What Should I try Instead?
I've been sitting here trying to figure out what I am doing wrong.
I have a niche that is evergreen and very popular - it has a million opportunities to sell a myriad of additionol stuff.
I know a fair amount about the niche as it is something I take a lot of interest in.
I know at least one person here who is making a good living (according to them) in the same niche using a similar strategy (as advocated by Dylan)
But it just does not seem to be working for me - there's something I am missing.
This particular site was started in March 2018 and has over 50 posts or pages all of which I think are pretty good, none are shorter and all have unique images taken by me (such as the one above).
I've tried to contact two senior WA officials to get them to just look at my site and advise if it is too broad. Maybe I should narrow it down to just one of the many additional options available within the broader niche.
No response from either which I must say is very disappointing seen as I have been a loyal member since 2006 - yes that is 12 years!
Maybe I should add adsense to the site - but with barely 10 visitors a day (and none of those are organic) I wouldn't exactly pay the bills.
So what should I try next?
Google gave me the lifetime ban with a PPC slap back in 2007 or 8 so that is not an option.
I've never promoted WA as I would feel like a fraud promoting something that, although it is an excellent program, I have not fully grasped and definitely not succeeded in. I must be the only member here who has been around for 12 years who does not have a successful business. Other people succeed within months!
What is wrong with me?
Oh and before you ask - yes I have done the training, several times over and believe I am doing everything right.
I can't afford to give up but I don't want to sit here day after day writing posts that aren't ranking for whatever reason.
What poison is fast acting?
(only joking ok!)
Seriously - what don't I get?
And I am not looking for sympathy either folks.
I guess what I would really like is for someone who knows waht they are talking about to look at my current site and tell me what I am doing wrong.
Thanks for listening.
Recent Comments
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Hi Lawrence,
When I started my website back in 2003 it took me almost a year and a half before I got my first customer (its e-eCommerce site).
I stuck with it, everyone was telling me I should give it up and didn't know what I was doing. At the time they were 100% right I didn't really now what I was doing.
But I was to stubborn and refused to give in and now it is making me a very lucrative income it took over 5 years before it kicked in.
And now that I have applied some of the SEO tricks I have learned here it has exceeded what i thought it would ever produce and it still continues to climb in profits monthly.
My advice hang in there,
Calvin
Being a member for 12 years you should be making a full time income by now. I haven’t been a member a year yet and some of my articles are ranking on first page and I get some organic traffic and I have made sales both with amazon and promoting WA. I still have a lot of work to do but you really gotta pick good keywords that are not to broad and keep requesting a lot of comments per article because that does help
Apparently but I recently got a whole bunch of 404 error notifications from Google from links in my comments and they were all from WA members. Very off putting.
I only found out because someone posted a link to a free "link checker) and I had 12 in all.
I had to then go and delete all those comments.
So I guess good comments (once that discuss not necessarily agree with the content) that have valid links can help while others could be detrimental.
Hi there,
I guess my first question is, in 12 years how many sites have you had that have been successful?
Laura
Good question - but not sure of the relevance?
I was very successful with PPC on a golf GPS site until I got slapped by Google for something totally unrelated. Thousands of others suffered the same fate through no fault of ours.
I have then had three other sites that were successful but not enough to call them a business.
One of my betters sites had the vendor withdraw his product - I suspect something happened to him.
In the old days we used to write articles for article directories like Street Articles (WA owned) and Ezine articles. I had hundreds of articles on those and then article directories became extinct. All that hard work down the tube.
In fact you now have me interested in finding out if Ezine or street articles still exist. I'll go check.
So now my question to you Laura is:
How does knowing my past successful/unsuccessful number of sites help with sorting out my current situation and getting that to move forward?
Cheers
Lawrence
Even though you did not see the relevance I do appreciate your answer. That was very kind of you.
It is as Steve stated below. If you have never had a successful site then the answer may lay in what you are doing. If you had a successful site then the problem lay elsewhere.
