“My wordpress site www.proteinshake.org.uk targets the keywords protein shake/s, protein bars, protein powder.  The website converts ok, not great but not bad either.  Some merchants convert around 5% or so, but this varies alot.  Lately the site has only been getting around 13-15 unique visitors per day and it should be performing much better than this.

The site has a fair amount of content and used to rank well for the plural and singular, but roughly 2 months ago it only ranked for the keyword ‘protein shake’.  I feel it should be ranking for alot more terms and in a higher position.

The site has a PR of 2 and a few backlinks.  Very few of the backlinks are for the secondary and third keywords, the majority are for ‘protein shake’ or ‘protein shakes’.”

What I would like to know is why you think the site is under performing so much in the SERPS?

Thank you for taking the time to review my site ”

Here’s what Dan, Kier and Elaine had to say:

Dan

Hi, Richard, how are you?

Congratulations on the site – it’s a great niche and should bring you money for years to come!

Here are 3 quick tips that I think will help you:

TIP ONE: Tighten up your keyword/page targeting

Your homepage title tag right now is:

“Protein Shake | Protein Bars | Protein Shakes | Protein Powder – proteinshake.org.uk”

In other words, you’re trying to get the homepage to rank for:

• Protein Shake
• Protein Shakes
• Protein Bars
• Protein Powder

Instead, I’d reduce your homepage title tag to simply:

“Protein Shake | Protein Shakes – proteinshake.org.uk”

Here’s why I’d do that:

1) You rank really well for ‘Protein Shake’, but you could improve the rank for ‘Protein Shakes’.  Tightening the targeting of the homepage to focus on those 2 terms only could easily bump you up for ‘protein shakes’ (which seems to be the higher volume term).

2) You already have other pages on the site targeting ‘Protein Bars’ & ‘Protein Powder’ respectively.  Therefore, by targeting those with the homepage, you’ve got 2 pages fighting to try and rank for each term.  Stop targeting those terms from the homepage and make sure their individual pages work as landing pages for each term.

TIP TWO: Gather backlinks for your secondary terms

Once you’ve stopped trying to rank the homepage for your secondary terms, you can concentrate on building a few links direct to their pages, with relevant anchor text.  Concentrate on each as if it’s a homepage for the term.

TIP THREE: Use Your Competitors

Without being spammy… if I search for ‘Protein Shakes’, the 3 sites that rank above you right now are all user generated.  It feels like it would be very easy to put together a useful article ‘Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Protein Shakes’, and to post that – quite helpfully and honestly – to each of those forum threads.

It looks like the Yahoo one is now closed, but Google is placing the latest related Yahoo Answers directly underneath it.  It would be very easy to set up a google alert for any topics from Yahoo Answers, Mens Health Forums, or PP Online that mention ‘protein shakes’ and to post a link there if appropriate.

Incidentally – I notice Mens Health Forums also ranks first for ‘protein bars’ and the last post on the thread looks suspiciously like it’s been posted by someone from myprotein.co.uk.

I hope this is useful.

Good luck with it, Richard.

Dan

Kier

Hi Richard.

You’re ranking well for your main keywords but not so much for others.  Identify those that you want to be ranking well for (use Google’s keyword tool to see search volumes) and start working on it.  Add more pages of content optimised for those phrases and build links with them in the anchor text.  You know it’s worked well for your main phrase so repeat the process for others.

As you state yourself your back links are mainly with ‘protein shake’ as the anchor text rather than the others, you just need to rectify this by getting more links and building more relevant content.

Elaine

I’m not certain, but it could be a perceived keyword stuffing penalty and internal linking with the same anchor text – ‘protein’.  Google does seem to have taken a harsher stand against this recently and I’ve had to cull some of my keywords and think of different descriptions and synonyms – sometimes less is more at the moment.

Might be worth a try.

“I have just had my website re-designed and this went live last Friday.  Previous to that I had an off-the-shelf template website from EKM Powershop.  I must now wait for the SEO the designer has done as part of the new website to start working which I know can take several weeks.  However, I already had SEO in place on the previous website, but now when I check certain keywords in Google I’m appearing in some reasonable positions, but when clicking on them it says the web page is not available as obviously this is relating to the old website.  Is there anything that can be done?  It seems a shame to have actually gained some reasonable places by virtue of the SEO I did with EKM to now start at the beginning again.”

Dan

Hi, Janice, how are you?

I don’t think this is really an affiliate question, but here are some notes that I hope will help you.  I’m going to tackle it in 3 parts and I’m also going to assume that your domain name hasn’t changed.

Here are the 3 parts of my answer:

1) What you’d do if you were going to fix this problem
2) Why I wouldn’t bother in your case
3) What you should do instead!

WHAT YOU’D DO IF YOU WERE GOING TO FIX THE PROBLEM

The most straightforward fix would be to tell the search engines firstly that your pages have moved, and secondly where they’ve moved to.  The standard way of doing this is by using a ‘301 redirect’ for each page.

You’d generally do this using either ‘.htaccess’ or, in your case (as your site is database driven, on an apache server, with thousands of pages), a better option would be a ‘mod_rewrite’ rule.  Mod_rewrite is a little module that helps out your server, looking for certain formats of URL & translating them into your preferred format.  For example, if your old format was ‘/category/bathrooms’ and your new format is ‘/bathrooms.html’, you’d set up a rule to look for the word ‘/category…’ before mod_rewrite would work its magic, pass people to the correct pages, and notify everyone that this was a permanent change.  You’d do that rejigging your old style URLs to your new ones.

WHY I WOULDN’T BOTHER IN YOUR CASE

In your case though, it looks like the site only has a couple of links coming into it, and that all of the links are to your homepage anyway.  That’s good news, as it means there’s not a huge advantage to sorting out this problem with dead links (and so you need not worry about the complexities of mod_rewrite).

It’s bad news however, as inbound links are hugely important as far as search engines are concerned, and a lack of inbound links probably means you’re not getting very much traffic from search engines.

WHAT I’D DO INSTEAD OF FIXING YOUR URL ISSUE

Instead, I’d firstly start putting some effort into building links to the site, and secondly I’d fix some other little SEO issues on the site.

I won’t give you any linkbuilding tips here, as there are many ways to do that and it’s far removed from your question.  I do know that one of the other doctors has a very good linkbuilding service over at http://www.contentnow.co.uk/link-building.php though.

