Journal: Authority + E-commerce

Authority:

Still moving along nicely, getting 700-800 visitors/day now.

PR: Apparently there's been a recent PR update and the homepage is now a PR 3 and all inner pages are PR 1-2, from the few pages I looked at. Not that concerned with PR, but some people are, as I've received a paid link request for the first time ever.

Social: Facebook page is getting maybe 1 like/day, but I'm getting a good number of shares/likes on posts.

Pinterest account is around 900 all-natural followers now. Almost every pin gets repinned 5+ times, with spikes to 50+.

Content: Still seeding comments on popular posts, one day other people will be doing this for me...

Plans: Almost done with the article mentioned in my last post. Stopped worrying about the title and it should go live today. I'll promote it through my Pinterest/Facebook account as well as another 30k+ Pinterest account I got access to. Hoping to get a nice traffic boost and some quality links out of this. If not, oh well at least it'll bring in some longtail traffic.

Also working on a store in this niche, using the authority site to jump-start it.

E-Commerce:

Doing well, around 50 visitors a day now and this quarter is on track to be twice as profitable as the last quarter. Ordered a Squidoo lens and got a YouTube video of my own added to it, trying to figure out how the hell to rank videos as they keep hovering between rank 20-40 even for longtails.

Anyway, almost ready for ordering more product and I'll be doubling the order size again. This should get me another 2-3 euros extra per order, which is good as the "strong" euro is killing my margins.

The local EMD mentioned earlier went up and instantly hit rank 1 for the two main terms and I got a sale in the first two days to boot. Unfortunately the rankings didn't stay up for long, though I'm still on the first page.

Plans: Getting more links, preferably bringing traffic. If anyone has a site in the party/goth scene pm me please.
 


Hey man. Glad to see you progressing.

Love to connect on Skype. PM me on here for my ID.
 
good to see things are working out- I just started en ecom business last month and I'm struggling.
 
Authority:

Social: Broke 1k natural followers on Pinterest. Account is growing at ~10 followers/day.

Content: My first top X article didn't go viral as hoped, but is still bringing in ~25 visitors/day. Could be worse.

Links: Got a PR 5 link on a resources page. Mentioned a broken link, got to talking with the admin and he added my site. Seems broken linkbuilding still works (though not often).

Monetization: The affiliate program I had high hopes for was a complete bust. Almost 250 clicks and not a single sale, so I'm back to Adsense. It only makes $3-10/day, but that's still more than nothing.

Traffic: Hovering between 800-1000 visitors/day now. With a peak of 1300 a few days ago, because a news story got people searching.

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Traffic by day, from rebranding the site until yesterday. Hopefully I can get that line going.


E-commerce:

Rankings have increased quite a bit. Unfortunately traffic is the same and sales are down. From discussions with other vendors in this niche that's normal though in this time of the year. So I'm not worried, yet.

No luck in finding any good links, so I'll just stick to adding a few quality links here and there. Most recent project is setting up some quality social profiles, KnowEm style.
 
Really long overdue update (sorry, not letting this thread die just yet). Because I focused on finishing my bachelor's degree I've more or less neglected my sites over the last few months.

So here's an overview of what happened (TL;DR: not much).

Authority:

Social: Currently just over 1.5k Pinterest followers (+50% in 6 months). Closing in on 500 Facebook likes.

Content: The top X article didn't go viral as mentioned before, but is by far the most popular article bringing in ~100 visitors a day. Pretty impressive for an article that focused on a 500 searches/month keyword (according to Google's keyword tool). Definitely worth the effort and in the future I'll focus on this type of article to see if I can replicate the success.

Started working with Kye (BST link) after giving up on finding a good writer through Textbroker. She's providing great content at a very reasonable price and even comes up with new article ideas. All I usually have to do is add one or more pictures and put it up.

Links: Lost my Alltop spot a few months back, presumably because I wasn't updating regularly enough. I should be able to get this back pretty easily once I start writing again.

Monetization: Still 95% adsense. Despite the lower visitor count the income of the site nearly doubled, because a few simple changes I made more than doubled my CPM.

Traffic: Hovering between 500-600 visitors/day now. The below graph shows what happens when you don't regularly update (-30% in 6 months)

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E-Commerce:

Rankings took a bit of a hit. However, the number of visitors as well as the revenue and profit have steadily increased over the past half year. I'm starting to think that this project could be a lot more profitable than I previously thought, but only if I can tap other traffic sources.

I'm pretty much done with paying for links that bring no traffic. So over the last few days I've contacted a number of people with a large YouTube following to see if they're interested in reviewing my product. So far I've had one bite and I was also able to place a link on a popular video for a reasonable monthly fee. Hopefully this will bring a nice amount of targeted traffic, perhaps with a rankings boost as a side-effect.

Just placed a new order that includes some new variations. The new variations are a bit more expensive, but because I doubled my order size again I was able to negotiate a lower price for the older variations. Always try to negotiate a better price/faster delivery/free goodies, you just have to keep dangling the increasing volume carrot in front of them.

