Story of my website so far. Need advice on how to develop it further...

Hello all. I've been reading this forum for a while now and I've decided to post my question / concern here. It's a bit of a long post.

tl;dr - help me develop my blog with suggestions on how to make the most out of my visitors!


I started getting interested in IM 4 years ago when my brother set up a website (health related) which started earning him some noticeable amount per month via adsense. I always though this was impossible as an individual because you have to have a big marketing budget and so on (which I didn't have).
But just out of curiosity I started my own website (dealing with students and studying abroad).

It started successfully and I got some traffic but then I got greedy and sank the domain (spamming links and so on). You know the drill.
After that I've set up another project which was in traveling niche. That site received decent traffic but then again I did some mistakes and got my site penalized. That was all 3 years ago.

I've learned my lesson. There is no quick way of making a site permanent success (if you're depended on SERP traffic). Only hit and run tactics.

I started my 3rd website which was in health niche. One of the most prosperous niches there are. I've gathered all my (SEO) knowledge and put it in that website. I went fully white hat. Well, at least when it comes to everything but link building. If you _build_ links than that's not white hat (in google's eyes). But in my eyes it was white hat as I was not spamming the web but was contributing interesting and researched articles to similar (health) websites. And not only for the single purpose of obtaining the link. My articles were actually useful. Of course I linked back to my site, but my site had useful and related articles as well so no harm there.
I invested 2 years of my life in this website. And after 2 years suddenly my website took off. And I mean really took off. From few € per month to few hundred € per month. Every month there was a steady increase in revenue (and traffic). And I had no costs with my website as I did everything myself (article writing, link / relationship building). So my overall revenue was 100%.

After a few months I've reached magical number of 1000€ per month and I was so happy. It finally paid off. Site continued to grow until few (6) months ago. It stalled. Started dropping a bit but still earning really nice numbers. I also reached 100.000 pageviews per month, which is a nice amount of traffic for a one-man-band website. And most of the traffic was organic of course.

Now I am at the point where I think the investment in my website (to develop it further) takes more than I can handle, and therefore it stalls.

I am looking for ways to expand my website to allow it to grow again. I need your help and advice.

Here's what I've done to develop my website. At first the site was only a blog with articles. It still is a blog today, but I've done some additional work on it.
I've introduced a subscriber button. I get about 1-3 new subscribers daily.
I've enabled comments under articles where users can ask questions. Users do post questions.
I've added some interactive material (downloadables) which users can download. They do.
I was thinking of integrating a forum where users would post questions and help other users, but forums usually get overcrowded with spammers so I've paused that integration.
I've added some product reviews on my site where I earn additional money using CB.
I started building my own PBN to help me boost my site (this is not actually a development to my site but it is what I'm doing recently).

But at this point I'm a bit lost on how to develop my site further.

Should I outsource? I don't trust SEO "experts" because they never care for a website the way owner does. They just want the money. I feel this site is like my child. I do not want to hand it over to someone I don't trust.
I probably could outsource article writing for a decent amount (let's say 50€ per high quality article).

I still want to keep my site useful and I don't want to overcrowd it with ads in order to earn more!

Some details about my site.
built on wordpress, running on private VPS, dedicated IP.
about 120.000 pageviews per month.
alexa <300.000
pr1, da28
more than 300 related links from related domains.
more than 170 well written and researched articles. Most popular article has almost 700 FB shares for example.
monthly revenue (adsense): 4 digits €
monthly revenue CB: 3 digits €

What to do next???
I now have some budget to invest and I am ready to invest.


Thank you all!

You need higher traffic.
It requires a high spec servers.
Because every time a high traffic. Google check out your website.

If one day you shared hosting or vps use.
Then your website down.
It will hurt your website rankings.

Seo in need in the website.
The website will grow if the buzzer goes to the website you very much.

Say you have 30,000 visitors per day with vps hosting.
You have to maintain a server remains stable.
In order for Google and your visitors happy.


When visitors happy, then your website will be promoted by visitors in general

Thank you for replying.
But would you mind to share how to obtain higher traffic? I am aware that I need more traffic as more traffic means more money (usually).

My VPS has high specs. It is now (with current traffic) utilized about 2%.

1 day of downtime never hurt rankings. A week maybe, but not 1 day. My website uptime is 99,9% so far. Never had any downtime.

Also, are you using google translate to post this?

Not really important, but I was curious what is the average page loading speed on your website?
Also, how is your website's presence on social media?

Yes, I am from a different country than you.

I study the structure of google.
And they are still good for all of my websites.

For the buzz of traffic, you just need a backlink services and buzz your article to all websites.

Using backlinks tier would be very helpful.
So you have control over your website backlinks harm.


For example:

WEB <---- Twitter <---- all kinds of links.


You can remove a link from the current twitter backlinks started hurting your website.

Good luck

lord1027 said:

Not really important, but I was curious what is the average page loading speed on your website?
Also, how is your website's presence on social media?

Click to expand...

My site loads in under 2 seconds on average (1st load, subsequential loads are of course faster), which I think is still fairly good. It does not interfere with good user experience.
I've set up caching system but it "breaks" my phone/tablet/desktop ads showing code (which is in php). I've disabled it.

I am present on Facebook (1300+ fans) and Twitter (300+ fans). Also, I've set up a floating box of social share buttons and users tend to share my articles.

For the buzz of traffic, you just need a backlink services and buzz your article to all websites.

Using backlinks tier would be very helpful.
So you have control over your website backlinks harm.

Click to expand...

See, this is a problem. I don't trust backlink services provides. I don't want to sink my site with some low quality stuff. Do you know for a high quality backlink service provider?