My gut instinct is that your new site could do with some big changes.  My gut instinct is often wrong though, so instead here are 3 quick on-site SEO Tips and 2 conversion tips:

1) Fix the Titles on your Category Pages

If you go to this page: http://www.divineinteriorsandgifts.com/Lamps_and_Lighting–c6.html, you’ll see that the page title is “Products: Divine Interiors and Gifts”.  There are hundreds of category pages on your site with that same title, all of which are very unlikely to rank anywhere in Google.  You should ask your web developer to fix those so that they’re relevant to the individual pages (in that case something like “Lamps and Lighting at Divine Interiors” – this could be automated for every page on the site with about 30 minutes work).  While they’re at it, it would be worth you asking them to put your page headings into ‘h1’ tags too.

2) Dot com or Dot co dot uk?

Google has latched onto your .com address, yet in your question you referenced the .co.uk address.  You can fix this by redirecting the.com to the .co.uk. (again your web company should be able to do this very easily).

3) Register with Google’s Webmaster Tools

Google would happily let you know about both of the problems above (and many more) if you signed up to their set of fantastic tools and notifications totally free (‘Google Webmaster Tools).  Visit www.google.com/webmasters/tools/, follow the instructions, and it will give you various bits of info and offer suggestions for improving your site.  A little sidenote is that you’ll probably have to fix the 404 page on your site in order to do this.  Again, your web developer should be able to do that.

4) Conversion Tip: Move your ‘Buy’ buttons

At the moment, the ‘buy’ buttons on your product pages are miles away from the product image, price and stock information.  They’re also in the same colour as all of the other buttons on the site.  I promise you that if you move them nearer the price and change their colour to contrast with the rest of the site, they’ll do better.

5) Conversion Tip: Fix your cart process

When I hit the ‘buy’ button, it’s taking me to a cart page with a link that says ‘Confirm’.  That’s fine, though perhaps ‘Check Out Now’ or something would be better.  But the rest of the cart process is a real struggle to get through.  I’d recommend that you go through this yourself, pretending you’re a first time buyer and then hassle your web people to fix the painful bits.

Semi-finally… there are plenty more little fixes, and bigger fixes, that could help out your site, but I’ve already gone on forever here.  Feel free to get in touch if you want more.

Completely-finally… your site isn’t an affiliate site, but you could benefit from setting up an affiliate program.  A few of the other doctors could help you out with this so do add a comment if you’re interested.

I hope at least something there helps.

Dan.

Clarke

Redirect the pages that are ranking to the new versions via 301 redirects.  It’s not ideal, but it’s better than losing the visitor to a 404 error page.  Your 404 error page is the same as your homepage at the time of review, and that’s going to cause you issues with Google unless of course the server is correctly telling Google it’s a 404 page and it should ignore the content.  Either way, it’s a bad idea to have any 404 showing, check your logs and 301 redirect the links to another page and or front of the site.  Less than ideal but not the end of the world, you have a sitemap in place, and would imagine that Google knows about it, so it should be a case of just waiting for the new pages take effect, but the time can vary on when this will happen in full.

What you should have done where possible is to re-use the same URLs and site structure, unless of course it was not SEO friendly in the 1st place.  Keeping the same page titles during a swap to a new layout and design can help when it comes to not losing rank on the pages that do rank, you can then slowly edit them over time.  I have noticed in the past that any complete shift in site URL structure and page titles leads Google to treating the site like it hasn’t seen it before, and not always a bad thing.  Sometimes you need to take short term pain for the longer term gains the new site structure, page layout and SEO can bring.

By the way, each of your sections in the product menu has the page title “Products: Divine Interiors and Gifts”.  This must be killing you on the SEO front; I would advise you get each title renamed to reflect the products sold in each section.  You also have no description meta-tag for each of your products, again not great for SEO.

Elaine

Your web designer should have used 301 (permanent) redirects on your site.  This is to tell all the search engines that a particular page is no longer available and automatically directs them to the new page.  Here’s some more information, 301 redirect, but your web designer should already know how to do this.
 

Kirsty

Well, if I were you and if the pages that have been 404-ing have counterparts on the new site version, I’d be pulling on my big tackety boots and asking the developer if they wouldn’t mind just bending over and giving me a minute or two to take a good run up.

It’s an easy job for a developer to set up redirects from old page versions to new ones to ensure a smooth transfer for your new site version in the serps. 

Even if there are some pages which didn’t have counterparts in the old site version, your developer should have anticipated 404s and set up a nice looking custom 404 page to help your site visitors find their way around.  

Kier

Hi Janice.

If I understand you correctly the issue you’re having is that with the site change, URLs from the old site are still showing up in Google but aren’t leading anywhere as the URL structure has changed.  To remedy this you need to use what’s called a 301 redirect for all the old URLs and have them redirect to the most relevant page on the new site structure.  You can find more info here.

Editors Note

Hi Janice.  Thanks for sending in your site for review, and apologies for taking so long to get it published.  It’s a very nice looking site overall and fits well with the product offering you have.  However, aside from the Docs reviews, I also noticed that you have a Twitter account associated with the site, although it doesn’t look like you’ve been very active with it since setting up.  You would definitely benefit from putting a little effort into this direction to pull in some targeted traffic to your website.  Without going into all the ins and outs of twitter, take a look at the following two articles by Kieron and Clarke on how to use twitter to grow your business and some general twitter advice and tips.  Kieron has used twitter to great effect in building and promoting his large userbase for ShareMyPlayLists.com.

At the time of writing, the keywords “laptop computers” received an exact search volume of 550,000 in January; an enviable domain name to have for development if ever you saw one!  However, it is a ruthlessly competitive sector, so Russ posed the following question to give him some ideas on how to progress the site development:

“Hi.

I have the domain name laptopcomputers.co.uk and have commissioned a designer to build me a site.

I have planned a large laptop review site with price comparisons, reviews and possibly videos, however, I would be very interested to see if the doctors have any other thoughts as to what could be included?  You guys think outside the box which can throw up some really interesting ideas.

The development is currently underway, but I’m in a bit of a flap so any input at all would be fantastic.

Thanks and kind regards.

Russ”

Here’s what the docs had to say:

Dan

Hi, Russ, how are you?

Congratulations on the fantastic domain name!  I’ve worked on a few laptop sites amd know you’ll get a ton of search traffic if you can rank well for that.

To be honest, you could do a hundred different things with the site.  BUT I’m going to be the most boring man in the world and suggest you keep it simple for the first few months.  Set yourself some targets, concentrate on the launch, plan some actions to get you to your targets, and put together a longer term plan to make money from the site.

A few examples for targets could be:

1. Reach page 1 of google for the phrase ‘laptop computers’ by June 2010.
2. Increase traffic to the site by at least 100% each week for the first 12 weeks.
3. Add 20 new laptop reviews to the site each month.

Aside from that, one big, big thing you don’t mention in your plan is to build an email list.  A good opt-in list in this niche could be worth thousands every month.  Laptop manufacturers are clambering over themselves to increase market share and have very good advertising budgets.