I'll also get someone to rework the sales copy that I wrote after reading Cashvertising once, as I'm pretty sure it's horrible.

Other projects:

Stopped working on everything else, I'll just keep collecting the tiny checks and let them slowly die or perhaps throw one or two sites on Flippa. The only exception is a local site that has shown signs of life over the last few weeks. I've ordered a few more articles for that one and will then let it simmer again (static site, evergreen niche).

Anyway, I'll be updating more regularly again.
 
TL;DR: Added some authority content and continued my advances towards YouTube.

Authority:

Added 5 pages with a total word count of ~3k, plus a new top X article just over 1k words with a whole slew of pictures. I'll slowly be adding the pictures to my Pinterest boards and ask someone I know to pin a few images to their 40k natural followers board. Worked out nicely for the last article, hoping to replicate that success.

Signed up for Google's page speed service. It took a while to setup, mostly because I had no clue what I was doing (it takes maybe 5 minutes if you do). It's basically a free CDN + speed optimizer right now. According to their tests it should roughly half my average load time (front page from ~2s to just under 1s). Hoping to see a nice drop in bounce rate and eventually better rankings.

E-Commerce:

Contacted some more Youtube channels and got another two people willing to review my product (60k/40k followers). I'm still trying to get a huge channel to review my product, but it seems they all turned professional over the last few years.

A review I got almost a year ago is still bringing a few visitors every week and yesterday I randomly got two orders from it. I only need a review to bring in 1-2 customers to turn a profit. In my opinion that makes the reviews worth a shot, even with these smaller channels.

So, if you got a visually pleasing product and nice margins, definitely check out YouTube.
 
How long have you been working on your authority site (this version plus the old site) and you're still not making anything from it?

It's eating up what looks like a large chunk of your time. Either find a way to make money from it or give it up and focus on something else.

You have one ecom site that sound moderately successful, I'd try another.
 
Closing in on two years now (~1 year on both sites). And yes you're right, it's eating up a lot of my free time. At this point I'm seriously considering to kick it up a notch for a month or so to show some growth and flip the site.
 
TL;DR: More authority content, back in Alltop, decided to sell site.

Authority:

Added another 5 posts. Most of the new posts are only getting a few visitors per week, but that should increase over time. I think I'll spend some time building internal links to the new posts, that might help.

The upside of the more regular posting is that I'm back in Alltop. I also scored a reciprocal link from a PR6 authority in the niche (PR5 page). Reciprocal links are a bit dirty I guess, but since I was already linking out to them I'll take it..

The Google Pagespeed service hasn't done much to my bounce rate (1.5% down, but that could just be noise). Oh well, it's free so I'll just keep it up because it can't hurt.

I've decided to flip this site so I can focus my efforts elsewhere. With some luck I'll be able to sell it for a nice multiple taking cues from Tavin's excellent thread on flipping (hopefully with some advice from Tavin himself).

E-Commerce:

New stock arrived, currently working on adding the new variations to the site. This is taking a bit longer than expected because the distributor forgot that their sellers might need some product images.
 
I'm thinking in a month. This will give me time to show some traffic growth. It will also give a potential buyer time to prep the site for the most important event of the year (Christmas).
 
TL;DR: Pimping my authority site, e-commerce is steadily moving away from Google.

Authority:

Added a few more articles. I haven't been able to write as much as I wanted, with university starting and keeping the e-commerce site going. So I'll be ordering extra content to keep the post frequency up.

After getting some solid advice from thehobbster I'll be fleshing out my social side by adding a YouTube channel and Twitter. I also ordered a new logo/header and I'll order an infographic based on a popular post on my site.

All in all I'll be spending some decent coin over the next few days, hopefully it will pay off in a few weeks.

E-Commerce:

Finally got some product images for the new stock. I'm going from a handful of variations to 25+, so I'm pretty excited to see how that will work out.

I've negotiated another YouTube review, this time from a channel with 300k+ subscribers. I'll wait on the results from the upcoming reviews before contacting more channels, but I'm expecting a lot from this based on early data.

Traffic sources over the last 30 days:

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Referral traffic is pretty much all YouTube, Facebook is a distant second and the rest is mostly niche referrals.

From what I can tell direct is a mix of YouTube and Pinterest traffic that is not properly attributed, along with the usual returning visitors.

Search traffic converts a lot better than my other traffic, but it feels nice to be moving away from Google (in b4 "Google owns YouTube").

On a side note: A decent (and growing) chunk of my traffic is from Brazil and most of them can't use PayPal and don't have international credit cards. So does anyone know of a Brazilian payment provider that allows me to accept national credit cards, without owning a Brazilian company or charging massive setup fees?
 
TL;DR: Authority traffic slowly increasing, some e-commerce site tinkering + AdWords

Authority:

Added another 5 posts, basically posting a new article every other day. Traffic has been slowly creeping up and is hovering between 550-700 now.

Got myself a sweet new link courtesy of thehobbster and the targeted page is bouncing around now, can't wait to see where it settles.

