I think you will soon learn that your deflated feeling is much too soon to feel. It takes time, patience and hard work to get traffic and recognition!

Hi Clare.

You and I both went with the home improvement niches, mine focuses specifically on man caves. I know it is very tempting to want to dump affiliate links on every page but the focus needs to be on the content and what you can provide of value to your visitors.

It's imperative to fight the natural urge and saturate the site with too many outbound links, lest Google will never trust it and ranking on search engines will be very hard.

Your website homepage is very appealing but I notice many of the drop down menus take you to blank pages. Like I mentioned earlier, you may be having trouble getting ranked because of pages like the "baby nursery ideas" which has only 8 words on the entire page, but contains 5 outbound affiliate links and zero context as to why anyone should be inclined to click them.

Another problem is that on many of your pages, you are not uploading images but embedding images that lead your visitors back to houzz.com.

On your Inspiration --> Images page, every single one of those images is an embedded photo leading anyone who clicks on it back to houzz.com. Which means that Google will basically view them as affiliate links, and your visitors will be leaving your site the second they click on them.

I'm sorry to hear about your frustration and it is apparent that a lot of work has gone into your site, but I would make sure you are going step by step through the certification courses to really help you polish it out. And seriously consider gutting out the site of all those embedded links back to houzz.com, they may be pretty, but they WILL prevent you from getting the traffic you want!

Good Luck!