Hope this helps!

Dan

Lammo

Hi Russ.

How about the ability to compare more than simply price?  By offering your users the chance to compare any two laptops spec next to each other, they can make the purchase decision much easier.  I say this as a non-techie who buys his laptops using the criteria “is it a Toshiba” (they’ve always been reliable in my experience!) and “is it cheap” (I’m tight), but if I can compare two models next to each other and see that one has much larger memory for the same price, then it may sway me to buy there and then, rather than look elsewhere.

Then of course there’s those who NEED a specific amount of RAM, screensize, software.  You could pull all this data from the feeds and effectively let users narrow the entire laptop market to the handful of models that entirely match what they need/want.

Elaine

Hi Russ.

I think there’s plenty of scope for getting some unique pages/content up and running, simply by thinking of all the uses for a laptop.

- Different colours – red laptops, blue laptops
- Kids laptops with security built in – or recommended programmes to install and tips on how to keep kids safe on the web
- Gaming Laptops – need high spec – check out the World of Warcraft specs
- Business Laptops – fast spec, robust for carrying about or lightweight ones
- Long lasting battery life required?
- Basic laptops – is it simply going to be used for research or Facebook etc.
- Laptops for first timers/silver surfers  – with easy to use instructions and links to ‘idiot guides’
- Laptops for music lovers with good sound systems etc.

Good luck.

Kier

Hi Russ.

My main piece of advice would be to keep it simple and be sure what you’re building before it starts, because currently you sound a little unsure of the overall direction.  I’m not sure of the level of experience you have so far, but hiring a designer should only be done where you’ve got a very clear idea of what you want built and are sure that it’s beyond your own skills to do so.  As such, I’d say the trickiest part from what you mentioned is going to be price comparison.

Knocking together a basic CMS or modifying an existing one for a broadly static site consisting of content like reviews, pictures videos etc. isn’t too hard at all, and you could probably do this yourself in fact.  Price comparison however is a big undertaking so think very hard about this aspect, how it will work and how it will interact with the site.  Is price comparison the main focus and reviews etc are for extra fluff or is it the other way round?  Decide what you’re building and make it excellent in that area, then add new features later.

Editor’s Note

Hi Russ. 

Thanks for sending in your proposed site/domain for review.  I’d echo these views and add that with such a generic domain name and a broad number of categories and laptops to promote, try and find a merchant/network that can provide you with good quality feeds to work from.  If you don’t have much experience with feeds, find a developer who does!  It is a potentially massive undertaking in a sector that is very competitive, but you’ve got a fantastic domain on which to build something that could do very well.  Build it slowly and don’t rush to do everything in one fell swoop.

“I run a web development company, Anoveta, and although it’s not an affiliate site I don’t have much experience in SEO beyond the basics of the on-page stuff.  I’m looking for some general suggestions as to how the site could be improved.

I’ve recently changed the design on the site and it seems to be getting between 10 and 30 uniques a day, but I’ve only had one conversion from it in the last month, so I’d appreciate any advice on how to improve that.”

Here’s what the docs had to say …

Jay

Who is your target market?  What is your USP?  If you can answer both those questions you should get a few ideas as to how to portray that and further improve your site.

From an SEO point of view, it would make sense if you could hone your target market in order to choose keywords.  Do you have a geographical area that you wish to target?  If so you might consider ‘web design Durham’ or ‘web development Durham’ as your target keywords and ensure you have a page named after this on the site.  This will narrow the number of websites you are competing against in SERPs (as opposed to the entire of the North East of England) and might also give you a local appeal.  You’ve got a great link from a well trusted domain, dur.ac.uk (a Durham-based site, so great context for targeting Durham) thanks to your previous work – and you’ve used great anchor text so keep up the good work there.

I’d also recommend targeting the homepage to catch your ideal client’s eye.  For example, the ‘hero image’ on your homepage is of a girl in a field.  Perhaps this could be a snapshot or scrolling gallery of your work, linking through to your portfolio page.  If that doesn’t appeal, an image of a successful small business owner could also work; someone who looks very happy with their website and has a booming business as a result!  It’s a cliché, but clichés work.

At every step of your site design, ask yourself what route you want your website’s visitors to take.  In your case, keep suggesting to the viewer that they should find your contact details, and now, through obvious buttons and text.  Oh, and keep all contact details and calls to action above the fold!  Simple technique, but it’s proven to work wonders.  I expect your portfolio page is probably one of the most visited too – it’s how web design is normally sold to a prospect – so make sure that it’s easy to get to and digest.

In order to get visitors to act as fast as possible, perhaps sell web design to them through how it’s the perfect timing in the current economic climate to be thinking about marketing (i.e. web design).  Or you could have a time sensitive offer, or promote festive web development examples that you have.  You just need to keep answering your visitors’ questions at every turn: “what’s in it for me?”, “why should I contact you rather than the next person?”.  If you can do that, combined with a bit of SEO, you should have a steady flow of traffic to a well-converting site.  Don’t forget to let a bit of personality shine through – some character makes you more human and approachable and can actually form part of your USP.  You could do that through a blog or news section – great for SEO!

Clarke

Hi James.

5 headliners for you “Content, Title Tags, Links, Links, Links”.

I see your site is built on Wordpress so that’s cool, it’s going to make things a lot easier.  So before I talk about the “5 headliners”, let’s get some of the basics that I would do if it was me.  Others will have their own view on what plug-ins they like better, but I can only tell you what I have used and what has worked for me.

You have no site map from what I can see, so who’s pinging Google with your site changes and all the pages that can be found on your site?   Sure, Google and pals are great for crawling the web, but they have site maps to help them do it better, so get the “Google XML Sitemaps” plug-in.

I see you have a SEO plug-in called “Platinum SEO Pack”; can’t comment on it, but I have a feeling it’s not as good as “All in One SEO Pack”.  Personally I would remove the other and get that one instead, but it’s your choice.

Content

OK … on to the content, and by this, I mean what you have on page and what you have in your meta-descriptions.  I am not the worlds best at copy (a wordsmith I am not!) but your own page copy seems alright.  Try and make sure you that you have keywords you want to rank for peppered across the site (not stuffed, but at least included once or twice in the site copy).  You’re not going to be in the top 10 for “Web Development”, “Web Design” or “UK Website Hosting” so stop trying.  Instead, go more local like “Durham Web Development” or whatever areas you’re after.  Sure, we all want work from all over the place, but honestly, you would do better finding a large local area to be number 1 on first before you go national.  Use the H1 etc. tags to your advantage, get your keywords to stand out, but don’t over do it.  Your meta-descriptions are boring, no one is going to read them and think, “Hey should click this link”.  It’s a pain to do, but if you can craft all your meta-descriptions per page as if you were paying £1 a click for someone reading the text, then you’ll get a much higher click through rate.  Something I need to do more of myself.

