It’s been a couple of weeks since we last posted, and after a brilliant A4U Expo at London’s ExCel last week (thanks to Matt and the Existem/A4U Expo team), it’s high time we got cracking on with some more of your reviews from Affiliate Docs HQ. There will be an announcement over the coming week or two for a new development that will be launching, so keep your eyes peeled!

Today’s review site comes from James (click to enlarge the screenshot):

“I run what I would call a semi successful website: www.enterf1.com

It looks the part in the Formula 1 niche and has occasional, if not not day to day postings about the sport of F1.

But it makes it’s money from the F1 tickets section which I have now been building up the SEO on for a few years:

Examples:

www.enterf1.com/f1-tickets.asp
www.enterf1.com/f1-tickets/britain.asp

A lot of my traffic from google is ticket related but I want to increase the traffic and therefore conversion of my ticket landing pages. I’m in a lot of top 10 positions but am fighting some big boy ticket companies making it difficult to get number 1’s.

Because of this I’ve started going after the long tail and setup small pages likes this:

www.enterf1.com/f1-tickets/Montreal-F1-2010-Tickets.asp

That one has proved a winner and is making me hundreds of pounds – but still the motivation isn’t there to keep setting them up as I’m never sure if it looks like I’m spamming Google, setting up too many small pages, how to link to them etc..

If you look at the bottom of a main ticket landing page you’ll see a grid of ‘related grand prix information’ links – this is my current method for linking to the longtail:

www.enterf1.com/f1-tickets/canada.asp

Would love some guidance on how to get to the next traffic level with this site!

Thanks

James.”

Here’s what Kieron and Kirsty had to say …

Kieron

First of all by adding smaller subpages to Google you’re not spamming it, you’re creating fresh content. This is good. My advice is that you have found something that works so replicate, replicate and then replicate some more! Google must like these pages if it’s serving them up in the index and you’re dominating for your keywords, phrases. So my first bit of advice is to make hay while the sun shines. We all know how fickle Google can be so if you have found something that works then maximise it.

With regards to other methods to drive traffic to your site, here are some suggestions:

1. Facebook “Like” Box: First of all, get an EnterF1 Facebook page set up and then put the Facebook “Like” box in your sidebar. For an example of this in action, look at the right hand side of TechCrunch.com. This gives your users another avenue to become a fan of your site and interact with you. Before you know it, you could have 10,000 Facebook fans and another revenue stream completely.

2. Facebook “Like” Buttons: On key pages and blog posts within your site implement the Facebook “Like” Button as seen on my playlist pages at http://sharemyplaylists.com/the-soundtrack-to-september-2010/. This means that anyone who views an article/page etc. on your site which displays this button can press it, and with 1 click it will appear in their Facebook wall. So for example if 20 people who have on average 200 friends click the like button on any given day that’s potentially 4,000 additional people per day who will see content from your site. Or an extra 120,000 per month. Let’s not forget that Facebook is the new internet so we should all be using it to it’s fullest.

3. Share to Twitter: Twitter is another source of traffic that you should be utilising. You can also get a whole load of “Tweet this” or “Retweet” buttons that have the same effect as the Facebook Like button.  You should also open a Twitter EnterF1 account and use it as a separate communication channel, like Facebook.

In terms of ShareMyPlaylists.com, after Google, Facebook & Twitter are my biggest referrers. So for not much work and no cost you should be able to drive your traffic up quite quickly.

Kirsty

Well, they say content is king and your successful page targeting the long tail has definately shown how effective content that targets less competitve search phrases can be.

I would definately produce more pages of this nature, but I’d be cautious about doing too many with content that was very similar or targeting subtle variations of strongly related phrases. Unless you absolutely went to town with it though, I’d say the worst that might happen is that Google will pick a few which it considers to be relevant to a wide range of search terms and ignore the rest. I see this quite frequently on my own sites where I have a few articles touching on the same subject areas. Frustratingly, sometimes the one that is “picked” isn’t always the right one!

You’re already doing a great job with news articles and forum posts on the site, drivers profiles, team profiles, as well as some very snazzy widgets to make your sales pages compelling (your next race feature on the home page for example!) – you’ve clearly put a lot into this site. If it were my site, I’d probably add 4 or 5 articles with good unique content around each of your F1 locations.  Don’t make the long tail terms too closely related to each other or it’ll probably just muddy the waters as I mentioned above. You can either link to them from the appropriate pages (not 100% ideal), or perhaps re-jig your site menu structures to link to the pages discreetly from as many other relevant pages as possible. Obviously if you add too much to the footer of your pages your site will look spammy.

To monetise it further I’d probably also add pages for each of the grand prix locations and try to sell some accommodation to people looking to go to these events.  I would also go into more depth with content around merchandise. I see you’re using ECU to create some nice looking pages around merchandise brand names, however you may want to go into this a bit deeper and target some specific items that sell really well. Just ask your network or merchant for the info and they should be happy to give it to you.

Editor’s Note

Thanks for sending in your site James, would love to do a follow up to see how things progress. As an afterthought, you have a lot of regular content going up on site from multiple authors. If you haven’t done so already, you should think about making an application to have your news articles featured in Google News and widen the site’s exposure further (there are some pre-requisites). Kieron published an article all about it here – getting your site featured in Google News.

Do you have any tips for James?