Louey's Journal

LESSON LEARNED: Post promotion and content sharing doesn't equal page likes.

$5 spent, 45 likes, 63 shares, 8,5000 views, and no page likes.

At least I know.

My theory is (and jsut completely based on speculation) that if you're going to increase page likes, you need to get your brand in front of people a couple of times at least so they get a feel for the kind of stuff you can deliver before you start getting a bunch of page likes.

I'm guessing this because this is what I need before liking a page. But who knows...
 


I've got a niche site that was doing reasonably well (#1 for one big KW, moving up for a couple of others, and getting around 500 visitors/day) when all of a sudden, without doing any link building, traffic just crashed.

It went from 500 / day to about 100 / day.

The SERPS of any major KW's didn't move but long tail traffic just dropped out the arse.

I've had a look through my ahrefs link profile and the ONLY thing possible I can see on there is negative link velocity. There were no other new links getting indexed around that time.

I had a sitewide link from a blog with 60,000+ indexed pages that I discontinued and therefore, lost 80% of my links in one day.

It's not the lost links that are responsible for the drop in rankings because I only had that sitewide link for a month and I was getting around 400 - 450 a day then so the only thing I can put it down to is negative link velocity.

Anyone else had experience with this? Can negatie link velocity crush your site's long tail traffic?

Thoughts?

P.S. The site was 3 months old with a really solid, white hat, link profile otherwise with some serious links from PR7's and PR8's. It looks great and has good enough on-site metrics as well.
 
Louey37 said:
My theory is (and jsut completely based on speculation) that if you're going to increase page likes, you need to get your brand in front of people a couple of times at least so they get a feel for the kind of stuff you can deliver before you start getting a bunch of page likes.

I'm guessing this because this is what I need before liking a page. But who knows...
Click to expand...

I would mostly agree. Depending on the niche, people need to trust a little before they "Like" the whole brand, and not just a post. IE, I deal a lot of financial. People don't trust financial right away, and I get a load of impressions before post-likes, then eventually some shares and page-likes afterwards.

It's all about trust. Keep it up.

Just as you said, if YOU require a few views, chances are you'll attract more people like you in the same number of views.

Note: Also depends on the type of impression: add/story.
 
louey37- did you learn why your site dropped from the serps?
Any chance it was the google dance after 3 months for long tails? If it was try keep going and pushing through with more white hat. Pretty interested to know how googles long tail traffic works. maybe it was just an algo change. i'm now just posting my thoughts onto writing.
 
sydants said:
louey37- did you learn why your site dropped from the serps?
Any chance it was the google dance after 3 months for long tails? If it was try keep going and pushing through with more white hat. Pretty interested to know how googles long tail traffic works. maybe it was just an algo change. i'm now just posting my thoughts onto writing.
Click to expand...

Are you talking about my main site or my affiliate site?
 
LESSON LEARNED (AGAIN): When your conversions drop dramatically, check your analytics.

I launched a new site design two days ago with the sole purpose of upping the initial optin rate. What I found was that the conversion rate actually dropped by 50%. I thought I fucked up the design. I thought I did something wrong. I went back through all the coding and setup and couldn't find the issue.

Then I remembered that analytics tracks conversions by landing URL and seeing as I moved my site from .org to .com, it would mean that no-one was hitting the conversion tracking page...

Moved it over now so hopefully, I'll get some real stats now.
 
Louey37 said:
If anyone is looking for a quality logo for just $5, check out this guy: Ei8htz will design 2 unique, high quality, professional logo totally vector and i will give you the source files for $5, only on fiverr.com

I got him to whip something up for one of my sites and the quality is out of this world. It's in the same league as what I've gotten going through 99 Designs and it's 1/60th of the price.

Sure, you only get 2 concepts and no revisions but even if you paid for three rounds of revisions, it still only going to cost you $20.

Well worth it.
Click to expand...

Just ordered a logo from the guy, he has 103 orders in line, incredible!
 
Haha... That's hilarious. I'm not surprised though, the dude is the shit. For $5 as well... It's far better than what I see on mot design sites.

Good to see him getting the recognition he deserves.

Also good to see he's thrown in all those extras to start really banking off this. Must be hard doing it for $5 a logo.
 
EXPERIMENTS IN VIRALITY

I want my articles to go viral. There, I said it. It's out there and I can't take it back. So, to make it happen, I'm going to start playing with some different techniques.

Step 1: Write an article that people love.

An article I just put up got 250 likes on facebook and some great feedback in the first 24 hours, which is more than the usual 8. So, I'm going to play with this.

First step is just testing it out on Reddit seeing how it goes. It's on a niche related sub-reddit which has 125,000 subscribers and I've had a post go to the number 1 position there before (see above in the thread) that ended up with 14,000 views in 12 hours before the site crashed.

After this, I'm going to try Digg and StumbleUpon to see if it gets picked up there.

I'm going to make an account and get some positive rep under my belt and then post it up for all to see. We'll see how it goes.

After that, I'm going to start writing around to various women's lib blogs to see if I can get them to discuss it as well as writing to a few Men's blogs to get them to discuss it.

That's the plan right now. We'll see how it goes. I'll keep you posted.
 
Found your site. Great post, upvoted for you. Looks like you've hit #1 again. Not that it seemed to matter, but I feel you could have had a better title.

Have you tried putting a small pitch about your product at the end of each post, before the comments? Look at the subscribe box at the bottom of this Finch post.

I haven't read this entire thread, so I'm not sure what you've revealed about your site. Let me know if you need anything removed from this post. Tried to stay broad.
 
Thanks mate.