Title Tags

Title Tags are so important, and yours I am afraid are shocking.  I suspect it’s the “SEO” plug in that’s doing the work, but why on earth it’s using a non-standard dot thing as a separator is beyond me.  Use a “-“ or “|”, or even a “,” or “.” is ok, but personally I use “-“ or “|” when I separate my words.

“Web Development, Web Design, UK Website Hosting • Anoveta” is your main page title tag, so that’s clearly all of your important words as the rest of the pages have nothing!  Instead I would have a page for each of your main areas and customise the title to that page and go longer tail; you will not be top 10 for “Web Design”, so go for something like “Durham Web Design”.  You should be able to get in to the top 5 for that with a little work.

Links, Link, Links

Links, Links, Links.  So we are clear, all the on page optimisation is a complete waste of time if you don’t get links.  You should do it to give you an edge over people going for the same keywords, and indeed, if your on page stuff is good, you might not need many links – but you still need links.  You need links to your main page and you need links to your key pages inside your site.

OK … so on to the good news.  You have designed a site for a college; way hey!, happy days you can get free .ac.uk links back to your site   The problem is you have targeted ‘keyword links’ back to your site.  There’s nothing really wrong with that other than that the main page you link to contains the mixed message page of “I don’t know what I want to rank for”, yet your keyword link back clearly says you want to rank for “Durham Web Development”.  Why don’t you have that in your title tag, your meta description and text on your main page if it’s important?  So fix that and it will do wonders, but don’t forget to get more links.

By the way, have you researched if that’s even the right keyword you want to go for?  Do more people type in “Durham Web Development” or “Durham Web Design”?  You should look in to that using your logs and tools like Google Adwords Keyword Generator.

Last bit of advice, always try and get links back from work you have done for clients, however be aware, as if you were doing work for the likes of me, I would have already told you up front I am paying you for the design, without credits, because I am a control freak as to where I link to LOL, so expect that from time to time; a jobs a job

Elaine

Hi James – the first thing I look for when I’m interested in a product or service is some indication of the price, which I think is important for prospective customers, especially those who may only want a very simple, entry site, at the moment it seems that you’re mainly looking for larger projects – you could be missing out here.

I also found the site a tad technical, it might be helpful if you had a glossary section which explained everything in simple, layman’s terms – and I mean everything, we do forget that 90% of the population have no idea when it comes to the internet, phrases such as web hosting, e-commerce websites, customer management systems etc..

I’m also surprised there’s no mention of SEO and if/how you can help them create a presence on the web – organic and PPC options – another area that most folk find totally confusing.

I’d hurry up and finish the portfolio page, this is probably not helping, it does look very sparse – I’d consider removing it until you had a wider selection to showcase.

I’d simply make it more simpler, let prospective customers know exactly what you can do for them, and some indication of price, especially for the lower end.

Good Luck.

Kier

Hi James

First thing I’d do is make your call to action more explicit, for instance instead of saying ‘get in touch’, have it say ‘Call or email us now for a quote!’ and move this from the bottom right corner to somewhere much more visible such as the top left.  Your navigation also feels a bit oddly placed, maybe consider moving this to the left hand column or another more common placing.

There’s so many things you could tweak really, my main piece of advice would be to get Google Site Optimiser on there and start running tests, and always treat the site as a work in progress, not something to have a ‘redesign’ every year or so.  I’d strongly recommend you read Google Website Optimiser 101, it’s a fantastic article from the guys at Conversion Rate Experts and should give you plenty of inspiration for improving not only your site but any future sites you build for clients.

“Whenever I’ve developed a new website, or had one developed for me, I’ve either left it to obtain traffic purely through search engines, cross promoted it via newsletter subscribers of my other websites, or headed straight down the PPC route.

Over the coming weeks I’ll be launching three new websites that aim to do what they say on the tin, nothing more, nothing less – Buy Cheap Books.  This time however, I am stumped as to how best to promote them and would welcome any suggestions people may have.”

The sites are:

Buy Cheap Books (live)
Buy Cheap Films (now live, but wasn’t at the time of review)
Buy Cheap Music (coming soon)

Here’s what some of the Doctors had to say…

Elaine

That’s a great easy to use site, which I think is it’s main attraction.  I think I’d be tempted to contact as many book related forums, book clubs, women’s interest groups and ask for feedback and offer a free prize draw for those who respond.

I’d also try doing a competition for some free books, I used to do this with Allkids in the early days, and usually got a great response – just ensure they have to visit the site to get the answer – ask them to forecast the next weeks/months top 5 books to win them – that way you’ll probably get only those who are interested in reading!

Send some books to relevant bloggers – they don’t come much cheaper than that, and ask for a review.

Good luck with the site Chris.

Lammo

Hiya Frostie, How about running competitions?

Let’s say you stump up for a first edition book by John Grisham… (A First Edition of his first novel will set you back around $150)… Then give that away as a prize with a qualifying question into the draw:

“What is the name of the lead character in Grisham’s latest legal thriller ‘The Associate’?” (together with a link to your sales page for this book where they can find the answer from the spiel and maybe buy the book if they like).

Make sure you capture their email address, and on the “thanks for entering” page, link to all the John Grisham books they can buy.  You’re going to get two things out of this: Lots of traffic and links from the competition and freebie sites (you should of course link back to them as a thank you), and a fairly large mailing list of people who like John Grisham books who you can email every time he brings out a new book, with your link to pre-order (as well as perhaps putting them in a “crime/legal thriller” mailing list once a month/fortnight/week.. all with their opt-in permission of course).

If you find this works, then simply repeat with different authors/genres etc.. and of course that can work for the Films (signed memorabilia from the actors/directors) and Music (gig tickets, signed albums from each artist) sites too – Just rinse and repeat!

Dan

Hiya Chris

I like the site you’ve launched.  Good luck with the others!  Here are 10 ideas – I hope at least one’s useful.

