So what about new things?

af Mikael · 4 Kommentarer · October 2, 2008

Now this is the second part of my breakdown of what happened in September to my site petinsurancepro.com. In the previous post I talked about how I changed the design and lost, gained and lost a ghostwriter.

When I wrote my post last month I had a plan of spending more time on getting links to the site and less on the actual writing part. As you might have guessed this didn’t go as planned due to the problems with the writers.

I did spend some time promoting the site through article marketing and I’ve also started using the free sites like Squidoo to gain extra traffic and incoming links. I haven’t seen any effect of this yet but I will also have to admit that I haven’t spent as much time learning how to use Squidoo as I could have.

When I get to the part where I’ll go through my stats and show you where my different target keywords are ranked you’ll see what the benefit has been from the work I’ve done.

Using free translation

I believe that it was two months ago that I mentioned something about a plug-in that I paid for that could “easily” translate and cache all of my pages and thereby increase the number of languages and pages that would be able to bring in visitors.

After a long back and forth conversation with the developers of the product I finally gave up and switched to a free translator plug-in that works like a charm. The plug-in can use different translation engines but I prefer to use the one that Google provides.

The best thing would have been that the tool automatically translated the pages one by one but that is not the case. The translation will only happen when people click the individual flags. So this is one of the daily (brain dead) tasks that I do when I have some spare time or I’m talking on the phone.

Since the tool translates into about 23 different languages it takes a while to go through every post as there is currently posted about 100 posts and I’m adding a new post every second day.

I still have to find out how these pages are going to rank in the search engines but I’ve seen (from one of my other sites) that they are actually performing rather well when taking into account that this is machine translation and no link building has been done.

Hopefully the traffic will increase from this over the next couple of months but only time will tell. Maybe Google will put the pages in the supplemental index. I hope to be able to provide you with more in depth information in about one month.

Starting to implement affiliate deals

Since I changed the design to something that could hold 125×125 ads I had to give it a try (or was it the other way around?). Think about it… if you make just a few sales per month you could easily add several hundred dollars to your monthly income. Wouldn’t that be sweet?

In order to find out whether these ads are actually performing or not you must remember to track what is happening. How many people are clicking the ads and once they have clicked are they buying?

Let’s say that you have 10,000 visitors that (supposedly) have seen the ad but none of them have clicked. This means that you should test something else. Maybe you’ll need an ad for a different product, maybe you’ll need to add some movement to it or maybe the ad is simply to small to get noticed.

Currently I am running 4 ads of 125x125pixel as well as a large and very noticeable ad. I have an idea that the ads might be taking the focus off my Adsense ads but I need some more time to test.

If the ad isn’t producing any sales there is no need for it to stay on the site. If, on the other hand, the ad is producing more that I can make from Adsense then it will of cause stay. At the time of writing the affiliate deals haven’t produced any sales.

Creating your own product

I’m in the middle of the process of having my own product created. This is a product that will need to have a lot of work put into it and I will be working with some professional copywriters to make sure that the traffic will convert.

I’m not going to go into too much detail about this product yet but I hope to be able to share some more information in one or two months.

Before the final part

Now all that is left if the final breakdown of how petinsurancepro has performed in the month of September in both financial, traffic and ranking measurements. I’m saving these information for the last part of this 3-step post so be sure to check it out (I expect to add it soon).

Take care,
Mikael

Tags: tools traffic