On the social front I'm building out my G+ page, which for some reason has attracted a decent amount of +1's. Even though I only uploaded a logo and added a tagline. Still waiting on my YouTube videos and infographic, I hope they'll be done soon.

As I was writing this I got a Google Alerts mail (easy way to keep on the news in a niche) and I saw that my Pinterest account was listed under "Web". Guess I'm doing something right there.

E-Commerce:

Added a plugin that shows the local currency of a visitor based on their IP. It's working quite well, so far virtually all payments are in a local currency, where before at least half was in the default currency. Still testing to see if it is increasing conversions or not.

Opencart uses AJAX to load the reviews (among other things) so they show up for users, but not for crawlers. So I got someone to write a quick vqmod that adds the reviews of a product to the source code so they are actually indexed. This added a good amount of new unique content to a few of my product pages, which can't hurt.

Started an AdWords campaign and so far I'm almost doubling my money. There's not a whole lot of traffic, so I'll just keep an eye on it so nothing crazy happens, but other than that I'm not spending time on it.

One of the YouTube reviewers said my product was rubbish, yet was flaunting it on Instagram. They've now stopped responding entirely, so enjoy your free stuff I guess.

Anyway, the 300k+ subscriber channel loved the product and will be reviewing it next week. Let's see how loyal their subscribers are..
 
TL;DR: Authority sale postponed, AdWords is great, new products and YouTube are not.

Authority:

Just received my videos and I'll be adding them to my YouTube channel today. Took a bit longer than I expected, but they're a lot higher quality than any Fiverr gig I've seen and similarly priced.

The infographic is in the first round of revisions, hope to be getting it back soon.

Other than that it's just the same old same old, some Pinterest, some new articles, etc.

The original plan was to list the site either yesterday, or next Saturday. However, with the delays in video delivery and the infographic taking longer than expected/hoped I'll be postponing the sale by at least two weeks. Luckily the traffic is still trending upwards, so it's not all bad.

E-Commerce:

AdWords is doing pretty great, CPC's are a lot lower than anticipated and the conversion rate nearly doubles that of organic traffic. My guess is that's due to my position in the serps (bottom of 1st page mostly) so organic traffic has already seen the competition.

There's not enough traffic to really make a killing, but still plenty to warrant more attention. So I've duplicated the campaign and am currently split-testing some ads. The amount of information you get from a campaign is pretty amazing and will definitely help you pinpoint lucrative keywords which you can use in your SEO efforts.

Still no YouTube reviews, despite being assured two of them would be added last week. I guess the professionalization of YouTube channels only extends to asking money for everything, because deadlines sure as hell aren't met.

The new products are not selling, at all. At this point I might as well turn this thing into a single product site, because that's what 95% of the visitors seem to want. Unfortunately that would leave me with a lot of useless inventory, so I'll have to think on it a bit.
 
TL;DR: Authority site blasted by Penguin, E-Commerce still humming along.

Authority:

Welp, my authority site just got blasted by penguin 2.1. I've got no clue why, because the only thing I've done in the past year is add more quality content and a handful of high quality links.

Traffic looks to be down 30-40%. So yeah, I might have to rethink my selling plans as I'm pretty sure people won't be paying a high multiple for a site that just got hit by Penguin.

Oh well, my infographic just went live and I added the videos a few days ago. I'll just leave it alone for a while other than adding some content and see what happens.

E-Commerce:

One of the reviews finally went live and got me a few thousand visitors total during this week. The traffic is pretty low value unfortunately, but I still got a few sales that took me close to break-even already.

Combined with AdWords these last two weeks have been the best I've had so far for this site.

I've even seen a sale to someone coming from a press release I put out two weeks ago or so, I guess people actually read them.
 
TL;DR: Authority site on the back burner, starting new e-commerce site/wholesale.

Authority:

Traffic seems to have stabilized at around 350 visitors/day. The only thing I can think of that could have caused the hit was that I redirected a small niche site I bought a few months back. At the time I didn't really think much of it, but after taking a look at the link profile again I realized it was a pretty stupid move.

So yeah, I removed the redirect and will see what happens when another update comes around in a few months. In the meantime I'll keep adding articles every few days and keep working on my social footprint (just broke 2k natural followers on Pinterest a week ago).

The endgame is still to sell the site (as I think my time is better spend elsewhere), but certainly not this year.

E-Commerce:

The site is doing pretty good, despite increasing competition. Good enough that I'll be starting a second site in the niche. The old site is an EMD that isn't brandable and I don't think the local TLD is doing me any favors for what is increasingly becoming a global audience.

I'm buying my product from an international brand, but recently they've changed their packaging. It now includes their URL and a QR-code, promoting their own horrible store. Let's just say I wasn't amused, but they're not changing the packaging.

I did some digging and have found their manufacturer, which I've already contacted. The plan is to get my own packaging (featuring the branded site) and hopefully negotiate a better price.

At the same time I've taken a good look at the competition that has popped up over the past few months and found out that almost all of them have the same wholesale supplier. I can easily undercut this supplier and still make a good profit. Once I have my new packaging/supplier sorted I'll try to move in on the wholesale market.
 
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