Short-term promotion ideas:

1. Send a book to each of your blogger friends & cheekily ask for a link/site review.  Could be a funny book related to them, could be something they’d like, etc.
2. Send 5 questions to a bunch of high profile authors/actors/musicians, publish them as interviews, & promote the interviews (e.g. on facebook/twitter, link to them from wikipedia, email their fan club, etc.).
3. You have twitter/facebook/delicious icons on there, but they feel like an afterthought.  Encourage people to post ‘I’m about to buy [....] via http://bit.ly/cheapbooks !’ to their various profiles.
4. Post a question to a site that’s read by a bunch of people in the affiliate industry

Medium-term promotion ideas:

5. Build widgets around popular books/films (e.g. the usual ‘Which character are you?’ widget)
6. Run a series of competitions.  For example, ‘design your own poster for the new Twilight film’.  Use a good prize, ask a bunch of ‘twilight’ bloggers to judge the competition (hence they’ll all blog about you multiple times), post the entries to flickr, etc.
7. Slightly odd idea: Try hiding the merchant info of the cheapest price when someone searches.  Include an ‘email me this price’ button.  Get a newsletter signup in return (& have an ‘email to a friend’ option?).  Lastminute sort of vaguely do something similar with their “This hotel owner won’t let us publish their name they’re so cheap!” thing.

Long-term promotion ideas:

8. Donate x% of your profit to ‘Book Aid’, make a point of this, ask for links to help you, ask for book aid to promote you.  You could even extend this to other charities.  Rev share with the charities for the traffic they provide?
9. Allow readers/listeners/etc. to stick up their own fan pages on your site?  Give them a cut for doing so? (a la squidoo)
10. Set up your own affiliate scheme.  A version of ‘Amazon Associates’, allowing other people to promote buying individual books, films, music, etc. via your site (worked well for Amazon after all!)

Hope something there helps!

Dan

Editors note – It’s interesting to see that all three Doctors are singing from the same page (excuse the pun) about running competitions – we didn’t compare notes honest!  Everyone has their own take on it though, so lots of different ideas for you there Frostie – hopefully plenty you can run with – Please keep us updated with how the sites progress!

“I have a pay as you go focused mobile phone affiliate site, http://www.pre-pay-as-you-go.co.uk.

It went live in January this year and I have since added a blog and regularly keep both updated.  I believe I have resonable skills with on and off page SEO, and have recently begun to concentrate on the latter.

My weakness I believe is design and providing visitors with an effective call to action.”

Critique:

Kier

Hi Darren.

Generally I’m finding the site looks a bit too much like a merchant site.  I tried clicking on ‘details’ to find out more about the handsets on the frontpage but it didn’t seem to work.  Also, several of the links seemed to be outdated.

I’d work on adding more info about the phones and making the layout a bit less busy, have a simple categorisation system and less on the homepage overall, but with more unique content for each product.  This will help your search engine rankings too.

Dan

Hi, Darren, how are you?

I’ve assumed from what you say that you’re getting a good amount of traffic from natural search, but those visits aren’t converting into sales.

You think this is caused by your design & your call to actions.  I actually think the ‘look’ of the site is pretty good, but perhaps there’s some confusion around some elements on the site that is causing you trouble.

I’ll give a few suggestions for how you could increase your conversion rate, then I’ll mention a couple of ideas on why it may currently be lower than you’d like.

QUICK SUGGESTIONS FOR IMPROVING CONVERSION

1. On each of your ‘network’ pages, put one main deal at the top.  At the moment you have a grid of 6 phones, all of which look like equally sensible ‘next click’ options.  That forces your visitor to try and find out about all of those 6 before choosing one to click on.  Instead, give them an obvious ‘recommendation’ above your grid of 6,  and give it a big ‘call to action’ button.

2. Put your best converting phones first.  If the Nokia 5530 is *your* highest converting phone on T-Mobile, choose that as your ‘recommended’ phone.

3. Give less prominence to things you don’t want visitors to click on.  For example, you have ’sitemap’ & ‘twitter’ as 2 of the links in your header navigation.  Do you really want a visitor to click those, rather than clicking to choose a phone?

4. Add Calls to Action where they don’t currently exist.  For example, in your sidebar you have a selection of ‘Free sim card’ ads.  For a visitor to get the Orange deal they have to click the Orange logo (which just looks like an image).  Instead, put a ‘Get Your Free Orange SIM Card’ link underneath.

5. Do a few tests on the site, e.g. do 3 phones work better on a category page than 6?  Or how about just 1?  It’s not too hard to get things set up in Google Analytics to test that.  Or Website Optimizer if you have a little more time.

A QUICK BREAKDOWN OF WHY SOME VISITORS MIGHT STRUGGLE WITH YOUR SITE

One thing to note is that you’ve chosen a slightly strange architecture for the site.  Here’s the architecture of a ’standard’ site in your niche:

Level 1. Homepage
Level 2. Network Page (eg. ‘T-mobile pay as you go deals’)
Level 3. Network/Manufacturer page (eg. ‘Nokia T-mobile pay as you go deals’)
Level 4. Network/Manufacturer/Handset Page (eg. ‘Nokia 7100 T-Mobile pay as you go deals’)

Here’s the architecture you’ve chosen:

Level 1. Homepage
Level 2. Network Page (with manufacturer & handset info shoehorned in via dhtml layers)

Because there are fewer levels of pages in yours, you’ve had to shoehorn a ton of extra information in using dhtml layers as a workaround.  It also means you probably miss out on a lot of handset-specific search traffic.  If I were you, I’d switch to the more standard site structure.

Even if you do decide to stick with your current structure, I’d try to clarify things to make the unusual bits on your site a little easier to use.  Here are some examples:

1. Moving the mouse over a phone handset image displays a ‘more info’ box.  But visitors would have to guess that.  I’d find a way to let them know without expecting them to guess, e.g. put a ‘More Info’ link underneath the image which – when clicked – displays the more info box.

2. Your ‘Buy’ buttons send visitors straight to merchants.  Again, not bad, but many won’t understand what’s happening here.  You could clarify by adding a ‘We are transferring you…’ page in the redirect, or by changing it from ‘Buy’ to ‘Buy at [merchantname]‘.

3. On your homepage, clicking ‘more deals’ sends the visitor to a network page.  But on a network page the ‘more deals’ button does something completely different.  I’d rename those to ‘More [network] deals’ and ‘More [handset] deals’ so that visitors understand what they’ll get before clicking.

SOME SIMPLE USABILITY TESTING

Whenever putting a site together, I’d suggest doing some simple usability stuff.  This could be as simple as going through the site pretending to be a visitor and looking for problems.  It could be getting a couple of friends to do that.  Or it could be using a cheap service like www.usertesting.com to do that.  If you’re interested in a usability book, “Don’t Make Me Think” by Steve Krug is a classic.

Dan

“I have recently created a new site, www.ecomatrix.net using a 3 year old domain.

The new site is about a month old and was created using product datafeeds.  What would you say would be the best course of action for the website?

Should I continue to add products and build a massive database of products and/or write some articles related to computers?

I am still building links to the site, should I concentrate on buidling links or building content or both?”

Here’s what Dan had to say:

Dan

Hi, Myo, how are you?