It sounds like your success may be in the middle of these 2.
I like to try to help and solve problems but I am sure your knowledge of the internet and affiliate marketing far exceeds mine.
If I am understanding you correctly, you can never be indexed on google? Is this correct?
If so then your job is 10X or even more difficult than any of ours. I do know some countries only use bing and yahoo and I don't know what you are marketing so I do not know what countries you are targeting.
With all of this said I am not sure it is what you are doing wrong. The circumstances sound like they are against you. But since you have been doing this for 12 years you know that you have overcome the circumstances before and you can do it again.
Hang in there and keep going because to stop now may very well be just before your breakthrough.
Laura
Hi, Bald, I just looked at your profile page, and something is missing, you need to put your URL address at the bottom right down on your profile page.
Jacqueline
Your site is the same age as mine as I signed up here in March of this year. When comparing to the other person in your niche, how old is their site? Site age has a lot to do with search engine trust. I'd argue almost as much as content.
Also make sure your content to affiliate link ratio isn't out of balance. Don't make every post with an affiliate link. Several of my articles are just informative to help the community. That said, many will have links to some of my other posts with affiliate links in them.
Keep adding quality posts that's related to your niche. Get the word out by not only getting your posts indexed but engage in social media, commenting on other similar niche sites and so on. I can tell you that I get a lot of traffic from Facebook alone simply by joining groups related to my niche and using them in 2 ways:
1) I see what people are talking or asking about and I write posts catered to those topics. It's a great way to get ideas for new content and keeps your content relevant to the topics of the day.
2) I then will respond to people saying things like "I went with x because of this" or "have you tried this to address your issue" and then would follow up with a link to my post. You just have to be careful here...don't just toss a link to your post and expect results. If you do, chances are you'll be banned from the group for soliciting, so you need to be tactful about it.
In the end it's just keep plugging away and adding quality content to get that trusted authority level. People will buy once they trust you.
I feel the same way. I started my site last November 2017 and I have about 50 articles, that most of them were actually outsourced and paid for. I told the writers to put the keywords in the right places, and I am very certain my stuff is grade-a content. I don't know why google hasn't ranked me at all either. I have a pinterest account that gives me 30 to 60 people a day! But that is with a lot of effort on my part pinning and making new pins, etc... but google isn't ranking anything of mine on #1 and I am just waiting for that....
I wish you would have posted the link to your site so I would be able to see. I can understand why you want to be lowkey, I'm not though my website is on my profile. I don't have anything to hide but I do want to also know why my site isn't ranking on google.
You need to do the work yourself when you are starting out. That is the only way you learn to get ranked and to make sales. A site that’s over a year old should have way more then 50 articles
Well, the best way to gain people, share at Facebook groups, if you don't have the Facebook page, you should create one now! for only ($2), use file army, on file army people are tempted to visit Your profile, use it to your advantage make your WA web link a Bio and you will see people visit it.
Hope this will help.
Jacqueline
I just followed you and don't see a link to your site on ur profile? Maybe you gotta follow me back? or just pm me your site link. I have been around website building since 1995. LOL I have had a couple moments in the sun but do have multiple streams of income, 2 sites here at WA that both generate income!
onward n upward
See more comments
You may not be doing anything wrong. I started my site at the end of January and have 81 posts on it. It took until the beginning of September for my traffic to start slowly coming up and it's been steadily rising since.
I think it just took that long to gain authority and start getting noticed by the search engines. It took from January to October to finally get a post ranked #1 on Google!
If possible, maybe crank up your posting schedule and do 1 or 2 more posts a week. I started doing that in August and feel like it's one of the things that helped my site take off.
Good luck!
Janelle
Thanks Janelle - may I ask how many organic visits per day to your site?
Lawrence
I'm averaging about 45 organic visitors a day, and it's still trending up. In August I was still averaging about 10 a day at most, so over 2 1/2 months my traffic has more than quadrupled.