I Started a New Website - 3 Sales After 4 Months

Hey there WA'ers. It is a beautiful summer's morning here in the land down under and after a walk to the beach I am about to get into it for another day. As usual, I like to start my days in statsville where I check my Analytics on my sites, Adsense progress and so on.

Now, as per the heading above I now have two sites to look at as back in October I decided I didn't have enough on my plate (I also run a Pilates studio with my amazing wife) so I started another website - https://beachandfishing.com.

I have created it around my passion for fishing and am quite enjoying getting it going. And as I check my stats I am starting to notice it gain traction in regards to traffic and, more importantly, Amazon clicks.

In January, it actually made 3 sales as well which is fantastic for a site as new as this one so I thought today I would outline the steps I took and how it took hold.

Month 1 - Setup

The first month was obviously all about the setup - and keeping in mind I have my main website to work on as well as our 'day job', things did not move as fast as you may normally expect if working full time on a site.

My plan here was to create the site as a pure affiliate marketing arrangement and due to my lack of time, to keep it simple at the outset and build on it as time passes. So in this first month I built the website and added my standard 'admin' pages - about me, privacy and affiliate disclaimer.

Stats for first month:

• Posts added: 2
• Analytics: 5 views
• Amazon clicks: 1
• Sales: 0

Month 2 - Config

In the second month I focused a little on site config - I played with colours, added logos and set myself up with some templates. I also configured and added Google Analytics, Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. And just to keep things interesting i also managed to get application requests to two affiliate programs declined due to lack of traffic and content on the site. Hence I am sticking with Amazon for the time being.

Stats for second month:

• Posts added: 5
• Analytics: 18 views
• Amazon clicks: 9
• Sales: 0

Month 3 - Christmas

The third month was December so as you might expect, the holidays kicked in and derailed all plans (those beers are not going to drink themselves after all). My focus here was simply to try and maintain some movement on the site. I did however manage to setup a Pinterest account too.

Stats for third month:

• Posts added: 5
• Analytics: 24 views
• Amazon clicks: 7
• Sales: 0

Month 4 - New Year

We took a couple of weeks off in January and my wife wouldn't let me take the laptop with us on our holidays. So again, it was just about keeping things moving here via the addition of posts whenever I could. I did also get accepted to another affiliate program this month and have started adding some banners for it to my site but my posts links are still with Amazon.

Stats for fourth month:

• Posts added: 3
• Analytics: 40 views
• Amazon clicks: 26
• Sales: 3

BOOM!!! Three sales

So, after four months of, let's's be honest, a less than perfect (not for lack of motivation though) attempt at getting the site up and running and adding posts when I can, I made three sales. And best of all, do you know when I got two of them? It was as I was sitting in a camp chair beside a lake with our friends whilst the kids swam - passive income baby!!

So, What's the Trick?

That's the funny thing, there is nothing special to the approach I took and there is nothing fancy on the website. I have a static home page, a blog page and that is it (apart from the admin type ones listed above). So what did I do?

I kept adding posts with 'low hanging fruit' keywords and followed the SEO basics outlined here. In short, every post I created has the following:
• Keyword in heading
• Keyword in first paragraph
• Meta Title with keyword (All in one SEO plugin needed)
• Meta Description with keyword
• 1 External Link
• 1 internal Link
That's it - my posts are between 1500 and 2000 words and I list three options for purchase only (I saw that in another training somewhere but can't find it). This is the training I followed:

SEO 101 - The basics

Let’s SEO a Blog Post LIVE!
The only thing I am missing in regards to my in post SEO is a video - that is my next project for this site.

What's next?

Over the next few months I plan to just keep doing what I am doing - I want to get around 10 posts a month to the site. I will also start to look at getting a YouTube channel up and running as well.

My ultimate plan is to outsource the writing for this site so I can build it faster but for the next few months, it is all about the content and hopefully a few more sales.

Conclusion

So that's it guys, I really just wanted to give you an update and let you know that as long as you have the basics in place and are adding good content, then the process does take care of itself. Even if you are sitting by a lake!

Until next time

Have fun
Paul