Two Month Progress - What Not to Do.

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I'm right at two months now on Wealthy Affiliate, and like many of you I've gone through a bit of a slump. I've done all the formal lessons, got a good site up and running (www.bakingnaturally.org), wrote about 25 good quality posts, some recipe reviews, some product reviews, some equipment reviews, set up a number of affiliates and got a good handle on how to advertise those items. I am getting lots of queries and some traffic. But then I made a mistake.

I signed up for Bing Ads and spent about $200 on two ads this month.

I guess I couldn't help myself - I was so curious to see what would happen if I could just generate more traffic to my items. Would I see some sales? Would I increase the activity on my posts? I had to find out.

Oh, I saw a dramatic rise in traffic. You can see it from my data:

Lots of queries and a gradual uptick in clicks - nice. And traffic, yeah, here you go:

My traffic definitely increased . . . but my bounce rate went off the charts, and the worst thing of all - NOT ONE SALE. Oops.

To isolate the impact of Bing Ads, I didn't create any new posts or share my site on any social media during this time. For almost the entire month of Sept, I relied solely on Bing Ads to draw traffic. You can see in the graphs that session volume greatly increased, as did users and new sessions. But session duration plummeted as the ad link followers clicked the ad, then immediately left.

As I watched all this develop, I'll admit, I slipped into something of a funk. It's no fun watching people view your "store" then immediately walk out! Ouch. But I can only blame myself. I'm not giving them what they want. I need to re-assess what that might be.

Anyway - try not to make my mistake. Save your money for later when you have something your customers want to see.

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Recent Comments

13

Good advice Don. Thanks. Live and learn.

Thanks for sharing, that's some good stuff right here.

You learned something that didn't work and you unselfishly passed it on the us. For that, I'm grateful. So a great big thanks to you Don. Donna

Thanks, Don! Sorry you lost some $$$, but a good lesson for all of us. What are your plans now? Regular promotion?

Good advice!

This is sound advice - thank you for putting it out there saving more than a few from burning themselves!

Good advice!

Thanks for sharing this, I'll be patient and wait for traffic to build organically! :)

Thank you for sharing. I will have to remember Bing and not invest into their business. Your bounce rate could actually hurt your website ratings because of the sharp increase. Be careful.

That's not a difficult thing for me Don as I don't have extra money to invest in ads at the moment. Thanks for sharing though. I'm currently at lesson 2 of Course 4.

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