[Case Study] First Product Review / Price Comparison Site

Humps

Humps

PPC Specialist
Aug 11, 2013
27
2
0
UK
What is this?

A thread to document my progress on my first product review / price comparison site. It provides products reviews of 15ish products from a particular brand that sell well on other sites for £100+. I’ve found 3 worthy competitors, 1 ranks strongly organically (his site is 2nd on 2nd page of Google for a generic KW with 27,000 monthly searches). I’ve traced him and his other sites (which I don’t have yet). He has 15 years of SEO experience but there’s plenty of value I can add over his site. Then it’s a case of outworking and out smarting him on SEO, Traffic leaks (by CCarter) and CRO. Over time I hope to automate much of this but as it stands that’s beyond me. Step by step.

Hopefully some fellow newbies will learn something from this and I can swamp stupid questions for helpful answers.

Who is this cabbage?

I’m a long time lurking newbie. I changed career 9 months ago from the legal sector to digital marketing, focussing on PPC day to day. I love PPC but I want a bow with infinite strings. I have a good grounding in Google Analytics and I’ve barely used Google’s Webmaster Tools. I’m at a small (20 person) agency where we discuss all aspects of our client’s openly so I’ve learnt plenty of Tech, SEO, Outreach theory along the way but it’s time to put it into practice. I’m getting excited writing.

I used to work 70+ hour weeks in my previous job. Now I have more reasonable hours and more laid back atmosphere in digital so I have plenty of spare time to devote to this. If I ever get lazy my weekly (every Monday morning on the walk to work) listen to this does the trick:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSiPbuotH4c

Aims

1. Learn –

• Basic web development (HTML/CSS basics) – tweaks to Wordpress theme;
• Affiliate stuff – better general understanding;
• Tech SEO – practice the theory;
• Outreach – again, practice the theory; and
• Traffic Leaking – get in the trenches.

2. £100 monthly revenue by July 2015.
I think £100 monthly revenue is achievable by then, if not before. I wanted a specific amount and time for my own work ethic (Cheers Earl).

Plan

1. Outsource reviews – 1,000 words each, totally approximately 15,000-16,000 across the main products (3 are with StackCash’s guys atm – I’ll update you on the quality of content and service but all good so far. I was nervous so just gave them 3 to do as a starter);
2. A developer mate is sorting out hosting & putting up an out of the box Wordpress site (I have done this myself before but he offered) I’ll then have a look at the speed of the site and any HTML/CSS tweaks I can make from CCarter’s Big Brand thread;
3. Write first 50 blog posts over 2 weeks off at Christmas – mix it up from quotes, celeb pics to long articles so it looks natural. This will be aimed at the low hanging fruit;
4. Social sorted for Twitter and FB for that Big Brand feel and extra traffic;
5. Learn HTML and CSS over Christmas on here Learn | Codecademy (It worked wonders for the basics of JavaScript for PPC scripts); and
6. Continue brick by brick.

Work to date

I wrote two review articles of approximately 800 words. The research and writing took me about 6/7 hours each so I’m going to outsourced them. It’s boring, I’d rather do something else and they have more experience writing content than me. I’ve put the feelers out for other content writers to outsource the others too in case the first 3 aren’t satisfactory.
Domain name bought for 2 years with Whois protection. It only has the brand and a keyword in. The information on URLs and ranking factors seems conflicting but our head of digital considers they are still factors for SEO and since my website’s scope is limited to this brand I thought it may help CTR once I’m up there. It’s had a site on it back in 2009 (archive.org) but that was gone by 2010. Ahrefs and MOZ were both clear so I think that means it’s not indexed and clean?

Questions

I do have plenty of questions about privacy & anonymity while doing affiliate stuff.
• Should I also be using a completely different Google account for each project?
• Even still, can’t google just link the IPs or check as I automatically change between Google accounts?
• If so, should I be learning about proxies etc?
Currently I have one website and won’t worry about this but long term with a few more sites it appears a small footprint is the best policy. Any insights on this would be appreciated.
Also, I will be using a persona in the target demographic as the site front person. Is it worth linking a G+ account anymore since Google’s really clamped down on schema mark-up for authors?

Updates

Nothing fixed, I’ll update when I can. It’ll probably go cold for the next few weeks as I get content, site and blog posts done unless I have any questions.

Let’s go.
 


Woops. Can a mod please amend the title to "[Case Study] First Product Review / Price Comparison Site".
 
There's no active mod that can help you unless you update this frequently and pray that emp notices it.

Bumping this thread cause it looks awesome when continued

Humps said:
I wrote two review articles of approximately 800 words. The research and writing took me about 6/7 hours each so I’m going to outsourced them. It’s boring, I’d rather do something else and they have more experience writing content than me.
Click to expand...
If its your niche, niche that you grew up with, the topic you know the ins and outs then you will write it smoothly without long research. Guessing your new to the niche?
 
