I had an e-mail from the lovely Nicola recently following up a previous plea for help with a note to let me know how she was going and to ask me to take a look at her new site and give her some thoughts.
Hi Kirsty
Well since I first emailed you I have got my first AM site up and running. www.babychamtrainers.co.uk it has been up since 21st August
and I have made my first sale with a massive commision of 88pence, but still was very excited to see a sale and I’ve got to start
somewhere (won’t be giving up the day job just yet though).I’m spending around £1.50 – £2.50 a day on ppc which seems to keep me at the top of google most of the time.
Any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated.
Look forward to hearing from you.
Nicola
Hi Nicola,
That’s a really good niche site to hone your skills on for a first effort. I think too many people try to do a massive website about lots of products and that ultimately slows down the learning process.
And congratulations on that first sale – it’s a bit of a buzz eh?!
I think you need to make your home page look a bit more like a merchant product page, I think the “click to see products” text will increase the number of people who land on the site and then leave immediately.
Here’s an example of a product landing page I’ve recently completed: -
http://www.personalisedgiftsuk.com/personalised-football-books/celtic-football-club-book/
(site is not quite finished yet, but you get the idea!)
I use pages like that a lot of the time and they have an excellent click through rate. I’m not suggesting that you have to come up with something like that to make your site work – but a little bit of HTML popped into the WordPress framework can go a very long way! If you can work at getting good “calls to action” on your page that will encourage people to click through to the merchant that will also help. A nice product picture, linked through to merchant with a bit of link text beside or underneath that says Browse More Babycham Trainers >> will also work.
Alternatively, Easy Content Units look great and can create a nice professional looking product area.
http://www.easycontentunits.com/
I’d also start doing some posts about some of the product lines you’re covering, describe what they are and why you think people would want to buy them. I tend to do this in my blog post titles and it works really well for getting in free traffic.
For example: – Multicoloured Canvas Trainers by Babycham Footwear
Or
Black Trainers with Pink Laces by Babycham – Hot 80s Style
Or
Babycham Basic Strap Trainers – Cool Velcro Fastenings!
What content like that does is draw in traffic both from people who already know they want to buy Babycham Trainers but also from people who know they want shoes with Velcro fastenings.
If you can, do some link research or ask around in forums and see if you can get some backlinks to help the site bring in some organic traffic.
I’d also get your side menu populated, as it’s currently looking a bit bare. The more navigation / information options you give your visitors the better chance you have of converting to a sale.
Finally, change your home page title from Babychamtrainers.com to Buy
Babycham Trainers UK : Designer Trainers – or similar. Your main
product title as all one word will weaken the SEO strength of the page.
One thing you have done that could cause you issues later is buying a domain with a trademark in it. I’ve known a few affiliates put a bit of work into such domains only to have them whipped off them by the brand. Some brands seem very worried about this whilst others don’t pay any attention.
I hope this helps you in your affiliate efforts!
September 7th, 2009 at 2:14 pm
First things first: the TITLE tag is spelt babySham, it doesn’t match the domain or the copy. If it’s intentional … it’s certainly confusing.
PS all the SEO advice I have heard is meta keywords are a waste of time other than to tell the competition what keywords you are targetting.
September 7th, 2009 at 5:03 pm
I would like to emphasize something here. Like Kristy said it is very important to channel your design to a more merchant kind of page. In the end the purpose of the page is to make the sale. Also try to make separate pages for every category/brand/product you are promoting. This will increase your CTR and conversion rate and also help you with the seo.
I saw that you have there some Coupon codes – highlight those as much as you can (people are always looking for discounts). You can use them in a time sensitive call to action – something like “Buy now using this code “***” and get a 5% discount” (i’m sure you can think of a better one.)
Put links to the products on the images also. And try to optimize them as much as possible.
September 7th, 2009 at 9:00 pm
Hey Kirsty. Is there a problem with the homepage of your website? It doesn’t seem to to want to display the latest posts…. I am getting some much older posts. … OR… am I simply being an idiot and your have a ‘most popular posts’ plugin to show the posts on your homepage?
September 8th, 2009 at 1:22 pm
Scrub that! Clearly I am being an idiot. I mis-read the date as “Sept ’07″ not “7th September”.
September 8th, 2009 at 11:39 pm
Hi Kirsty,
Wonder if you could run your eye over my 1st ever affiliate site.
