[Journey] Bro, do you even build links?

The digital product site just made it's first sale!




The sale rate has gone from 0% to 1.9%. Thats an percent increase of an undefinable magnitude! Your favorite unicorn doesn't have this sort of dubious valuation metric growth rate!



Also, on a substantive note:

The customer's sales funnel was adwords -> email collection page with a great offer for the email address -> a couple of days -> automated email campaign dripped over a week -> sales letter page -> purchase/checkout page -> payment page -> product download page.

This is a lesson, for me at least, on the value of collecting emails and email campaigns! Collecting emails is practically free. Why not do it all of the time?! And, without the email campaign I would not have made the sale, either.

The Long tail site is doing well. I've changed up the ads to be more targeted to the users interests. And revenue is up to a bit under $3/day. Amazon dropped my old account due to the site being 'popular'. I've contact amazon about this and set up a new account. I'm working on link building/indexing code with the longtail site.

One thing I've been wondering about and would like some input on from wiser users:
I've noticed the long tail site gets some links in GWT from sites that autogen a lot of decent looking content one way or another. Is there a way to 'handshake' with the sites or their owners to get some more linking back and forth going? Or another place these webmasters chill at? I figure the 'contact' forms on these are fake.



The physical good sites have been up and down a lot in rankings. They're net up over the life time I've been tracking their ranks for the past few months and in particular they're ranking for more keywords. But, they're down over the past 7-30 days or so. I'm just not going to touch anything, let my programs keep whirring, and see where things are in another two or so weeks.

The digital product site is not doing well. The conversion rate is quite low. I'm testing lowering the price. If price experiment does not go well, then I may try affiliates like CB or put the product and advertising on very low cost autopilot.

Hmm Going Good !

Keep Updating..

The long tail site is killing it, relatively speaking! Amazon denied my account again... so I made more than $10 or $20 or w/e in about 5 days from the site. This means the site is doing $2-$4/day unoptimized. I've hired another developer to polish that site up and add some more content sources. Cause I've got a wicked project I'm coding up now. And you all folks get to hear about it.

Here's the scoop. I've gotten tired of manually screwing around with website development code. And, more importantly it takes a lot of time. I want to spend my time doing shit besides mindless website programming. One site a week? Waste of time! So what's the solution, brah?

BRO, DO YOU EVEN CODE?

After writing a few long tail sites I realized, ah, I can easily write a build script to write sites! So start building a build system using nested templates I did. And, then I thought to myself, but, once upon a time, I looked down on SAS and cursed many people's names because they used macros. And, what am I doing but merely writing a much better documented macro system?

The trouble is these ORMs that come baked into web frameworks nowadays. New table means new class with a new schema. And these aren't inheritable. Every site with new data needs a bunch of new ORM classes. Ugh. And writing code to write code for these ORM classes was taking most of my time, too. The only thing less fun than writing templates is writing templates to write templates. This is madness!

Now, I'm making the switch to a so-called 'minimal' web framework/app library. And, a little bit of class inheritance and a configuration file replaces an embarrassing amount of template code.