Domain name bought for 2 years with Whois protection. It only has the brand and a keyword in. The information on URLs and ranking factors seems conflicting but our head of digital considers they are still factors for SEO and since my website’s scope is limited to this brand I thought it may help CTR once I’m up there. It’s had a site on it back in 2009 (archive.org) but that was gone by 2010. Ahrefs and MOZ were both clear so I think that means it’s not indexed and clean?
Click to expand...

Yep, it should be good. Your thread seems interesting; I will be keeping an eye out for your future posts. And good luck!
 
Hi guys, thanks for your interest. These updates will be sporadic as I have plenty on atm but will keep you up to date.

Member8200 said:
If its your niche, niche that you grew up with, the topic you know the ins and outs then you will write it smoothly without long research. Guessing your new to the niche?
Click to expand...

Nope, I know sweet fa about this niche. I've chosen it because there's a few competitors (only one that looks really professional), the products are well priced (£100+) and they sell well so that any commissions won't be negligible and there's enough search volume to make decent money. Accordingly, I've done lots of reading and watching youtube videos and outsourced the writing with links to authoritative websites for the writer.

So I've got 3 of the reviews back (the rest should be with me tomorrow) and been through them to add in a few new keywords here and there. I checked the keyword density out of interest and it's nowhere near 2-5% but I didn't want to add anything that would make it seem unnatural.

Plenty to do. The theme is up and I've added the first three product reviews but the site is far from big Brand. I'd describe it as clunky. Annoyingly, the theme I've finally went for seems to be .php and .css. While I've learnt a bit of css, I've learnt more html so plenty more learning to go if I want to customise this theme.

Because I have so much to learn my attitude at the moment is get it live and tweak further down the line. I'd rather get everything up and running 80% and slowly add the other things I want to add and jazz the site up. In the past I've spent too long trying to make everything perfect and not getting enough done.
 
Member8200 said:
There's no active mod that can help you unless you update this frequently and pray that emp notices it.

Bumping this thread cause it looks awesome when continued


If its your niche, niche that you grew up with, the topic you know the ins and outs then you will write it smoothly without long research. Guessing your new to the niche?
Click to expand...

Done, and LOL

::emp::
 
Well spotted and cheers Emp.

Been a busy few evenings after work this week. Flatmate is not enjoying the silent treatment.

Completed this week:

+WP theme chosen and on
+colour scheme created
+logo created and uploaded
+GA universal setup
+webmaster tools setup
+13 reviews proof read and KW research checked
+title tags setup

Next:

+2/3 pictures for each review and get them live.

Title and alt tags filled in for each picture.

I'm avoiding using pictures of the affiliate sites that I will be signing up for. I don't know if that's likely to be a problem but better safe than sorry. Also, I need to remember to link my pictures to my Amazon affiliate link (once I have signed up for the affiliate scheme) so that any clicks on them get the Amazon cookie on my user's machine.

Same with authority logos. As per CC's big brand post these will help add trust and legitimacy but I'm holding out on them until I have been through the affiliate application process.

+Internal linking

Add product review URLs in where the products are cross referenced.

+Cloudflare info

I need to look into this, I've seen it on CC's big brand post but I need to actually work out what it is, what the benefits are and how to do it.

+html and css

The fun part. I've got my ftp setup and watched a few youtube tutorials. Seems easy enough but there's parts of the theme I need to amend that I can't do in WP's backend. This will take me a while as I'm a newbie at html and css.

+author photo at the top of each review. If anyone knows the easiest way to do this please let me know as the theme doesn't seem to include it.

Getting close to dropping the holding page and setting it live. Very excited and I can't wait to start the marketing stuff but plenty to do.
 
Above I have explained I'm avoiding using the photos that sites I will be requested an affiliate partnership with.

One other potential issue is that the products I'm promoting are from one brand. I have that brand in my URL currently and as part of the logo. I will be approaching the official brand for an affiliate partnership.

I imagine this could cause difficulties, anyone got any ideas on how to do this? Will they expect me to use their brand?
 
Today's been a busy day.

+Most of the photos are up
+amended the site buttons
+static pages and URL names sorted,
+setup the site's blog.
+Other small things that needed doing most of which I found here

Beginning With WordPress: First Steps With Your New Website - Tuts+ Code Tutorial

There's plenty I want to change about the WP theme that can't be done in the Dashboard. I've learnt above FTPs and downloaded filezilla, watched some tutorials on that and got it setup. Really basic (and slow) tutorial:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCGctsHKizw

I downloaded the entire site as a backup to avoid future screw ups taking me ages to fix. Once that was done I read up on how best to make changes to the theme:

Beginning With WordPress: Editing the Look of Your Site With CSS - Tuts+ Code Article