Well done on grabbing the domain and all the effort you seem to have put in so far.

You ask whether you should keep building links, or whether you should build more articles.  To answer that, you should look at how much traffic you’re getting at the moment, and what terms it’s coming in for.

Here are 3 things to take into account:

1. If you’re getting a small amount of traffic, but for the right kind of terms, then some general linkbuilding may be useful purely to boost the traffic per term.

2. If you’re getting a lot of traffic, but for the wrong terms, adding articles for your key terms could help divert some of your link equity onto those terms. Building links specifically to those new articles, and featuring them in your site architecture would help there too.

3. If you’re getting a decent amount of traffic, for the right terms, is it converting into visits to your merchants (and ultimately sales)?

Looking at your site, I have a feeling ‘number 3′ – conversion – will be the most important thing to work on.  As a very quick example, you’ve put in a lot of effort adding hundreds of articles, but you haven’t added merchant links on many of them, and where you have added links to the articles they’re not very prominent.  Meanwhile, elsewhere on the site you have your datafeeds with very little unique content.

If I was you, before spending extra hours on more traffic, I’d make the priority to get the site converting.

A very easy way to start sorting out your conversion is to go through each type of page on your site (eg. homepage, category, subcategory, product, article) and ask yourself these 2 joined questions:

“What do I want a visitor to do on this page?” and “What could get in the way of a visitor doing what I want them to do on this page?”

Hope that’s of some use!

Dan

“Myself and my business partner run the site http://www.hengifts.com.  We were hoping you could give us some constructive criticism on how to improve it.

We are working on repairing broken links at the moment, but any other advice you could give us would be really gratefully received.”

Here’s what Lammo and Dan had to say:

Lammo

Hi Rebecca.

The first thing that strikes me about your site is how dull and dark it looks – I’d lose that background and go for something vibrant and fresh – Hen nights are supposed to be fun – so should your site!

Any reason a bingo banner has pride of place across the site?  I know it matches your demographics, but I’d really try and keep the focus 100% on Hen-related merchants and products.

I think this site is crying out for some user-generated content – encourage your users to share their stories of their own, or their friends Hen nights – you can then drop relevant affiliate links in where required.  Perhaps a forum?

Once you have a loyal following providing you with UGC, then a little editorial prodding can work wonders – spend some time planning a “suggested Hen weekend in Malaga” complete with affiliate links to flights, hotel, costumes, etc. and it’ll be repaid many, many times over.

Dan

Hi, Rebecca, how are you?

The site looks really pretty and definitely ‘on-theme’!  I’d love to know how much traffic you’re getting & how sales are going.

If this was my site I’d focus on the two most obvious things:

A. Getting more visitors.
B. Turning more of those visitors into buyers at your merchants.

Here’s a quick idea for 5 steps you could go through to do that.

STEP 1.  GET MORE VISITORS FOR CURRENT TERMS

Looking at Google’s keyword suggestion tool, it looks like the biggest core terms for you would be ‘Hen Party Gifts’ & ‘Hen Night gifts’.  At the moment your homepage title tag is ‘Hen Gifts’.  I’d make sure the words ‘Night’ & ‘Party’ are in there, e.g. ‘Hen Night Party Gifts’ (in fact, looking at the #1 listed page for ‘Hen Party Gifts’, that’s exactly what they’ve done!).

Next, I’d take a look at the main competitors for those terms & see if I can outrank them.  Here’s the data from Yahoo on which pages link to the top page for ‘Hen Night Gifts’ & the top page for ‘Hen Party Gifts’:

http://uk.search.yahoo.com/search?p=linkdomain:henpartygifts.co.uk%20-site:henpartygifts.co.uk
http://uk.search.yahoo.com/search?p=linkdomain:hen-den.co.uk%20-site:hen-den.co.uk

The first of those only has a couple of pages of inbound links.  I’d go through each of those & contact them asking very nicely if they’d link to me.

STEP 2.  GET VISITORS FOR NEW TERMS

Next I’d have a look at what else I can get traffic for.  Again, looking at Google’s Keyword Suggestion tool (https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal) I see that ‘Hen Night Accessories’ is a really big term that you’re not currently focusing on, (along with things like ‘hen night games’ & ‘hen night t shirts’ which you do have categories for).

You can of course repeat the process from step 1 against the sites ranking for these other terms.

STEP 3.  GET VISITORS OUTSIDE OF SEARCH ENGINES   

Yours feels like the kind of site that would do well in facebook or twitter, or where one hen party guest might email to another, etc.  Why not add a prominent ‘Tell your friends about hengifts.com’ function somewhere, maybe using one of the social widgets like “addtoany” that lets you post direct to facebook?

STEP 4.  TURN MORE VISITORS INTO BUYERS

To do this I’d perform a few little tests on the site & then carry on with the bits that work, here’s an example:

Does removing adsense from the top (or moving it to the foot of the page) increase my overall profits or decrease them?
Does reducing the height of the main banner reduce my bounce rate?
If I add a search box below my top navigation, does it get used?  Do people buy as a result?
Does making product pages for my items work better than pushing visitors direct to merchants from the category page? (could trial that on one category for example).

STEP 5.  SELL TO VISITORS OVER THE LONGER TERM

I don’t know how much priority you want to put on the site, and this suggestion’s slightly more labour intensive: you could gather email addresses through the site & market to them.  A simple way to do that would be to bundle some of your content up into a quick ‘Complete Guide To Organising a Hen Party’ guide (even if it’s just a word document).  Advertise that prominently on the site and build a little landing page for it.  The landing page would require the visitor to enter their email address before they can download the guide.

If you build that list up, it could be very valuable as it tells you 1) this person’s going to a hen party; 2) this person’s going to be going to a wedding soon; 3) this person is a woman, likely to be between the ages of about 18 & 40.  That’s a lot of useful info to help you sell more products to them.

Hope that’s useful.  Good luck on the site – it looks great & I hope it’s a big success!

Dan.

“Hi

I thought I’d let you guys do a full examination of our new website if you’re willing to help!

The website is www.costadelvillas.co.uk

The idea behind the website is to allow holiday home owners the chance to advertise directly to holiday makers looking to rent property in the Costa del Sol, without the need to use an agency.  Although there are a lot of other websites that are offering the same service, not many are concentrating solely on one destination.  We also plan to offer a more competitively priced advertising package than our competitors.

Although this is not strictly an affiliate website, there are certain sections that will promote various affiliate programs including flights, car hire, travel insurance, airport parking, airport lounge passes and transfers.  There’s also potential to promote extra products such as travel books etc. further down the line.

We are still in the early stages having launched on a very low profile in March this year.  We aim to steadily increase our natural traffic over the next 7 months and have a full scale launch in January 2010.