But you're missing the point of my question here. I'm aware that the more traffic the better, or at least, the more targeted traffic, the better.
My main question was how to improve / upgrade my site. Should I implement a forum? Any other interactive elements? Should I start my own web shop?

It starts from the initial goal established for your website.

Do not jump into a lot of methods.
Because one method will make you rich.

I've jumped nearly 500 different methods to make money through blogs and failure.

The first thing that made me fail is.
I saturated achieve little results:

For example, I was successful with a variety of PPC advertising.
As Clicksor, Bidvertiser, cpm network I put on the blog.

But I moved to bpa.
A month later to move to amazon and clickbank.




You must be sure that the first blog that will make you successful.
If you have a highly targeted traffic, affiliate and CPA products are the right choice for you

2 advices:
1)Increase your social media presence, you have few followers considering the amount of visitors per month.
2) Be creative when collecting emails, you could offer a giveaway or something in exchange for their subscription. There are plenty of viral plugins to do that, such as Appsumo Giveaways. Look into it.

mtj85 said:

What to do next???

Click to expand...

Find places where your potential audience spends their free time and give them a chance to discover you.

2 advices:
1)Increase your social media presence, you have few followers considering the amount of visitors per month.
2) Be creative when collecting emails, you could offer a giveaway or something in exchange for their subscription. There are plenty of viral plugins to do that, such as Appsumo Giveaways. Look into it.

Click to expand...

1) getting FB followers is not my main concern and I don't "force" visitors to like my website that's why there's so little followers despite a decent amount of traffic to my site. After all a typical visitor to my site is 35-65 year old so not really the generation that is dependant on social media.

2) I'm not sure what kind of giveaways I could give out as my site is mostly health related. As I am no doctor or medical person I really can't "give out" anything. Do you have something particular in mind that I could share with users?

Find places where your potential audience spends their free time and give them a chance to discover you.

Click to expand...

Again, my typical visitoris aged 35-65 so these are not the people that spend much time on Internet. But I may be wrong, of course. Also, these people usually have some kind of medical problems and are only looking for a solution to their problem / issue.

Any other suggestions on how to develop my site further?

mtj85 said:

1) getting FB followers is not my main concern and I don't "force" visitors to like my website that's why there's so little followers despite a decent amount of traffic to my site. After all a typical visitor to my site is 35-65 year old so not really the generation that is dependant on social media.

2) I'm not sure what kind of giveaways I could give out as my site is mostly health related. As I am no doctor or medical person I really can't "give out" anything. Do you have something particular in mind that I could share with users?



Again, my typical visitoris aged 35-65 so these are not the people that spend much time on Internet. But I may be wrong, of course. Also, these people usually have some kind of medical problems and are only looking for a solution to their problem / issue.

Any other suggestions on how to develop my site further?

Click to expand...

Think outside the box, it doesn't have to be health related. A fake contest for a trip to Barcelona for example. Or go for something real, a PDF in the health niche. There are tons available that they don't know of. Be creative!

Hmmm, fake trip to Barcelona. This doesn't seem right.

I mean, why Barcelona? Madrid is a much nicer city.
Kidding.

Well, to be honest I don't want to do fake contests. I know this is black hat forum, but I posted in white hat section I was thinking of giving a 50$ Amazon gift card if people would recommend my site to colleges but I'm yet to discover how I would measure/track that. Maybe they would be required to like and share the page and by that they would enter the contest for 50$ gift card. Is there a plugin for wordpress that would allow me to do that?

How about a forum? Do you think it's a good idea? How to motivate people to start using forum instead of posting question under my articles (posting comments)?
Again, how to motivate users? It's so hard to start a forum. People will not post in an empty forum. Can I "buy" a service for forum posting?
The thing here is that this forum would be health related and you cannot just post nonsense there. People must find it useful....

I don't know the exact niche, but a forum can work pretty well. People love to complain and/or give advice, on a forum what they say matters Get your Forum started with some paid comments from Postloop or Microworkers (or just do the manual hard work yourself ) Good luck!

I might give forum a try - will consider.

By the way - I've set up a banner to signup to newsletter promising 25$ Amazon gift card. The banner pops up when user reads 30% of the article (scrolls down 30%).
Guess what? Subscription rate is the same
My visitors are so lazy and uninteractive.

I would never sign up for anything to make a chance to win a gift card/coupon. Make it a real price, like a bicycle, or running shoes, or something health related. You can dropship them directly to them

People do subscribe on a regular basis, so there is a reason to subscribe to my page without offering money. The money offered is just to encourage those who are thinking of subscribing, but they're not sure... But I guess it doesn't work as planned

I'm not ready to spend a lot for this campaign, 25$ is my max. Otherwise I would rather invest in getting Facebook likes, because it pays off better -> more potential traffic to my site...

How about you? Would you rather choose Facebook followers or email subscribers (if you had to pay for either of them)? Why?

mtj85 said:

People do subscribe on a regular basis, so there is a reason to subscribe to my page without offering money. The money offered is just to encourage those who are thinking of subscribing, but they're not sure... But I guess it doesn't work as planned

I'm not ready to spend a lot for this campaign, 25$ is my max. Otherwise I would rather invest in getting Facebook likes, because it pays off better -> more potential traffic to my site...

How about you? Would you rather choose Facebook followers or email subscribers (if you had to pay for either of them)? Why?

Click to expand...

Don't go for FB likes, the overall reach decreased so much over time. I have pages with more than 150k likes and they're useless.
I believe there is much more potential with emails.

Shoot for quality over quantity with the backlinks, diversify everything a bit (anchor texts, link sources, social stuff) and keep the fresh content rolling out.