3 months later: Please review my site

3 replies
Hello fellow warriors.
I haven't been here for some time because I was working on my site and doing my regular job, living life etc.

Anyway by the beginning of March I started my first website - internet marketing experiment. My goal was and still is the same - I don't want to become rich or have a big income - I want to learn how to attract people to my website, to learn marketing skills.

My goal when I started was this:
- 50 unique visitors/day
- 2 user registrations/week
- income $1/day from Adsense/Affil marketing...

You can read about my beginning in this thread. Since then I have completely redesigned the site because the old one was ugly and cluttered.

The site is: Film Screenshot Quiz

Now I have very clean design, Facebook login and few more tweaks here and there.
I used to have on-site store promoting ClickBank and Plimus products but I no longer use it - it felt sort of forced.
I still have AdSense which I hoped would make few cents a day but it has made me one dollar in three months (you can laugh now). Instead, I replaced CB with Amazon Associates and I incorporate affil links into my posts.

My Google Analytics data are:
- over 1000 unique visitors (around 350/month) = this translates to 7 uniques/day, far from 50 that I envisioned
- 3350 pageviews, 1600 visits
- my bounce rate is huge = almost 70 percent

I used to have new registrations almost every day for first month but those people didn't participate or were spammers. Actually only one guy is active and he's been great - I just envisioned more people competing.
And as for sales - there's been none and just a few clicks on Amazon links.

I have tried:
- Adsense campaign twice = didn't bring any new registrations but made up all those clicks, too expensive for me
- Paid tweeting/Facebook likes = practically worthless
- Paid backlinking strategy (quite expensive) which proved to be somewhat successful. It was linking on blog network for $40. It skyrocketed me on first page of Google on few keywords but as I don't have any other backlinking plan, it lasted only few days. In that time I saw double/triple increase in visitors - few registrations, no clicks, no sales.

I suspect where my weaknesses are:
- I don't do enough backlinking: I use competition directories (5-6 sites) that bring some people to the site, rest is Facebook, mailing list or Google
- I don't have text content. As you can see, my page is built around images which isn't really friendly with Google. I changed my strategy and now I accompany some of my image posts with information/reviews/thoughts and I also write 2-3 articles per month.
- my Unique Selling Proposition is kinda hard to sell. There are some sites out there that do the thing I do but I'm the only one who gives away cash and prizes. But is that enough?


So my question is: What should I do next? How can I fulfill my goals?
#months #review #site
  • Profile picture of the author fenixpro
    Hello Op,

    Looks like you've done a lot.

    My two cents related to sites is almost always that content is king. Yes, there is SEO, and Social Media and a Paid Traffic, but content is what the search engines are for: Matching your site to search terms.

    So, for me it all comes down to extensive keyword research and then creating content. I would say, to the tune of at least 50 pages and more likely, 150+.

    When I say pages, I mean pages or posts that are optimized for one long tail keyword primarily and that use a couple other even more long tail KWs. Even without any back linking, you can drive enormous traffic by creating tons of content that gets searched. With social share buttons on your pages, this will only amplify the process.

    Now if your site is junk or people don't care or are the product is not converting on it's own, that's a different story. I would work on the traffic using solid site building (via targeted content creation) methods and then tweak as necessary with the conversions.

    If all else fails, you can sell a site with traffic, but with low conversions for a decent amount of money.

    ~
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  • Profile picture of the author osekdomains
    Thanks fenixpro

    You kind of confirmed what I already thought. I am a fan of content and I do not want to be dependent on blackhat/paid traffic anyway.

    I feel that more content would be better but it's hard to focus on anything specific since my website is competition web based around images. Lately I've been treating it as a personal blog.

    I'm just out of ideas - what useful information could I give to visitors given my site's characteristics. I tried this with some articles but it just seems I need to learn keyword research more.

    That's one thing that I haven't been really doing/learning.
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    Film Screenshot Quiz - win cash and prizes
    http://www.screenshotquiz.com

    SuperBMX - czech website for freestyle BMX beginners
    http://www.superbmx.cz

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  • Profile picture of the author osekdomains
    I have a feeling that this "niche" might work. It is not probably a money machine but if you read my first post you can see that my goals are quite modest compared to most IM crowd here.

    It is really an experiment for me and I knew from the beginning what I was going into. I'd like to have opinion from you people
    A, What impression does the site leave on you as a visitor?
    B, What techniques (SEO wise, backlinking) should I exploit more (see first post)?

    I think my on-site SEO is as good as it could be.
    Signature

    Film Screenshot Quiz - win cash and prizes
    http://www.screenshotquiz.com

    SuperBMX - czech website for freestyle BMX beginners
    http://www.superbmx.cz

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