It's finally weekend, so I can work on my site in peace
On weekdays sometimes I just get home and fall asleep (happens at least once a week), so that kinda limits the time I can spend on the site.
What happened until now?
Social media profile setup
Well, I have decided to make some social media profiles for the site. I've created pinterest, twitter and a youtube channel. In the future I might be able to drive some traffic from these places, but the main reason I made these is the website link on my profile page. I believe these should serve as some initial "put me on the map" signal to google.
Oh, and I've followed all the brands that I promote on twitter, I'll try to get some retweets from them in the future.
As for other social networks, I hate facebook (low to nonexistent exposure even with a decent number of followers), and instagram is just not suitable for this niche.
Applied to Amazon Associates
Thanks to the advice I received here, I scrapped my plan to wait for traffic before I apply, and submitted my application. The good thing about this is that I can use native ads on my longtail pages that are most likely to receive traffic in the near future. I put an ad grid (if that is how its called) in the sidebar on those pages.
The review pages don't have a sidebar because I want them to be focused on selling the products that I recommend.
I have also updated my privacy policy. I added a small section that specifically states that my site isn't targeted to children under the age of 13. During the application process they said I have to do this, so here it is.
Question about amazon plugins
One of the problems I face is that I'm unable to display big product images with the tools they provide on their associates panel. So right now I'm looking for a plugin that can pull proper product images from amazon. So far I've found EasyAzon and AAWP, they have a lot of handy features but I'm not sure if either of them has a function to just display a big product image with an affiliate link.
Can anyone give me some advice about this?
Messing with share buttons
Because I created my social profiles, I felt the need to review my usage of social share buttons. I'm not a big fan of social media, but if it can drive some traffic or boost SEO through shares, then so be it
I've added share buttons to the top of the articles (previously I only had them on the bottom). With this, and a sidebar that actually has ads in it, it's starting to look like an actual site
I have also chosen to display links to my profiles in the top bar of the site, hopefully this can help google figure out that those are indeed mine.
Adding videos
I have accidentally found some videos on youtube that I can add to some of my articles. I will do this later today. This is a great way to add another type of media to a post, and it's especially great when I just can't find related stock images.
Organic reach
No traffic to speak of just yet. I got a click but I think that could have been just me testing stuff earlier.
However, the site is starting to get on the map for more and more phrases:
Some of them have decent positions considering the site is barely a month old. That 12k one still baffles me, not sure what's up with that.
By the way, I've discovered something interesting in the search console. When looking at the top pages section, I noticed that one of my review comparison pages got displayed with an anchor link on it.
See, I use this table of contents plugin that displays a... Well, table of contents on the top of my page for easier navigation. And how it works is that it puts anchor links next to H tags, and scrolls the user there on click. The links themselves look like this:
mysite.com/best-blender-reviews#Fruit-slicer-2000
So one of my comparison pages like the above example got displayed for a search term like "fruit slicer 2000 review".
To me, this is a previously unknown benefit of using navigation links.
Content
2 new longtail articles have been finished by my writers, one of them is a buying guide. I still have to edit them and look for related images and/or videos, but they should be online soon.
I still have a few left in my excel sheet that I use to track keyword ideas, but those will require some additional research on my part as they are buyer keywords. I will get this done either today or tomorrow so I can outline the articles and pass them to the writers.
Next up
Aside from adding new content, I'll try to look for ways to make some initial links to my site.
One of the possible ways I've found is to do a press release. I heard new sites often do that to announce their launch, so it would look natural if I did it on mine. Plus, I've heard that it also helps you get out of the sandbox faster, so I'll definitely consider this.
