index it.
This is my main e-commerce store, which gets an extremely low amount of sales and visitors.
Although, I do have a couple hundred products available on it.
I have a small amount of private label products under this umbrella as well.

Currently this website is ranking for 400 keywords and gets maybe 500 visitors a month.
About 1/4 of those are people searching my very small private label brand.
This is the store I really wish would take off, but I am damn sure I gave myself an algorithm penalty while learning SEO and I am only now beginning to recover, but barely.

2.
This website I opened a year ago and I built links to it mostly from sellers here at BHW but I've built a small number myself as well.
This is a religion and history blog that has adsense as well as a woocommerce shop.
The idea for this shop was to blend educational content with a niche store/adsense so I had a way to obtain natural links. Personally I feel like I have some very good content on this website and an article I wrote myself was even used as course material at a university the other week (no live link from them unfortunately, as their site courses are password protected but I could tell from the referral analytics that it was legitimate)

This has not been profitable, but the site seems to rank a little better then my other site.
Probably due to obtaining a huffpost link for $50, and a wikipedia link I added myself that, so far, has stuck for 5 months. This website gets about 1,000 visitors a month and ranks for 1,000 keywords but the design was absolute garbage until a month ago, as I recently redesigned it. The bounce rate and time on site has drastically improved, but I have yet to make any real money from this site. I think I have made $15 from adsense thus far, and 0 sales.

3.
I just opened this website a couple weeks ago.
This is going to be an entirely white-hat health affiliate website.
Ok, perhaps grey hat because I will be building links but I won't be using spun content, PBN's, or spam of any sort. I will likely do it all myself.

Currently getting no traffic, and has no ranks worth mentioning.
Due to my limited budget and method of operation, this project will probably take a long time to produce any results.
I plan on using this website to practice my SEO tactics and become acqauinted with CPA and affiliate marketing, as I am very new to that.

Social Media Account followers are currently at:
Site #1 Twitter Account: 3644
Site #2 Twitter Account: 4051
Site #1 Instagram Account: 2549
Site #2 Instagram Account: 1586
Puppy Instagram Account: 14291
Site #1 Pinterest Account: 912
Site #2 Pinterest Account: 478
Site #2 Google+ Account: 83
Site #2 Tumblr: 79
Site #2 Tumblr: 49
Site #2 Youtube: 430 followers
I don't currently get much traffic from the links on the videos I post but the youtube channel seems to be growing at a reasonable rate. I get new followers every single day now. I am very bad at social media promotion, but I have been attempting it.
Currently have most of those accounts running through @Stiletto Jarvee Bot.

And I also have access to all of my previous customers email addresses, which over the years would amount to quite a lot of email addresses. However, I currently have no idea how to use this to my advantage.

Conclusion:
Wish me luck!
I will probably only update this about twice monthly as I have wrist issues and I cannot always type a lot but this may change if I begin obtaining real results.
Also, I will not be updating any information relating to my marketplace stores, as those are separate projects.....but feel free to ask vague questions if you're curious.
Anyways, I hope you have fun learning from my failures. (or maybe even success )

 

[blogzandstuff]

I wish you well, but sorry I couldn't read all of it as I am afraid i'd be dead before I reach the end lol!

 

[Soucha]

What did I do this week?

Site #1
Given, most of my time is focused towards packing and shipping my marketplace platform orders, customer service, listing products, etc.
But anyways, this week I have ordered a few articles from @Tamerlane as after 7 years I am finally starting a blog on this website. I am getting very tired of relying on marketplaces for sales as they often-times make more money then I do from my own sales so I hope to drive more traffic to this website.

Created a small infographic myself to add to my sole existing blog post atm.

Fixed my payment gateway issues.
I found out a week ago that for the past 2 months my stripe integration has not been working.
What a nightmare. Anways, I just got an order on there so I know it's fixed.

Also did a shopping cart migration from prestashop to thirtybees.
If you are currently running a prestashop website checkout thirtybees.
It's an open-source fork and has resolved many of my bug issues.
It's still in early stages but it is fully functional and I highly recommend it thus far.

Site #2
Ordered an article from @Tamerlane for this website, as he has done a bit of other writing for it.
This site might be mostly on the backburner for a little bit. Since I have a few very niche articles ranking reasonably, I now hope to obtain some natural links eventually, as most of the content is very educational.

Site #3
Wrote 3 articles myself.
Signed up for clickbank and am considering Amazon, eBay affiliation, or other alternatives, but this obviously isn't a big deal for now as the site currently gets no traffic.

Made an introduction YouTube video.

I ordered a few articles in preperation to post on free niche authority health websites from @onlineventures

Waiting on a product review from @seodean

I also received an article from @Array Experts
Article seems good for the price. I did have to reword and change a few things, but I expected that, and it's no problem since I am a native speaker.