In the first month we managed quite a few sales (about 5
) but now we have quadrupled the clicks but the sales don’t justify the upturn in clicks.
Any advice you can give would be treated with high regard.
All the best,
Paul
September 9th, 2009 at 9:02 am
Hey christy,I know how much you love spiders, check this one out http://imgur.com/Y7bap.jpg
September 11th, 2009 at 1:10 am
More great advice Kirsty, and I like your new product page
To Nicola – I would definately recommend Easy Content Units too. They have really helped save me time with adding products and pictures to my affiliate sites. I notice you’re now using them nicely too.
All I would suggest in addition to Kirsty’s comments is that darkening the font on the homepage that you’ve used for titles and tabs would fit with the ECU’s a little better and make the text and titles stand out more. There’s also an option to remove the borders on the ECU and I would consider this so that they fit more seamlessly into the site. Only my opinion though – and not quite so important as the SEO changes Kirsty has pointed out. Well done on the good work with your PPC – hope that was the first sale of many.
September 11th, 2009 at 2:58 am
LOL, it happens to the best of us
September 11th, 2009 at 3:02 am
Hey Paul, that’s a pretty good looking blog site. Nice calls to action. I suppose the question that needs to be asked about the clicks is how relevant were they to the products on the pages they landed on? That is probably an important factor to consider. Also, have a think about how you are targeting your post SEO and keywords.
Well done on 5 sales in the first month though, that is good going for a new site so give yourself a pat on the back and just keep up the pressure with getting new content out there.
Good luck!
September 11th, 2009 at 3:06 am
That’s a cracker!
September 11th, 2009 at 9:47 am
Hi Kirsty,
Thanks for the advice, I haven’t analysed those landing pages, as of yet, but will defo do it over the w/e.
I don’t run ppc, every click comes from organic listings or social media (mostly twitter), perhaps I’ll start a ppc budget and see how we go from there, be silly not to.
Once again thanks,
Paul (shopNbag)
September 11th, 2009 at 10:46 am
Hi all,
I have had another sale which is great and keeps me motivated, and hopefully I’m going to start working on my new site http://www.cool-gifts.co.uk very soon.
Thank you for your further advice it is all useful. I have been working a lot on my site with the advice Kirsty has given me (still working my way down that long list though)
Thanks again
Nic
September 16th, 2009 at 6:53 pm
Hi Nicola, great info there from Kirsty in the initial post and if I can just add something else. I logged onto the site today after spotting this post in a reader and I don’t know whether it was my monitor or not but I actually found the colours above the fold (above the content units) where you have your paragraph of text a little glary (bright, fuzzy, not easy to read). I know thats not essentially the primary purpose of your site but just thought it may be worth mentioning because some people have very short attention spans and will click off sites with the slightest hint of fuzzy pages
Otherwise, you’ve followed some of the suggestions and I think you’ll do pretty well in time, it’s a great little niche youve got there.
September 21st, 2009 at 3:11 pm
Hi Kirsty
Great blog as always. I have a quick question re your site that you used as an example. Do you set the pages up ie the celtic page you use as an example as page or a post?
The reason I ask is that I would like create a page/post like the following http://www.personalisedgiftsuk.com/personalised-football-books/ which lists all the pages/posts for a particular category. But beiing a non technical newbie I have no idea how its done! How do you do this!!?
September 22nd, 2009 at 6:09 am
Ooh, well you’d have to ask Duncan about that! He’s using a bit of PHP fun to assign an image from within the post to be displayed at category level. He’s still trying to work out how he can display them in a nice grid format but hasn’t quite cracked that one yet!
January 30th, 2010 at 8:00 am
Hi Kirsty. I was looking at you example landing page on http://www.personalisedgiftsuk.com/ Obviosly that site is a wordpress site, I was just wondering what the benefit of using wordpress in that examples are? It seem most of the pages are static, and the newsfeed doesnt show up on the site anywhere as far as i can tell.
Just curious, Ive never used wordpress like that before.
January 30th, 2010 at 8:01 pm
Hi, the main benefit is that we’ve discovered that by using static pages we can populate the site with our content about 5 or 6 times more quickly than when we use posts. Bit of a downside is that the search engines don’t seem to yum up the content quite as fast, but that may be down to niche rather than anything else. Must investiate that actually!