An interesting Ask Kirsty this week from Patrick who has spent a fair bit of time recently setting up an affiliate site in a niche that is of strong interest to him.

Well i finally got my first website finished last week after accidentally stumbling upon the area of affiliate marketing a few months back and being hooked on it ever since. My first site is something small and of personal interest to me: – www.manchester-united-shirts.com

The site is simply selling the manchester united football kit in its various forms. Once it was finished i went to the add url section of google and submitted the site. After a few days it then appeared on google when i searched site:manchester-united-shirts.com. I also submitted an article on digg as i had heard that would also help with getting it indexed. My problem however is this; it doesn’t seem to appear on google when i do a search for any of the keywords, such as manchester united shirts, manchester united kit, or michael owen manchester united shirt. Its not even on page 20 or less! I haven’t tried ppc yet as i was hoping on getting some organic traffic first. I know i need to try and get some back links to my site so my question to you is this; why is the site not appearing on google for any of its keywords, and how can i get some decent backlinks?

Patrick then sent another mail saying…

I tried my hand at PPC as this was the obvious way of getting the site noticed for my chosen keywords. I achieved great success with this method as i made my first sale and had a click through rate of about 14%, with an even higher conversion rate. However, what became apparent was that although my ads and site converted well, the cost of getting traffic there in the first place, ie, the keyword cost, meant that i was only actually breaking even in terms of profit.

Thanks a lot for your time and keep up the hilarious yet informative blog posts. Kind regards, patrick.

Hey Patrick,

First off, congratulations on putting such a great looking site together.  I think it’s pretty good looking and would definately be attractive to Manchester United fans.

Why Isn’t Your Site Ranking?

Although your domain is keyword rich that is not going to be enough on its own to have your site ranking.  Hyphenated domains don’t seem to have the same strength as those without hyphens.  However, that needn’t stop you ranking for your desired search terms.  Going forward I’d suggest you do a bit of work trying to get some backlinks (which I’m assuming you already realise as you’ve also asked about that!).

You will need to put a bit of time and effort into getting your site where it needs to be.  With that in mind, I suggest that you try and add a little bit of Manchester United related content most days.  Being seen as a good information resource on the club and in particular their shirts and strips will help you no end.

I think the reason that you are not seeing much in the way of rankings is that there’s so much buzz around the club.  Do a search for “Michael Owen Manchester United Shirt” and the search results are absolutely stacked to the brim with authority sites.  I think to get traffic you will need to sit down and have a real brainstorm about some less competitive search terms that might bring in some traffic.

Avoid the big names like Owen and Rooney, perhaps try to concentrate on building some content around phrases that don’t mention names and topics all the newspapers are likely to be reporting on.  For example, if I were the owner of your site I’d write about: -

Manchester United retro shirts or Man U retro shirts

Manchester United 1977 shirt

Man U 1977 FA Cup Final shirt

If you take a gander at the search results for these terms you’ll see affiliate sites popping up here and there and not a lot in the way of your Daily Telegraph and Wikipedia type stuff.  Targeting the long tail when a site is new can bring in some much needed traffic and revenue early on.

How Can You Get Some Backlinks?

I think in this case the best thing to do would be to try and locate fan sites and perhaps other affiliate sites.  I’d start looking by making highly targeted product related searches like the ones above and looking at who was blogging about them and featuring them on their sites.  Drop them a line and ask if you can have a bit of an exchange, you could also widen this activity out to other teams.  Also, add a post to the A4U Link exchange thread and see if you can locate some people with sites relevant to yours.

Link building takes a lot of time and effort, but you’ll reap the rewards handsomely if you put some effort in.

Making PPC Work

I reckon that you need to be targeting the long tail.  Clearly your site does a good job of pre-converting if a good proportion of your visitors that actually got through to the merchant made a sale.  However, 14% of traffic getting through to merchant is a little too low.  This means your search terms are either too general or your landing page is rubbish (and I don’t believe its the latter).

On my own sites, I manage to push through around 80% of the traffic that hits my PPC landing pages to merchant.  Often more.  I do this by sending highly targeted traffic to highly targeted pages.  Of course this reply is largely guess work as I don’t know what keywords and products you are targeting.

I hope all this helps you out Patrick, and if anyone has anything to add that might help Patrick please do leave a comment as the more people we have talking about the Ask Kirsty’s the better resource this site will become.

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