I began some, primarily, no-follow link building including a tumblr, youtube, dailymotion, archive.org, flickr, soundcloud, social bookmarks and social media links.

 

[Soucha]

I wish you well, but sorry I couldn't read all of it as I am afraid i'd be dead before I reach the end lol!

You make a good point Sir.
I shortened it by removing this week's acts and putting that into a new post.
It's probably better this way.
Thanks for pointing that out.

 

[lioneds]

Good luck Mr. Soucha

 

[Stiletto]

good luck mate

 

[Soucha]

40% don't even like Soucha.

Once you got haters, you know you're on the right road right? xD

good luck mate

Thanks mate.

 

[ssk1986]

Good luck mate!

Make sure you also focus on building an email subscriber list (especially for the health website). CB offer work well on targeted email lists, and most CB merchants usually offer good quality swipes for you to test out.

 

[sesamee]

Wish you success. Following bro !

 

[Soucha]

Late update. It's been about 3 weeks.
Been busy due to tax preparation, as well as taking care of my other business sales.
April 15th coming soon.

Website 1:
I've added about 40 new products to my website in the last 3 weeks and cleaned up some URLs/301s.
Still have to write descriptions for most of these.
Added 3 additional blog articles and 10 product descriptions.
Not currently tracking any specific keywords, although I do have a large collection of them... but I did get 2 guest posts (DA 40-50) to a blog article pointing towards some products of mine. I have 4 more guest posts coming in to some other posts in the next week or so.
Traffic is currently up to 600 visitors a month and appears to be climbing.
I've gotten 7 orders the past 3 weeks...probably about a 2% conversion rate because only about 60% are from USA and I only ship domestically.

Website 2:
The only work I've done here is upload more videos to you-tube and some social media promotion.
Currently up to 1.2k visitors a month.
A few of my articles were again involved in 3 other password protected university websites.
Wish they'd actually give me a back-link though.
Also got a couple guest post requests and a couple order inquiries, but no orders in the shop yet.

Website 3:
Still a really new website.
Made another YouTube link, a profile link, mentioned it on Quora, minds.com and a couple high follower social media shares.
Haven't added any additional content.
Waiting on this domain to age a bit more before sending anything powerful towards it.

 

[Soucha]

Update:
I put a couple more blog articles on my main money site with internal links to products and I've been doing some manual link building towards these articles with mostly raw URL/brand anchor text and also received a few more DA 20-50 guest posts. I just had them keep anchor text natural because I'm mostly using these articles as buffers. Additionally, quite a few spam links I had appear to have disappeared. I seem to be recovering pretty fast from the algorithm penalty this site has had for about 6 months. Many of my URLS are ranking on page 2-3 again. GWT lists over 950 keywords now, compared to only about 400 about 5 weeks ago. I'm still not tracking any specific keywords but I probably will start again soon. I need to figure out some more blog content for this website.

Also posted an informational article on my affiliate site and have been continuing some slow link-building on authority sites such as:
Medium, audiomack, logomoose, deviantart, etc.

 

[Soucha]

Update:
Been focusing on my main website still...
Traffic seems to be going up quite a bit as of late.
Getting about 40-50 visitors a day now.
I got 7 orders in the past week, which, as pathetic as that is, is actually an all-time high.

I believe what I've done to accomplish this is the following:

Built a lot of links via e-commerce social sites such as 'Kit' and 'Polyvore' to help balance out my anchor cloud.
I built about 200, in total, no-follow bare URL links to various products.
This is about the time my site was pulled out of it's algorithm penalty.
I guess it wasn't as bad as I thought.

I've bought some nice guest posts from @liveforseo

I went through GWT and checked for broken URLS.
I had quite a few old 404 URLS that apparently had links.
I went through and 301'd the URLS with links back to their corresponding targets.

2 days ago I started experimenting with PPC as well.
I don't have much experience in PPC ads.
However, I set-up a small campaign to test out and so far have been able to receive some targeted USA clicks for 10-15 cents a click.
Of course, not a lot of clicks, because obviously I get out-bid quite often with such a small bid.
I figure I will just setup buying targeted terms for low bids for most of my products and just accept the lower amount of small cost traffic.
Going to experiment with this more over the next couple weeks.
I'm considering trying facebook ads too, but I figure I'll stick to google until I figure it out a bit more.
If anybody has a guide on google PPC ads they recommend, or even tips, feel free to post or PM me.

The problem I had with finding content topics for my website has now been somewhat solved
It turns out a wholesaler of mine actually has a blog, complete with topic ideas relating to the exact products they sell.
Since they are my wholesaler, obviously I sell many of the same products so these content ideas will work for me.
I just have to rewrite some of these. What a goldmine find. lol.

 

[webmd]

Made an introduction YouTube video.

how much time do introduction should be ? and do you use a good tshirt or just usual ?