Please take a look at our website and pass on your honest opinions and recommendations, it will be gratefully received.”

Here’s what Dan had to say:

Dan

Hi Neil.

As you say, this is not really a traditional affiliate site.  The site is driving visitors toward enquiring about individual villas, rather than passing them on to merchants’ sites.  But … ignoring that …

I noticed the homepage has a pagerank of 2 & Yahoo’s reporting 100ish inbound links for me, so you’ve obviously been doing some bits of work.  I’d be interested to know how much traffic you’re getting, and if you have a process for measuring that & using the information to improve things.  Doing that is probably more important than any other advice I could give.

Anyway – onto some specific points.  I’ll apologise in advance for this MONSTER LIST OF BULLET POINTS.  Do dig through & hopefully you can pull some quick wins out from here!

HOMEPAGE ARCHITECTURE

The site looks good, fairly professional and trustworthy.  One easy addition to the header would be something orienting the visitor & getting your proposition across.  ’374 Great Value Villas Across the Costa Del Sol’ as a rough example.

The main priority of someone landing on the homepage, and the most valuable action they can take from your point of view, is to narrow down to a specific location.  You don’t make this easy.  Here are my suggestions to improve that:

1. Shift your ‘cross-sell’ items (car rental, cheap flights, advertise, property) to the foot of your content area.

2. Use that space on the right to text list your locations (each linked).  Make those links ‘Malaga Villas’, etc instead of just ‘Malaga’, as the ‘villas’ bit is very important anchor text for you.

3. Your ‘About Us’, ‘Help / FAQ’, ‘Contact Us’ stuff could easily be moved to the header area – top right – to free up that important space on the left for things that are going to make you money.

4. I also suggest moving the ’search’ box on the left-hand side up into the ‘Holiday Makers’ section, where it really belongs, and removing any dropdown options with zero results.

GENERAL LAYOUT & OTHER ARCHITECTURE

1. On individual villa pages, link the villa title back to itself (as a blog generally does), that gives you a bit of extra relevant anchor text for nothing.

2. URL structure is great across a lot of the site, but for the individual villas it’s just a plain ‘/home/view/number’ format.  Not huge priority, but if you could stick the location or villa name in there it may help.

3. Your ‘owner registration’ page is quite long with no real reason (could easily fit the same info without need to scroll) & gives no indication of which are required fields and which aren’t.  Not a major priority, but would be nice to make it easier at some point.

4. On the main site, your title tags are in the format [site name] – [page specific text].  I’d switch that around so that your page-specific text is the first element.

5. Your search pages all have the same title tag, even though some are location specific.  If you could make the malaga section ‘Malaga Villas’ instead of just ‘Search Results’, that should encourage more people to click through when it does appear in search engine result pages.

6. Some pages have breadcrumbs, some don’t.  At the moment, your ‘photos’ pages have the ambiguous link ‘Back to home’ as the main action at the top of the page.  If I’m looking at a villa in Malaga, I’d suggest there should always be a breadcrumb ‘Villas > Malaga Villas > [Villa Name].  If I’m looking at photos of a villa in Malaga, I’d suggest ‘Villas > Malaga Villas > [Villa Name] > Photos’ or something like that.

7. Another minor note: you have pricing on the site both for villas & for ad space, but you don’t say what period this is for.  40 per week? per month? per year?

CALLS TO ACTION

1. Your ’search’ buttons are presumably quite important to you.  Instead of putting them in the same brown as the rest of the site, putting them in a contrasting colour will make them stand out & draw visitors eyes to them without them having to hunt.  Rebadging them as something like ‘Find A Villa’ instead of just ‘Search Now’ may also help.

2. Your ‘travel guides’ section is a great idea.  But… once you’re in there, it’s quite difficult to get back to searching for villas.  I’d recommend adding a ‘Find Villas in Malaga’ link (etc) to the end of each of these guides, rather than just leaving people at a dead end.

3. Your ‘late deals’ section is a good idea, but only has a single item in at present.  If that area’s empty, there’s a nice opportunity to just put some affiliate links in to another ‘last minute’ type site.  Again on that page, you’re linking through the text ‘info’, whereas you could be linking through the text ‘Alhuarin el Grande villa’.

4. The ‘enquire about this Apartment’ button at the top of each villa page is a nice idea, jumping down to the contact box.  The contact box itself doesn’t note which are required fields & which aren’t.  It turns out ‘telephone’ is a required field.  I tried this a few times and you can get the impression you’ve submitted an enquiry when you haven’t.  If you leave the ‘number of guests’ fields blank, it refreshes the page with no error message.

5. When an enquiry has been sent, that’s the perfect place to ask the visitor to do something else.  At the moment they’re left at a dead end ‘enquiry sent’ message.  It would be simple here to cross-sell your ‘car hire’ and ‘cheap flights’ links; ask the enquirer to send the link to a friend, etc.

6. You also have a blog with a good amount of content.  You feature the call to action ‘Find villas’ in very faded text, top-right.  I’d guess the majority of people are landing on the blog on individual post pages.  On some of these you’ve added relevant links back to the main site, but on some not.  Instead of leading straight from post content direct to ‘Write a comment’, it’s always worth inserting a call to action button there pushing visitors across to your villa enquiry site.

OPPORTUNITIES

1. Add some more affiliate pages.  The site concentrates on villas, but you may want to try some secondary pages. eg. there’s a ‘Malaga Villas’ section.  Might be worth trying a ‘Malaga Hotels’ subsection to see if you can get any traffic?

2. ‘map’ is quite a popular term for any area, and usually not hugely competitive (other than the standard google map they throw in there).  Adding ‘Marbela map’, ‘Malaga map’, (etc) pages could get you some extra relevant traffic for nothing.  ’[areaname] photos’ is another easy way to get some extra relevant content that people genuinely want to search for.  You can use this additional content to funnel people from search engines into your site & then onto your villa booking pages.

3. Robots.txt: there’s nothing in here other than a sitemaps reference.

4. Presumably you have a couple of hundred villa owners signed up here.  Have you asked them each for a link?

5. I noticed some of your inbound links come in from blog comments you’ve made elsewhere under the name ‘Steve’.  If you’re going to comment on other blogs, why not use the name ‘Steve @ Costa Del Villas’.  As the ‘name’ is the element that usually links back to your URL, there’s a chance the anchor text will positively help you & it doesn’t take any extra time.

6. It feels like there’s a good opportunity to link the blog & the main site together a bit more.  I found the blog by chance – there’s very little opportunity to reach any of that relevant content from the main site.

7. The blog links back to the primary site with the anchor text ‘Villas’.  It feels like you should be using your main anchor text there!