Next I made some of the changes I wanted to make in my browser with the ‘inspect element’ feature so that I knew what changes I needed to make to the html files. Then I spent what felt like ages looking for the html files to copy from the woo commerce template files to my themes files so I could amend them. Eventually I discovered that php generates the html and therefore there's no html files for me to amend. That's frustrating as I currently know nothing about php but that will soon change.
That changed today's objectives. I was planning to make those amends to the website today. Unfortunately, as explained above, there was no html file to make those changes too so today I was focussed on learning how to make those amends. Back to CodeAcademy which I seriously recommend if you're new to web development. It's here

Learn to code | Codecademy

I spent the next 4 hours finishing off the html section and am currently learning about css. I hope to spend tonight and tomorrow finishing css and moving onto php. I’m enjoying the learning, feeling a bit like this:

http://stream1.gifsoup.com/view7/4222565/johnny-5-more-input-o.gif

I asked some questions in my posts above, if anyone has time to give me their thoughts on them I'd appreciate it.
 
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Update:

+HTML / CSS course finished on code academy
+all images up with title and alt text
+updated all review button URLs
+figured out how to order products by custom order

Next

Busy few weeks for me with people off on holiday at work but main aims:

+complete php course (absolute beginner)
+sort out full author profile and show on each review
+internal linking
+meta descriptions for every page
+BIG ONE - write a price comparison table with affiliate logos, prices of products and buttons with affiliate links to products via php and add it to the theme.

If this is all done in the next few weeks / month I'll be very happy.
 
Busy day. Late back from work, turned my friends offer of drinks at their's down because I'd been waiting all day to crack on with this project. Just finishing work on the site now.

Done:

+started PHP learning
+wrote 700 word blog & 500 word about us and author posts written
+keyword research for further blog posts
+contact us plugin setup & page sorted
+added search widget
+added text to the home page
+setup author plugin and information - had to find one that allowed me just to select my fictional persona

Server has been really slow too which sucks. I've also got 7 plugins running so my eventual speed audit from CCarter's posts will be interesting.

Tomorrow I'm going to build an html table (easy bit) with price, company and a buy now button in the three columns for affiliate links. I'm going to add the html direct into the product template php files and style it so it doesn't screw up the current template (harder bit). If I only got that done tomorrow, I'd be over the moon because then the site can go live and the marketing fun can really begin.

All in all, good day.

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Sorry for the lack of update. I’m moving country in May so have been dealing with that lately hence the lack of updates. They’ll continue to be sporadic moving forward.

So, the website works! It ranks 80th for one keyword, it was 64th but dropped slightly. Anyway it’s a start.

Annoyingly the site got rejected from Amazon’s affiliate scheme. Their email mentioned it was incomplete and was an ecommerce site so may need to change those aspects but the email included about 4/5 vague reasons so I can’t pin down exactly which one was the reason. The site does look like a ecommerce site but it’s actually for reviews of each product. I’ll apply again in 2/3 months once there’s more blog posts and social traffic etc.

Work completed:

+fixed a whole load of speed issues with the site, there are some that I’m unsure of:

“Remove query strings from static resources” – Grade F
“Enable gzip compression” – Grade C
“Use a CDN” – Grade F
“Make Fewer HTTP requests” – Grade F
"Compress components with gzip” – Grade C

If anyone can shed any light on how to implement any of these I’d appreciate it. Especially the HTTP requests. If it helps, the server response time has been very slow at times.

+Setup social links

Twitter, FB, Instagram & LinkedIn for my online alter ego. It was a few days after these that I saw the green up arrow on my rank tracker.

Next jobs

+Use Search Metrics to find the content a competitor is using to rank for the top terms and produce similar.

+Begin outreach – approach sites with a couple of article ideas and see if they’re interested. I’ll probably follow them on social and interact a bit before.

+Twitter – Carry out research into similar twitter accounts to see popular content and begin.

+Add all comparison tables and update all the links - this is slightly annoying given I'm not an affiliate yet but focusing on the user this is the benefit to them.
 
Is $1/100 too cheap for native English blog writers on oDesk?

Most of my invites were turned down even by guys with $3-8/hour rates.
 
Humps said:
Is $1/100 too cheap for native English blog writers on oDesk?

Most of my invites were turned down even by guys with $3-8/hour rates.
Click to expand...

It's definitely cheap but it's not impossible. Just be aware that you're going to have a hard time finding someone, and more importantly, keeping them.

Keeping them is the big one. Every time you lose a writer and have to find a new one, it's going to put you back at least a week. That's one week later it's going to be till you hit your big pay day.

Spending more money now is WELL worth it.

I tend to pay $1.25/100 words these days and find it MUCH easier to not only get people, but keep them.

Quick note: we're just about to convert some of our /100 words staff to full time now as an experiment to see if we can increase productivity. Don't know how it's going to go but it'll be interesting...
 
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