I feel exhausted! But still excited … as I read around I see that people are making money out of doing this kind of thing, and that makes me more determined and inspired to succeed.
It has been quite a big learning curve so far, and I’ve become quite good at having lists of what to do. Below is a semi-chronological list of some of the more important things that I’ve done so far.
In future updates I will give more information on how to do some of tasks described below (or at least, tell you where to look for the information) :
- Researched
- Decided on my preferred method of managing my website - for me, I chose Wordpress.org .
- Found a webhost that could support my chosen website system, and was reasonably priced. Purchased webspace and domain.
- Installed WordPress on the server.
- Joined Clickbank.
- Setup first product review post.
- Sent my site away to join Adsense - this was a silly idea! Sending away my one-page affiliate program “site” meant they came back with the unsurprising answer of “no” due to “we believe that your site does not add value or provide unique content”. Outcome - I will focus on building more content before I resubmit the site.
- Promoted website on blogs designed to build the profile of your site. You have to remember that no-one knows about your site yet - you need to make sure that people on the web can find your site!! If you search for blogs such as “free advertising blog” you will find many of these. Search engines (apparently) crawl these sites and so it is a way of getting your domain out and about. Outcome - since doing that both the Google and Yahoo bots have crawled my site.
- Joined the Adwords program … on a very small budget. My goal here is simply to test the waters, at the moment my spending is limited to £1 a day. Unfortunately the product I’ve chosen to sell is one that is heavily promoted via other sites, and even though I have focused the campaign on a very specific area my success rate has only been to manage 2 clickthroughs on almost 2000 ad displays - so I’m not even hitting the £1 a day limit!! I can only hope that the display of my website address in the ad may be helping drive my traffic further.
- Done things that with hindsight, I should have done earlier in the process, mainly around site design and optimisation. These have included:
- optimising my site accessibility … previously two seperate sections on the one domain, I now have a main page that displays posts from both subsections
- updated my pages to include keywords (via the Search Engine Optimiser plugin for Wordpress)
- modified my site design to give a better impression (editing tempates in WordPress is easier than you’d think)
- setup cloaking on my affiliate links
- created site maps (this helps the search engines find their way around your site)
- enabled visitors to recommend / share the site on sites such as Facebook, del.icio.us, digg, etc.
As stated, I do now feel I should have done those things right at the beginning … obviously I was in a hurry to get my site online, so I know why I did what I did, but with future site launches I will attempt to get those things straightened out before I start publicising it.
Why? We all first impressions last … if I’d had my site ready before I submitted it to adsense, I feel that I could have had a better chance of getting accepted. And lets face it, you want the site to look good and be search engine ready before the search engines and people’s eyes start to see it!
We live and learn though … I am now happy with the site and it’s ready for the world to see. It’s time to continue exploring ways to drive traffic to the site - and don’t worry, I’ll keep you posted on what I find.
leave a reply