Hi STM'ers. I'm pretty new to this so if there are glaringly obvious places where you can see I'm making rookie mistakes, that's the reason. However, if you have a critique please be direct, I would rather learn than worry about a bruised ego.
I joined STM when I had already started this campaign, so this will seem like we are jumping in halfway. A few months ago I bought a course from Source Wave which had a section on affiliate marketing using seo. I thought the course was good but there were gaps in the training, say I would follow the instructions but come across something with multiple options and I had to google to try and find out what to do next.
I'm posting this in the hope that you guys might be able to tell me what I'm doing wrong and steer me in the right direction.
So, on to the particulars.
I found a offer based in Spain with a payout of $55. The niche is weight loss. I found the product name keyword which brought in 22,000 searches per month in Spain. I ran a moz difficulty analysis on it and the result was 27%. This seemed like a likely starting point for a beginner, so I launched a site.
I purchased a domain name with the keyword in it, with a .co suffix. Then I made some 300 word articles for three keywords in spanish, and posted them on seperate pages on the site.
I sent out a syndwire blast with short posts in spanish linking to my site.
Now on to the link building... this is the area where I had some trouble. Not knowing any better I bought some links from a PR4+ private blog network vendor, right off the bat as the first backlinks to my site. Oops.
I waited, hoping to see my site move up in the rankings. Of course it didn't, so I decided to try something else. In the course they taught that it was ok to use Sape in foreign niches, as the rules are more relaxed. I bought 10 PR2 links off a sape vendor, for a monthly subscription. Finally my page appeared in the top 5 search results.
It progressed up until page 4, and then made a slow descent to page 5 again. As a noob I had no idea why this happened, though I did watch a video on 'the sandbox' so I put it down to google not liking such a fast rise in the rankings. I reasoned that the ranking would take some time, so I thought I should just wait and see what happened.
A month later there was a sudden rise in the rankings again, around the time my subscription fee came out. This lasted for two days, after which there was an abrupt drop again, to the same page it started at days earlier.
This got me scratching my head. I did another syndwire blast, added another article to my site and bought ten PR2 links from linksmanagement.com.
I left the site for a month and went on holiday. Again, there was a surge in the rankings, all the way up to page 3, and then there was a slow decline to page 5.
At present in majestic, the site has a TF of 7 and a citation flow of 16. I don't want to spend more money on links before I have an idea of how to keep the gains I make. My best guess as a newbie would be to do more syndwire blasts and create more articles for the site to try to increase the trust flow, then try to get the right backlinks in place to improve.
Can anyone help out here? Thanks in advance. I'll post all actions I take and any progress made from now on.
The rise and drop in rankings does happen when it comes to SEO. You are doing great. However, here are some important points that you need to execute for the page that you wish to rank.
1. Increase the word length of your landing page. Yes, it is possible to rank for a page that has lower word count. But it is easier to rank for pages with higher word count. I would say to have a minimum of 2000 words in your landing page.
2. Get links from Web 2 blogs and dilute your keywords. Register for blogger, wordpres, tumblr etc and write an article or two with a link back to your site.
3. Create your own PBN. In that way you will be more efficient and easy to rank. You will require at least 9 sites within your PBN to see results.
It is very difficult to make ROI in SEO and that is the reason I have joined STM to learn mobile. But once, you have achieved that first three spots, you will be all smiles.