Read the full backstory here.
Ok, so in a nutshell - I have this credit card blog. Gets about 9-10k uniques per month, but is only making - at best - $500 / month. And really, it's been ages since it did that - this month is looking especially bad with revenues of just over $100, and that's all in adsense. So yeah, pretty grim. It's hardly suprising - I've been neglecting the fuck out of it for months now. It was getting 15k uniques and was a PR 4 at its height (I was recently demoted to PR3) - still nothing spectacular, I know, but considerably better than it is now.
Anyway, here is my plan to get things moving again. To be honest, I'm a bit high at the moment, so forgive me if I suddenly jump from talking to you to talking to myself.
1. Figure out which valuable keywords you already rank for and which ones you should target. I mentioned this in my initial post in the other thread, but a really large proportion of the traffic that I get is not actually credit card related. I published articles on all sorts of topics that were often only loosely related to finance, and paid no attention to keywords. I guess what I'm saying is, I don't want to just grow the quantity of my taffic, I want to grow the quality of it as well.
2. Post a quality article on the site (of at least 500 words) every day. I'll make an effort to link to other related posts to increase pageviews and decrease bounce rate.
3. Publish at least 15 guest posts on other high quality, established finance blogs and include as much juicy anchor text as you can without being spammy.
4. Build your blogroll. This one kinda follows on from 3, because you can try to hit up those bloggers for a blogroll exchange after they publish your guest post.
5. Finish webapp. Ok, if you didn't read the backstory, you're probably a bit lost now. Basically, a while back I started working on a web app - a simple financial management system. I launched the blog about 18 months ago because I figured it would be a good way to establish the domain for a couple of months while I put the 'finishing touches' on the web app.
Well, the app's development kind of had a few false starts, and stalled a bunch of times, but it's now at the point where it's about 90% done. Sounds good, but it's been like that for about 6 months now. I feel like I've had a some kind of mental block stopping me from getting it done. I put so much work and effort into it that I'm worried I wont be able to take it if it doesn't succeed.
But fuck that shit. I'm going to work like a dog and get it done over the next couple of weeks. If it fails, it fails, but at least I gave it a shot. (actually, this should probably be priority #1)
6. Blog commenting / Forum posting. I figure that assuming the comments/posts are actually quality, they should bring in some decent backlinks and maybe even a bit of traffic.
7. Paid links. Don't really know what I'm doing here, so I'll have to be careful. Part of me wonders if I shouldn't just save my money and just try to push the 'guest post' side of things.
A question for the paid links gurus out there - is it better to pay for a blogroll link or just get a 'paid post'?
Well that's about all I can think of right now. Please chime in with any thoughts/suggestions.
Oh, one thing - I've recently discovered Yahoo Site Explorer (it's amost as awesome as the Google Keywords tool), and I checked the backlinks on my site.
http://www.mydomainname.com/blog has 7600 inlinks
http://mydomainname.com/blog has 11000 inlinks
Is this bad? Do I want them spread out like this, or do I want them concentrated on a single domain? If so, how do I do that? Any help would be much appreciated.
Ok, so in a nutshell - I have this credit card blog. Gets about 9-10k uniques per month, but is only making - at best - $500 / month. And really, it's been ages since it did that - this month is looking especially bad with revenues of just over $100, and that's all in adsense. So yeah, pretty grim. It's hardly suprising - I've been neglecting the fuck out of it for months now. It was getting 15k uniques and was a PR 4 at its height (I was recently demoted to PR3) - still nothing spectacular, I know, but considerably better than it is now.
Anyway, here is my plan to get things moving again. To be honest, I'm a bit high at the moment, so forgive me if I suddenly jump from talking to you to talking to myself.
1. Figure out which valuable keywords you already rank for and which ones you should target. I mentioned this in my initial post in the other thread, but a really large proportion of the traffic that I get is not actually credit card related. I published articles on all sorts of topics that were often only loosely related to finance, and paid no attention to keywords. I guess what I'm saying is, I don't want to just grow the quantity of my taffic, I want to grow the quality of it as well.
2. Post a quality article on the site (of at least 500 words) every day. I'll make an effort to link to other related posts to increase pageviews and decrease bounce rate.
3. Publish at least 15 guest posts on other high quality, established finance blogs and include as much juicy anchor text as you can without being spammy.
4. Build your blogroll. This one kinda follows on from 3, because you can try to hit up those bloggers for a blogroll exchange after they publish your guest post.
5. Finish webapp. Ok, if you didn't read the backstory, you're probably a bit lost now. Basically, a while back I started working on a web app - a simple financial management system. I launched the blog about 18 months ago because I figured it would be a good way to establish the domain for a couple of months while I put the 'finishing touches' on the web app.
Well, the app's development kind of had a few false starts, and stalled a bunch of times, but it's now at the point where it's about 90% done. Sounds good, but it's been like that for about 6 months now. I feel like I've had a some kind of mental block stopping me from getting it done. I put so much work and effort into it that I'm worried I wont be able to take it if it doesn't succeed.
But fuck that shit. I'm going to work like a dog and get it done over the next couple of weeks. If it fails, it fails, but at least I gave it a shot. (actually, this should probably be priority #1)
6. Blog commenting / Forum posting. I figure that assuming the comments/posts are actually quality, they should bring in some decent backlinks and maybe even a bit of traffic.
7. Paid links. Don't really know what I'm doing here, so I'll have to be careful. Part of me wonders if I shouldn't just save my money and just try to push the 'guest post' side of things.
A question for the paid links gurus out there - is it better to pay for a blogroll link or just get a 'paid post'?
Well that's about all I can think of right now. Please chime in with any thoughts/suggestions.
Oh, one thing - I've recently discovered Yahoo Site Explorer (it's amost as awesome as the Google Keywords tool), and I checked the backlinks on my site.
http://www.mydomainname.com/blog has 7600 inlinks
http://mydomainname.com/blog has 11000 inlinks
Is this bad? Do I want them spread out like this, or do I want them concentrated on a single domain? If so, how do I do that? Any help would be much appreciated.
No wonder my Google rankings were falling! Anyway, I'm getting my next days worth of GA in 4 hours, so I'll keep everyone posted.