If you write it, will they come?

lschmidt

lschmidt

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Jun 11, 2007
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I've been out of the game a long time, but spent the last month or so setting up an ecommerce site selling private-labeled products in a certain niche. Tried all kinds of stuff to try and drive traffic profitably and all has failed so far (based on ROI is not profitable):

adwords/bing -> product page (sales come in, but not profitable)

adwords/bing -> e-mail squeeze w/ autoresponder guide (got my cost per subscriber down to below $1 but conversion rate was not high enough to make it profitable)

Other paid ads like facebook advertising, same thing. Can't squeeze out a profit.

The other strategy that I haven't tried, but it's on the todo list is to set up a contest landing page where you submit e-mail to win some product, and gain more entries/increase your chances of winning by getting friends to also enter the contest. Luckily I am a programmer so I can custom code this myself.

Not sure where else to turn, except churning out large articles of 1k-2k words in length. There is plenty of content to write about in my niche, so much that I can really saturate my time just writing content if I really wanted to.

Now the question is...if I write content, will I be able to rank for anything? This is a "standard competitive" niche but I can't really divulge any more than that. It's not ultra competitive but definitely has a lot of players.

I have already done everything else like make sure on-page SEO is up to par, visually the site looks really great, mobile version is up to par, pricing is competitive for my widgets. E-mail series is set up and ready to go, I have ~150 subscribers at the moment as a result of my PPC experimentation.

Thoughts? Opinions? Basically....in an "average" competitive niche, is there organic traffic to be had for new players with new websites, providing you write good content?
 


1. have you tried A/B testing?
2. if you use blackhat methods make sure it is so blackhat that google thinks it's whitehat.
3. neg the competition.

Ok, but jokes aside I would say
1. it depends how much traffic you expect based on the search volume of organic traffic for the keywords and will this generate ROI based on the results you have seen thus far with your paid campaign.
2. how much content/ links/ authority etc. the competition has for their sites and how much competition there is. For example: If the top 10 sites for your keyword are shit, then you might have a good chance, but if the top 20 sites are really good and have a lot of content, links, and are big name brand sites etc. then Obviously it will be harder for you to out rank them.
3. depending on your product/ niche, is it something that a lot of good content would make a potential customer return to your site in the future, therefore increasing your chance that they might eventually buy your product.
4. also maybe it's your sales copy, too long? too short? not provoking their emotions? not enough technical details? too corny? not enough calls to action? too WaFo? not WaFo enough? etc. etc. Try doing some testing on this, maybe that will make a difference, or hire a professional sales copy writer.

(sorry if this is obvious answer, but at least I tried)
 
There's something wrong with your product or sales page/marketing or both. You need to figure out what's wrong before you spend months on an SEO campaign that produces the same results your PPC campaign produced.
 
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another idea would be instead of putting all that content on your website,, use that content for your follow up emails, then maybe you can eventually convert some of those emails you are harvesting
 
icestationzebra said:
Your product is probably garbage
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fella makes a concerted effort in this lean environment, and you jump to shit on it? you're helping to make it worse. if you want to bail, bail, but don't hang around shitting on stuff just so you feel better about how it used to be.
 
It definitely depends on links etc as to whether you'd rank by default. Is it possible to create some higher quality articles that are directly relevant to buyers, and then PPC to them?
You may get some conversions on that alone, but the main idea would be to get lower CPC on social networks - then retarget, testing both your squeeze page and product page. Also try to get people to join email lists etc direct from the article pages, and as suggested above, use the other articles as a follow up sequence to keep your site fresh in people's minds and show you know what you're talking about.
 
If you write it, they will NOT come...It's not 2008 no more. You have to market your content, reach out to readers and pull traffic from others sites to yours.

Obviously, you can't rely 100% on Google for traffic, so consider whether all the time/effort and money you'll be spending on SEO and generally traffic generation will be worth it in the end or not?

