What would you do in my position?

C

cycloptik

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Apr 28, 2008
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I've been lurking on WF for some time now, but I decided to finally take the plunge and ask you guys for some help with a bit of an existential crisis I am having.

Here is my story...

The Credit Card Blog

So I have this site. It's not really performing that well, and at times I am tempted to just sell it, even though I know I'd get a pitiful amount for it considering how much work I've put into it over the last 18 months.

In theory, it's a personal finance blog with an emphasis on credit cards. I started it about a year and a half ago. Gets about 9.5k uniques a month, has over 10k backlinks in Yahoo Site Explorer. Used to be PR 4, but I've been neglecting it a bit lately, and it was recently downgraded to PR 3.

I never paid for any links, managed to get a couple of articles on the front page of Reddit and one on Digg, and I did 20-30 guest posts on high profile personal finance blogs. Unfortunately, I knew fuck all about SEO, and I didn't put in any juicy anchor text. Yes, I am a moron.

Still, apart from the PR hit, it sounds pretty sweet, right? Everyone knows that credit cards are big money in the AM world. But the problem is, only about 10% of the content is actually credit card specific, and many of the articles that bring in SE traffic aren't really related to credit cards at all.

At its height, the site was making about $700/month, which is pretty mediocre in and of itself, but now it's lucky to clear half that, due to the loss in traffic (used to get over 15k monthly uniques at its height) and the collapse of the credit card affiliate market.

And there's another catch - the blog isn't located in the root directory, its at www.domainname.com/blog. The reason for this is that I had planned to release a web app in the root directory - a sort of simple (but powerful) financial management system. The blog was just supposed to be a way to establish the domain, and get a platform to launch things from. Well, nearly 18 months later and the 'simple' web app is still not done.

I've got Google Analytics running on the domain, and the stats are pretty girm - it's got a bounce rate on 83.17% and the average time spent on the site is 1 minute and 22 seconds. That's pretty shitty, isnt it?

To cut to the chase, I guess my question is, what would you do if you were in my situation? I might be delusional, but I can't help but feel that there's a lot of potential with this site that I am just not unlocking, and I would really feel like I'd betrayed myself in some way if I sold it or let it die.
 


Any stream of income that's bringing in some monthly cash is worth keeping.... especially if you leave it alone for awhile and it continues making cash. I'd say you are not delusional http://a.comabout it. $5 is right... I think you should reinvest some of that money... hire a writer, or hire someone to code that app for you. If you can get the site hits back up, or hell, even at 9k, you can get some pretty good money off of an app that you could sell them. If all of those people are targeted towards using your app, even better. You definitely have a little gem there.
 
Thanks for the feedback so far.

Let's say you had a $1000 'renovation' budget for the site - how would you spend it?

I'm not going to bother with PPC, because all the worthwhile terms are way too expensive, but I was thinking at least half of it should be spent on good content that can be used on the site and for guest posts.

I think I can probably do an overhaul of the design myself, though I'm still a bit of an SEO n00b. Is it worth investing something in a professional SEO?
 
Still, apart from the PR hit, it sounds pretty sweet, right? Everyone knows that credit cards are big money in the AM world. But the problem is, only about 10% of the content is actually credit card specific, and many of the articles that bring in SE traffic aren't really related to credit cards at all.
Click to expand...

That's your problem right there. If you want credit card money, write about credit cards, quality content, and people will come.
But it's fundamentally flawed trying to promote CCs to non-CC traffic.
 
Build an email list to market to.


I have a credit card site somewhere in my arsenal and it's a topic people can get very passionate about if you write about the hot button topics of the moment, such as cc companies jacking interest rates for no reason, raising minimum payments without warning, lack of customer support, abuse of bailout money etc, etc, etc. Write about these topics, do some homegrown and outsourced SEO and your traffic will pick up. Get approved at CJ for CreditCards.com to send disenchanted visitors to for a credit card terms comparison site. Just a few ideas.
 
Yeah, I suppose I'm a bit retarded for not focusing more on actual credit card related topics. I've got a new writer working with instructions not to deviate much from the topic, so that should improve. I also changed the theme - hopefully that will improve the bounce rate a bit.

As for the SEO side of things, I guess i should just keep doing guest posts on high profile blogs, and try to link back with some juicy anchor text.

Again, what are people's thoughts on me brining in a professional SEO? And if I should bring one on, how do I know they know their shit? Can I get a decent one for a few hundred bucks?

Unarmed Gunman: I do sort of have an email list - people can subscribe to my blog via RSS or email. Got a few hundred 'readers', so I suppose that's a good start.
 
Well, basically when I started my blog the credit crunch was still in its early days, and there were about 100-150 different cards to promote.. the top ones had epc of up to and over $5, and the overall approval rates were way up there.

Now there are about 20 cards, most of which are totally crap. EPC for most products is well under $1, approval rates are in the single digits for many programs, and pretty much all the major issuers have entirely 'suspended' their affiliate programs until further notice.

In a nutshell, it's fucked.
 
I think you have done a lot of things right and are on the right path, you just need to refine and keep going.

I wouldn't pay for SEO services or anything like that unless I was paying because I didn't have the time to do it. If you have the time I would dial in your approach and try to take things to the next level.

It sounds like you have the right attitude. Keep working hard and learning and something good will come of it.
 
Thanks for the advice - I do have the time to at least attempt the SEO side of things.

It seems to me that once you've taken care of the on-site side of things, the rest of it is pretty much just getting linkbacks with good anchor text on quality sites. Is this accurate, or is there more to it?
 
cycloptik said:
uh, yeah....

Got any advice?
Click to expand...
Well maybe gear some of it towards credit consolidation. See if you can find some offers for that.

Building a list would be a real good thing to do.

Having it on the /blog is not that bad of a deal.

Look at each page/post and find relevant offers to that post. Make it more about anything credit related rather than just credit cards in general.

Home Loans, Credit Repair, Credit Reports and so on.

If you have $1,000 to invest. Go over to buy, sell and trade. Buy some backlinks. Have someone build a mini-net <as they call it> to point to your site on specific topics.


Take around $200-300 and place it up for a small PPC campaign. Push this to certain pages and do it more for traffic at this point rather than a great ROI.



If you haven't already submit some articles from your site to ezine and other places.

The best thing to do all this is to start with an amount of time you want to spend on the site daily. Say 2 hours and focus on certain parts.

Keep a log either in the newbie section here or for yourself.

I say do it here as you will get some decent insight on your next moves and support/help.


Another thing that might be a good idea to look into is building a few other sites in verticals similar to this using your current sites link juice and age.

If you do that. Make sure each site has a different IP from your current one.

You can use dreamhost. Just set up multiple accounts. Using a paypal plugin or buy unique ips on each domain in your dreamhost account.
 
Jason, really good advice - thanks.

I've decided to focus on 5 main categories:

- credit card debt
- credit cards (reviews, general usage tips)
- credit reports/ratings (including credit repair)
- debit cards
- personal finance (stuff like budgeting, responsible use of credit etc.)

As far as how to spend the money goes - I think I'm going to spend the vast majority of it on quality content. I can save that money on PPC and paid links by doing regular guest posts on other established blogs.

I've gone ahead and set up a Newbie journal here, please check it out.
 
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