Why do I get so little traffic?

Hello,

I don't really have any friends in real life who share my IM interests, so I do rely on what this community has to say when it comes down to it. Valuable information and useful advice when in trouble.
Cliff notes because I don't want to scare away those who might have something useful to say but don't like reading long ass messages.
1. I bought a website with a pretty good name, and when I bought it the guy said he was receiving around 500-800 visitors a day. I didn't update it for a while and it was still receiving 200 visitors a day. When I would update it and bookmark it to 2-3 sites I would jump to 300-400 level.
2. I keep building backlinks, forum posts/signatures/profiles, some commenting here and there. None of it is spam, it is related to the forum and blends in with the community's niche.
3. I have built a linkwheel with 6 spokes...and I try to update each spoke with a unique article weekly. They are all indexed in google.

4. Each article I post on my blog is unique, I write it myself although since I'm bilingual I sometimes copy - paste an article in my native language in word then translate it and it turns out unique. I search keywords via Micro Niche Finder and Google Keyword Tool, to each image i add keyword rich alt text and once posted I bookmark it to 10-12 sites and pingler it.

MY PROBLEM:
After doing all that my recent article on my main blog usually gets indexed in less than 20min! It says on google: Indexed 14min ago and then there are also 3-4 social bookmarking websites who also indexed it. When I search for the exact title though, at best my homepage shows up in google. So if I write something with the title/link domain/keyword1-keyword2 and i search in google for "keyword1-keyword2" my homepage shoes up with those keywords in bold...probably cached by google but it doesn't help the user because it doesn't take it to the keyword article s/he was searching for.
For example, I wrote an article on Nov 16 with good keywords, bookmarked it here and there, got it picked as one of best answers at yahoo, indexed in 9min....this article is still on my blog's main page, although I wrote new articles meantime but I have WP displaying 10posts or so, and this is one of the 10 most recent....When I search google for the keywords my homepage shoes up and I have to click under it "show more results from" to see the actual post indexed....
After all the link building (angela's links + my own posts and profiles + linkwheel) when I click link:mysite I only see 2...and they are not related to my linkbuilding. I had one of my profiles created from angela's backlinks show up in link:mysite but it disappeared although the profile page is still indexed in google...the backlink doesn't show although it is a ********.

I just feel a little bit discouraged not just that the website is not paying off for itself, but I do put effort in it by writing good articles, doing proper keyword research, and trying to get backlinks to homepage/individual posts. I don't go overboard in spamming or building 100s of backlinks in a day.
My website is lookbookfashion.com

Did you bookmark and ping your WP home page or the specific article sub-pages? And don't worry about backlinks not showing yet. It can take quite some time for them to show up.

Ooo thank you for bringing that up! As far as bookmarking goes, I bookmark the article itself. I manually do it for my homepage, and as for the linkwheel I SENuke it...but for pingler I never know...I used to ping my homepage whenever I posted but after noticing that it is the main page showing up in google rather than the article I started pinging the article itself as well....this started yesterday, let me know if I should ping my homepage instead.

I also have 3-4 ezine articles with keyword anchor text to my website...do those count as backlinks? They've been there for a while but don't show up -> I know building backlinks and having them show is a lengthy process and 'months' is usually the measure, not days or hours....but i was wondering if I should expect backlinks from these..

I would guess that your keywords are not that good, i ran them through Market Samurai and not one of them came back as viable. Some of them such as watches or fitness are just not worth bothering with, they have to much competition to rank with and look book fashion keyword wont have that much traffic.

If you are trying to get money from adsense then you need to strike a balance between keywords that you can rank for and get traffic, and high paying keywords that advertisers are bidding on.

Good keyword research is the trick, choose about 8 good keywords, then promote them, and try to stay focused on your niche, I noticed that you seem to be straying off a bit is the site aimed at men or women? you also have dating tips.

your site description says

"Look Book Fashion is a style guide for men and updated with
latest gear for guys, hot models, watches, and style articles"Stay focused and research and choose your keywords carefully. There is also a bit of good news below are some of the keywords your site actually ranks well for in Goggle, although search volumes are low.:;

Top ranking keywords on Google for this domain KeywordPosition in GoogleVolume per monthCPC the plank abs473$0.05 fashion lookbook591$0.05 guiseppe shoes15110$0.05 g belt1636$0.71 mens fashion denim1636$0.05 fashionable men1858$1.10 guiseppe zanotti shoes20210$1.40

Thank you magpie! I usually am conservative with the keywords when i choose them, competition wise and I guess i still havent found the right balance between search traffic and competition.
When I bought it, it was very disorganized and it did have articles aimed at women fashion. I did a little overhaul and got it organized but now I see it's pretty overwhelming because to keep up with all the categories. I wanted to take out all the women related articles/news whatever, so that my website will abide by its description. I'm still thinking about buying a new domain and starting a similar website geared towards women fashion? IDK...i don't want to delete content, but I do want to narrow it down a bit but I'm still undecided as what to dooo

Just one suggestion, if you intend to buy a new domain then don't go with fashion choose another niche. If you need some help in choosing one then PM me.

magpie2419 said:

Good keyword research is the trick, choose about 8 good keywords, then promote them, and try to stay focused on your niche, I noticed that you seem to be straying off a bit is the site aimed at men or women? you also have dating tips.

Click to expand...

This was my thought in looking at the site. You have woman's fashion, fragrance, dating tips, eye candy (women pics), celebrities (which is a very overdone niche on its own) and men's fashion. You seem to be all over the place. Now conceptually they may be similar to a reader but they really arent as far as SEO ranking is concerned.

this post was very helpful to me. May be try adding CPA offers related to your site (e.g. fragrance offers, men clothing .. )