8. It looks like you only have 1 actual affiliate link on the site at the moment (‘jet2′).  Your car hire & other flight links aren’t affiliated.  If you’re getting any clicks on those at all it’d be worth signing up for the relevant programs.

9. After visitors have been on a holiday through you, it’s very easy to ask for a photo & a quick review.  Even if you’re just using these as blog content when things are quiet, this gives you some extra content for nothing.

Hope that’s useful & doesn’t come across too negative.  Would love to know how the site’s doing & hope you make it a big success!

Dan.

Editor

Thanks for sending in your site for review Neil.  Hopefully you’ll be able to take the advice forward to use in your big Jan 2010 launch, and a big thanks to Dan for such an in depth review and analysis of the site.  Would be great to hear your thoughts below …

First up is a Surgery review of Dan Harrison’s EnviroGadget site. Dan started the site in June 2008 having previously run a niche site all about spy gadgets. Finding spy gadgets to be a little too niche, he decided to look for a different angle and decided to combine the eco-friendly products sector with gadgets to create EnviroGadget. Since its launch, Dan has achieved a daily RSS reader count of 550+ with the site receiving around 500 unique visitors a day, and a recent award from Time Magazine’s “The Green Design 100”.

(screenshot)

Dan asks the docs:

“My site is http://www.envirogadget.com

After lots of link building and work, I now have about 500 unique visitors a day and ~550 RSS readers.

I’m making around $125 a month from Google Adsense, and about $30 a month from Chitika. The site generates around £20 every 3 months using affiliate links through ThinkGeek (US), Nigel’s Eco Store (UK), Maplin (UK) plus a few more.

I’ve tried a banner for Think Geek to target US visitors, but over a month, it’s had no sales at all. All commission so far has been through reviews of products.

I promote affiliate related products by doing normal reviews, but with a link to the product and a buy now button.

For example:

http://www.envirogadget.com/clocks-and-watches/customisable-mud-powered-digital-clock/

http://www.envirogadget.com/solar-powered/handy-solar-powered-keychain-flashlight/

I’ve not plastered the site with Google Adsense so that it doesn’t annoy my readers. However, I feel that my earnings are really low given my level of traffic, and I don’t know how to fix it.

Any feedback and suggestions would be greatly appreciated.”

Here’s what Lammo, Kieron and Kirsty had to say:

Lammo

Do you know that you’re getting a decent level of US visitors? Otherwise that could explain why you’re seeing sales from the UK merchants, but not the US one!

You say the reviews are doing well, and it’s not surprising – they are very good, and probably the key selling point about the site. I’d keep on adding them, perhaps adding a more prominent call to action where users can buy the product (tell your users what you want them to do … BUY THIS PRODUCT!).

I’d also add some direct merchant links to bestselling/popular products in the sidebar rather than the “Google Search” and “Advertise Here” buttons – something like this perhaps:

http://easycontentunits.com/ecu_eco_products.html

Why not produce some “how to be greener” guides giving general advice about composting, using water butts, energy saving etc, which you could feature prominently on the site, and incorporate product links into?

Kieron

The site looks good, a few bits of feedback for you:

There is a lot of wasted white space on the right hand side. As soon as you scroll down past 3 or 4 posts you get pretty much half of the space wasted. Think about moving to a 2 column layout.

Get rid of the Adsense ads at the top of the individual posts. These just look unprofessional and annoying. Instead build some ad blocks within the homepage. Take a look at Autoblog.com and TechCrunch.com to see how well they integrate ads into the homepage and the sidebars. There is no need to “trick” users into clicking Adsense ads at the beginning of blog posts, it isn’t 2003 anymore. I would also recommend that you approach some eco retailers and ask them to advertise on your blog. Create 3 to 4 ad slots and charge £150 per month per slot. At those prices you should be able to sell them easy. Then when demand and traffic grows you can increase the prices. Put together a really good media pack that outlines the benefits or advertising on your site.

Your blog posts seem very short. In order to get maximum visibility from the search engines start writing posts of a minimum of 300 words and at the very, very least write 1 new blog post a day. Ideally 3 to 5 though.

You could also do with featuring your Twitter feed on the homepage. Speaking of which, your Twitter feed reads more like an RSS feed. Try to stimulate conversation and interact with your Twitter followers more instead of just Tweeting about a new blog post.

Kirsty

I agree completely with you Dan that you are only earning a very small amount of money for the level of visitors you have been achieving. It is a decent looking blog too, clean cut and well laid out. I’m not sure if perhaps you have altered your site structure since submitting your question in order to help monetise it with Adsense, but I’d certainly call your posts “plastered” in Adsense at the moment! I think you are going to have to choose whether this is an Adsense site or an affiliate site. I find those ads extremely offputting, and I find it difficult to focus on the page content because of them.

Adsense considerations aside, there are a few things we need to think about here.

What percentage of your 500 visitors per day actually make it through to merchant? If the percentage is low, then you may need to look for reasons why and try to resolve them.  Your calls to action may not be strong enough to compel your visitors to visit your merchants. I’d suggest taking a look at a highly successful merchant site in your sector. Place yourself in the position of a shopper looking to buy something, and check out how they funnel their traffic through to point of sale and try to emulate that as far as possible within the constraints of your blog structure.

Alternatively, your traffic may not be targeted enough to compel your visitors to visit your merchant, i.e. what you are ranking for and what you are targeting are two different things! If a healthy proportion of your traffic is getting through to merchants it may be that for some reason they are not able to convert your traffic. If this is the case it may be an idea to seek out other merchants and test your traffic with them instead.

Another idea might be for you to set up your own shopping resource and add it as a feature within your blog. If you have lots of subscribers why not simply ask them what kind of green products they are likely to buy, perhaps even run a survey with a small prize draw as an incentive and really find out who your readers are, and what they are looking for when they search online and end up on your site.

Editor’s Note

Dan has made some changes to the site recently since submitting for review and it being published, so you may see that some aspects of the review have been addressed.

Thanks for writing in and submitting your site for review, I hope it helps you out with some ideas. You’ve got a great site there and it’s obviously pulling in a nice audience for you to target. I’d agree on the Google Adsense front, but can also see that it’s bringing in most of your revenue at the moment.  If you need the money for now, perhaps you could work on building the affiliate side before winding it down. Alternatively, why not try posting your newer articles ‘Adsense free’ for the first couple of weeks or so, and then add them to the older posts so that your regular readers don’t have to see it (I think Al has experience with this). On the more blog posts front, I know this can be a headache especially if you’re still working full time in another job – but maybe it’s time to outsource and get some trusted writers on board?

What did you think of Dan’s site?