somecrumbs
Newbie
- Apr 18, 2020
- 16
- 5
Hello. Long time lurker here.
Just wanted to share with you my journey with an affiliate site that I have had for a few years, but never "really" started working on it properly. I heard Brian Tracy say how writing down things and letting others know of what you're doing helps increase productivity.
Bit of back story: I bought a domain around 3 years ago with the idea of making an authority site that would be monetized with affiliate product recommendations. My goal was to make $1000+ a month from it. Due to jobs/life/other projects/etc it always took a backseat and I barely did much to it. I hired a writer during that time and slowly wrote content for the site and that was all I did to it.
I didn't do any backlinking to test if anything would actually come organically, but my record for about 2 years was 5 visits or something like that. The kws I was targetting were a bit tough but my content was better, so this test at least proved to me that unless the kw is SUPER easy, content along won't rank. I also remade the site with various themes as I was never fully satisfied and I get the feeling that may also have not helped with the rankings as I changed the structure of the site each time.
Late last year I decided to prioritise the site more and started working on more content and trying to get semi-relevant ******** backlinks. I managed to get around 10 of them but my rankings barely changed, which was a surprise to me, even though the traffic did increase a bit..
Then in the days leading up to 2019 Black Friday the traffic noticeably increased and it stayed that way throughout December. I made my first $5 with the site that month, but then in early January the traffic completely disappeared.
I looked through the stats and realized that most of the traffic was actually coming from a few images via Google Image Search! I was a bit shocked about that, but as I've never really had a site with 1-5 visitors before I never really paid attention to Google Image Search referrals on any sites (you should check yours as this may be an untapped source of traffic for you too).
Anyway, after a few months of hiatus I'm now going to start again and try to develop the site a lot more. Despite Amazon screwing over affiliates with their new rates, I'm going to still use them for a while until I get proper traffic and then work on finding alternatives. I've now opened a Pinterest account as clearly images work on this site so will be implementing guides from here for that + get more relevant/quality backlinks gradually and just see what happens with just that
Here is the traffic graph of the site month-on-month, and I hope that in a year from now, it looks completely different:
Depending on how it goes I'll share the progress every 2-3 months here, and then hopefully do a big recap in a year.
Maybe the results of this journey motivates someone else to revive any dead projects they may have
Just wanted to share with you my journey with an affiliate site that I have had for a few years, but never "really" started working on it properly. I heard Brian Tracy say how writing down things and letting others know of what you're doing helps increase productivity.
Bit of back story: I bought a domain around 3 years ago with the idea of making an authority site that would be monetized with affiliate product recommendations. My goal was to make $1000+ a month from it. Due to jobs/life/other projects/etc it always took a backseat and I barely did much to it. I hired a writer during that time and slowly wrote content for the site and that was all I did to it.
I didn't do any backlinking to test if anything would actually come organically, but my record for about 2 years was 5 visits or something like that. The kws I was targetting were a bit tough but my content was better, so this test at least proved to me that unless the kw is SUPER easy, content along won't rank. I also remade the site with various themes as I was never fully satisfied and I get the feeling that may also have not helped with the rankings as I changed the structure of the site each time.
Late last year I decided to prioritise the site more and started working on more content and trying to get semi-relevant ******** backlinks. I managed to get around 10 of them but my rankings barely changed, which was a surprise to me, even though the traffic did increase a bit..
Then in the days leading up to 2019 Black Friday the traffic noticeably increased and it stayed that way throughout December. I made my first $5 with the site that month, but then in early January the traffic completely disappeared.
I looked through the stats and realized that most of the traffic was actually coming from a few images via Google Image Search! I was a bit shocked about that, but as I've never really had a site with 1-5 visitors before I never really paid attention to Google Image Search referrals on any sites (you should check yours as this may be an untapped source of traffic for you too).
Anyway, after a few months of hiatus I'm now going to start again and try to develop the site a lot more. Despite Amazon screwing over affiliates with their new rates, I'm going to still use them for a while until I get proper traffic and then work on finding alternatives. I've now opened a Pinterest account as clearly images work on this site so will be implementing guides from here for that + get more relevant/quality backlinks gradually and just see what happens with just that
Here is the traffic graph of the site month-on-month, and I hope that in a year from now, it looks completely different:
Depending on how it goes I'll share the progress every 2-3 months here, and then hopefully do a big recap in a year.
Maybe the results of this journey motivates someone else to revive any dead projects they may have