I definitely think you're right. I know I can come up with great ideas for articles but I'm shit at coming up with catchy headlines. I need to work on that. I've got a few resources that I'm working through trying to get better at it.

And yes, thanks for the tip. I'm actually putting one of those optin boxes in at the bottom. The site's only new and the coder is still putting it in.

Every page actually has a big optin box at the top that's been working well. I removed it before I put it on Reddit so that it wouldn't affect peoples voting and now that it's at the #1 spot, I've turned it back on so it'll be interesting to see how many conversions come from it.

Traffic is running at about the same rater as last time - a bit over 1000 visitors per hour. I'm on a new server (dedicated rather than VPS) so hopefully this one can take the traffic. There doesn't seem to be any issue with it right now.
 
LESSON LEARNED: Social media > Google

In the last week, I've been going on a social media binge trying to see if I can use it as a viable alternative to relying on Google. It turns out that I can.

Aside from getting 25,000 visitors in 48 hours, something even more exciting is happening.

Without ranking for any major KW's, organic traffic is up 33% and direct traffic is up 50%.

I guess it is true: You'll get the most love from Google as soon as you stop needing them.

Even if you discount the traffic spikes from social media, I'm now getting on average, double the unique visitors I was getting a week ago. And the front end conversion rates have stayed the same (not sure about back end as it's too early to tell).

Alo, instead of my traffic profile being 75% Google and 25% fear that google was going to rip the carpet out from underneath me, it's now a very nice 1/3 each split between direct, social, and organic.

So, the moral of this story is if you want to increase your direct traffic or organic search traffic, start by focussing on social media. The rest seems to take care of itself.
 
EXPERIMENT: Increasing optin rate through adding an optin box at the bottom of every post

My new site design features a HUGE optin box at the top of the site that takes op the majority of the above the fold space but it didn't have any other optin boxes on the page.

After the site redesign, front end optin rates were 1% which was MUCH lower than I was hoping for. My hypothesis was that people were ignoring the top optin box because they wanted to get to the content so I added another optin box at the bottom of every post.

Turns out I was right. The optin rate to the big, top, optin box has stayed the same at roughly 1% but adding the second optin box has just added another 0.3% to the optin rate.

I put a different message on the bottom so I can't say it was just the location that increased the optin rate but it is still interesting.

LESSON LEARNED:
1. Test the location of your optin box to see if it effects conversion rate
2. Don't be afraid to have multiple optin boxes on a page
3. If you have multiple optin boxes, don't be afraid to have different messages in each to appeal to different segments of your market
 
Re opt-in box, my sites only 3 weeks old and I have 2 box's one in sidebar and one using scroll on trigger. Once reader hits comment section it triggers the box to come up. So far I havea 0.5% conversion rate on that trigger box. Which is not bad considering it was an experiment.

Have an experiment in play to reduce bounce rate at the moment and then will experiment with conversion. However changed my info in the bix to add what they would "get" if they subscribe and saw an increase. Right now data is not enough to comment accurately but a 0.2% seems to be the trend. So highlight benefits seems to be the way to go.
 
Louey37 said:
I had a sitewide link from a blog with 60,000+ indexed pages that I discontinued and therefore, lost 80% of my links in one day.

It's not the lost links that are responsible for the drop in rankings because I only had that sitewide link for a month and I was getting around 400 - 450 a day then so the only thing I can put it down to is negative link velocity.

Anyone else had experience with this? Can negatie link velocity crush your site's long tail traffic?

Thoughts?

P.S. The site was 3 months old with a really solid, white hat, link profile otherwise with some serious links from PR7's and PR8's. It looks great and has good enough on-site metrics as well.
Click to expand...


Hey man, the same thing has happened to me. My site: About 2 years old, literally zero link building by me. I gained a sitewide link from a relevant PR2, then lost it a couples months later. My rankings went to shit.

I am not sure if it is the link velocity, or the percentage of dead links. I don't really know where to go from here. I have just been continuing as normal, but no luck so far.

If I figure it out, I will let you know, and if you could do the same for me I would appreciate it.

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LegalNA said:
Re opt-in box, my sites only 3 weeks old and I have 2 box's one in sidebar and one using scroll on trigger. Once reader hits comment section it triggers the box to come up. So far I havea 0.5% conversion rate on that trigger box. Which is not bad considering it was an experiment.
Click to expand...

Is this a WP plugin? If so, what's it called? Sound like it could be useful.
 
dtk123 said:
Hey man, the same thing has happened to me. My site: About 2 years old, literally zero link building by me. I gained a sitewide link from a relevant PR2, then lost it a couples months later. My rankings went to shit.

I am not sure if it is the link velocity, or the percentage of dead links. I don't really know where to go from here. I have just been continuing as normal, but no luck so far.

If I figure it out, I will let you know, and if you could do the same for me I would appreciate it.
Click to expand...

Sorry to hear that mate. I know how much it sucks.

I've actually given up on that site so I can't help you out with it. My attention is almost entirely on social media and conversion rate optimisation these days. When my social traffic goes up, my search traffic goes up. For me, writing an article that gets a lot of social traction is easier than building links right now as I'm going to stick to it.

Good luck mate.
 
I'm firing up my own offer and I need someone a little dodgy to process it.

The product isn't illegal, it's just frowned upon (think natural herbs that get you high but in the tech niche). I've been turned down by Plimus, Revenue Wire, and I've heard of RegNow even turning it down.

They don't have to have an affiliate system as I planning on running all my own traffic (though it wouldn't hurt if they did), they just need to process payments.

Does anyone know of any dodgy payment processors that will run less than glamorous offers that have a traditionally high (10%) refund rate?
 
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