Firstly I’d like to thank Kirsty for her help, she’s gone way beyond the call of duty to help me out and for that I am extremely appreciative, and I think I kind of know where I’ve been going wrong now.

The very first website I ever built was to sell a couple of ebooks I’d written in a niche area. It looked horrible, but I wrote the copy with one thing in mind – to create desire for the ebooks to my visitors & to sell products, & it converted really well making me quite a good chunk of money.

However, the problem with that site was that it didn’t rank & adwords eventually got so expensive that it was nearly eating all of my profits, so I had to learn how to optimise my website.

Roll on to now, around 4 years later & I can see where my problem is thanks to Kirsty.

When I put a site together now I don’t write it for the visitor, to encourage them to buy, I write it for the search engine to rank it as highly as possible.

What I’ve come to realise is that this is utterly futile – what’s the point of getting visitors if they don’t go on & buy something?

The net result of low conversions was to create sites with ranking & adsense in mind, again not catering for visitors (although you could argue this works well for adsense – encourage the visitors to leave and hope they leave via an adsense ad).

Somewhere along the way I’ve lost the plot and forgotten about the most important thing – the visitor.

I’m now planning a new site that I’ll be launching over the next few weeks, and this time I’m going to write it for the visitors first & search engines second, and hopefully I can create a site that will successfully sell affiliate products.

Thanks again Kirsty.

I’d also be interested to hear what Dave’s main search term is, as I couldnt find the site for the main keywords & titles, “Insurance Groups”?? If its this – wouldnt people who are searching for insurance groups be looking to find out what group their car/van/bike is in? Not a group of insurance companies. If so – suggest this could be the reason why conversions are pap.

Kirsty is bang on with the call to actions – there ain’t none.

Whats with Adsense? If thats not giving you any revenue (which my insurance have never done) – get rid, its taking up premium content space – but dont just whack in some banners!

Also “Your pages targeting things like “Motor Cycle Insurance” simply have no chance of ranking for their search terms”………….whilst thats true as the site stands, it is possible to get up there with hard graft for terms like that.

Aim for the stars, if you miss – you might just hit the moon instead!

Do you have an upper limit of search result competitors that would indicate whether you would enter a market as a “rule of thumb”?
I have just recently set up my first shop type affiliate site and am planning to attempt some ppc which i am familiar with, however not for ecommerce…any tips?