In your case with an e-commerce store, it doesn't really make sense, writing content and then trying to build up organic traffic to make a profit....It will take ages and apart from that, you have to ask yourself why it's not working out with paid traffic?

Without knowing your data/numbers, we can't give much advice. Are your keywords solid, are your ads good (CTR?), is your CPC manageable compared to the money you're making per transaction?

Look at your competitors and see how they're doing. Are they also bidding on Adwords/Bing? How are they managing to do that and still stay in profit, if you can't?
 
Give up.

If only it were as easy as setting up a 'private label e-commerce website' and turning on FaceBook ads.
 
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If you write best article in your niche without progressive promotion you're most probably fail.

The only one right success formula is = genuine content + aggressive social promotion + constant Off-page SEO. And remember, time is not your ally here.
 
samrichards said:
If you write best article in your niche without progressive promotion you're most probably fail.

The only one right success formula is = genuine content + aggressive social promotion + constant Off-page SEO. And remember, time is not your ally here.
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What's the current consensus on purchasing links? Is that a 2012 thing, or does it still work today?

I definitely have some of the best written and best looking content in my niche. It's more engaging, more informative, better styled, includes photos, etc. It deserves to be top 10 but I need to get it there somehow.

I've been manually following 1,000 people per day on twitter by following people who follow some of my competitors. It's working to a certain extent...I've got about 150 followers now, 120 facebook fans, and 150 people on an e-mail list.

So with each article I write, I get a little trickle of social traffic like 15-20 people per day.

Now I need to figure out how to get this content in the SERPs.
 
Other paid ads like facebook advertising, same thing. Can't squeeze out a profit.[...]The other strategy...
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Perhaps you have to be better than your competition in 2016 ;)

It deserves to be top 10
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Google is a corporation not a moral instance
 
Don't expect to get to the top right away esp if you are a newbie. Some websites would usually take more than a year before the profit comes in. Here are some tips which hopefully can help.

1. Evaluate your keywords. Are they low competition, high search volume KWs?
2. Check your competition. Determine their background esp if you want a healthy spot on search engines. Do they have enough backlinks, etc?
3. Implement a good SEO strategy. Most advanced SEO strategies include creating private blog networks with redirects pointing back to your main site. This is to increase your rank in search engines. Be consistent in your content, efforts and don't saturate a lot of links/spammy content on these private blog networks to avoid being penalized by google.
4. Be aggressive on social media. If you cant make it to the top page yet on search engines, social media is your next best option. Follow similar pages and see their strategies, pay for ads, etc.
5. I'm not really a player on PPC but if your keywords plus marketing strategy aint that good, might as well spend some money on something else before you get really aggressive when it comes to PPC campaigns.

Hope it helps!
 
I'm trying to infiltrate the niche and steal a share of the pie. I'm not undertaking an easy task, that's for sure. There are competitors with lots of links and have been around for awhile. But I think they have weak marketing materials, poor packaging, and outdated looking websites. They do have the benefit of having history in the search engines, trust, authority, links, existing customer base, scaled and optimized supply chain / logistics, etc.

My theory is that my competitors pay for PPC at a loss or very close to it. Isn't that the final equilibrium state of all ad bidding platforms in a competitive niche? Competition drives down ROI so that only those who can survive on razor thin margins and have time-tested, optimized conversion paths with very large budgets get most of the impressions.

I'm making progress, surely but slowly...
 
They have some or all of the following:
- better margins
- better back end monetization
- better campaign optimization

None of these is a simple thing to get done but that's how it is & you can be sure they're not losing money if they're paying for clicks.

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Blackman said:
In your case with an e-commerce store, it doesn't really make sense, writing content and then trying to build up organic traffic to make a profit....It will take ages and apart from that, you have to ask yourself why it's not working out with paid traffic?
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"Content is the king" you should believe on this. and work accordingly what you are doing. Use some other adnetworks as well. Good luck
 
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