Journey to my first sale..

Hey all.. Longtime member here (5 years )

Finally starting to get back in to internet marketing. I'm attempting to create an authority site for a niche with relatively low-medium competition.

Looking to get my first sale of an affilliate product on clickbank.

I currently have 10 articles up on my site and am continuing to add content & revise link structure daily.

Here's my current stats:
Keywords ranked top 20: 1
Keywords ranked top 30: 1
Keywords ranked top 200: 3


I fear I've been affected by over-optimization so my focus the past week has been on battling over-optimization.

Will update soon.

Hey mate, good luck in your journey.. May i know how much your initial budget in starting this project?

Best of luck buddy,add content daily is possible

Good luck!
I wish you gave us more details, such as traffic sources, broad niche, etc...

Best of luck! I have seen Clickbank do wonders for people.
Hopefully, you will see a sale in no time.

Glad you finally activated that old account. Welcome to BHW!

vincentchong said:

Hey mate, good luck in your journey.. May i know how much your initial budget in starting this project?

Click to expand...

There's no set budget currently, I'm trying to keep costs down but my dayjob supports me enough that I should be able to spend for necessary services.
So far I've spent ~$200, $150 on content and the of the expenses were for hosting, domain, etc.

TheUnborn said:

Best of luck buddy,add content daily is possible

Click to expand...

Thanks! Do you mean add content to the site, the journey, or both?
I've currently been spending a lot of time on content to ensure that its quality and will rank well.
Do you think that the quantity of content (assuming it is decent content) is much more important than quality content?

lord1027 said:

Good luck!
I wish you gave us more details, such as traffic sources, broad niche, etc...

Click to expand...

Sure thing~

My main traffic source will be through Google, hopefully ranking high for all of my longtail keywords.
My broad niche is Health / Fitness, competition for the keyword is medium.

The website that is ranking really high for all of the keywords I want to target is currently PR0 with almost a completely empty static backlink profile. Which makes me really confused as to how it is ranking so well.

It looks like its social factors could be it as its been liked ~400 times and tweeted ~50 times.
Its domain authority is ~20 so that could be the deciding factor.

Will update with what I've done today later tonight.. Looking forward to hearing everyone's opinions

I've gone ahead and removed a bunch of pages from my site that were thin with content and also filled with "related" content from the site.
I've also added the notion of an author to the site so that the articles seem a bit more trustworthy as there is a face of a person.

I'm building this site from scratch as I have lots of development experience and am interested in learning firsthand what works. A bit of re-inventing the wheel, yes, but I enjoy it.

I'm hoping to work on internal & external linking on all of the articles tomorrow as well as adding images to the content.

Once I start ranking high enough I will be working on building my mailing list.

I stopped tracking some keywords as the search volume was next to nothing. Still not ranking for my big keywords but my long-tails are starting to rank. Hopefully my battle against over-optimization will push these ranks up.. Here are my ranks as of the end of tonight:

Search Volume: 720/mo
Rank: 101

Search Volume: 590/mo
Rank: 174

Search Volume: 880/mo
Rank: 241

Search Volume: 2900
Rank: 275