Site #2 Stats:

Niche: Hobbies

This was going to be my break through site! making me a passive income of  over $1k a month and eventually become a monster affiliate site. Here are the stats from Ahefs.

Site Age:

~2.5 years. Brand new domain, brandable domain.

Reason for choosing this niche:

I believe the reason for selecting this niche was the product price range, they are some where around $200- $500. I had read some blog that said go to Amazon.com and look for categories with the best seller products, then pick your products based on daily sales. Once I knew my products, I researched and picked my commercial KWs.

Initial Strategy

Since I had burned my hand on affiliate site #1 , I wanted to learn from the failures and implement new strategies. Mind you I was still doing decent KW research and niche research. At that point I thought if I follow that guru’s plans  or blue prints I would make a successful site.I had no clue about proper on-page SEO and off-page SEO, I was just putting bit and pieces of information from various blogs, youtube gurus and affiliate boot camps.

For this site, all the content was written by me and researched by me. I did 50% commercial KW and 50% info KW articles and then I figured I’d save money and make my site pretty by getting WP theme ($140 lifetime use) recommended by the gurus.

Goal: Make $100-$200 /month

Note: At this point, I had no knowledge of on-page or off-page SEO, all I knew was to get my site to 50K words in review articles and info articles, then put affiliate links and boom passive money!

Link Building:

To me link building meant scraping google to find do-follow blog comments. I hired a VA ($600),she did her thing and there was no anchor KW or anything just random links and random words hyperlinked. I assumed this worked from site #1, so I applied it here as well.Then came directories, paid directories ($100) and hyped up garbage link building methods for free.

4 months into making $$, I took some jackass’s advice on some FB group and misinterpreted the link building approach by ordering shitty PBN’s ($120) directly to the money page for exact match KW. This pretty much killed the site 🙁

Cost so far: $960 initial months.

Results:

Surprisingly the site started ranking for KW and I made my first ever $ and I was on cloud 9, until the end of the week when Amazon shut down my account!!!!! that’s right, in a panic I called the Amazon Associate and turns out I’ve used images from Amazon but was suppose to use links  provided by them and no copy paste them…that’s right …I did that ..I individually copy pasted them and hyperlinked them to my affiliate link.

Now I had to replace every picture with Amazon products links, this completely tanked my momentum and took me few weeks. After all the hard work, the site was making $25/month for 1 commercial KW (1500 clicks/month) at 6th position serps.  After two months it got up t0 $75/month. It was steadily climbing upto $100/month, until I decided to point some PBN’s direct to the money pages and they tanked.

I did such a colossal fuck on the link building, the site never really recovered financially. Although it was ranking for quite a few information KW, it just couldn’t make any money.

ROI : $475 after 6 months

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Update: March 2018

Basically two years later I’ve learned some new tricks and stuff, so I decided to reboot this site.

Challenges with the site:

• Site speed
• KW cannibalization
• Images are not optimized and no ALT
• No On-Page or Off-Page SEO
• No Social Fortress
• Bad Spammy links
• No Organic traffic

Strategy:

• Rebuild the site with clean framework : It was housed on genesis frame work but still lacking in speed, so I switched up the theme to Generate Press, adjusted the cache mechanisms and it boosted the site loading speed to under 2 seconds.
• Remove cannibalized articles competing with main KW: Bit of on-page and off-page SEO process involved.
• Image were optimized and ALT description added: I used image optimizer (helped the speed as well) and added the ALT desc for SEO purpose.
• Social pages were created with FB,Pintrest,Twitter and G+
• Spammy links disavowed.
• Link building with proper guest posts and some PBN’s: Little bit more complex than just throwing the links but rather make sure you have proper anchor KW ratio. There are good articles written up about them, google them.
• Order some new content for supporting articles

 Cost to reboot: ~$380

Results As Of 03/28/2019:

• ROI: $576.89  from 2.5 years of affiliate fees. Currently it does around $20- $50 month passive with no work done on it.
• Organic Traffic : For the targeted KW’s, the site ranks around position 8-13.
• It still jumps around for some KW, it needs structure and link diversity. The amount of content that needs to be reworked and cleared out, its not worth my time and effort.
  

  

 

Conclusion:

FAILURE!

Reasons for failure:

• SEO wise this site has issues from link diversity,KW anchor issues and some duplicate content issues, which caused most of the KW to get stranded on page 2. Since there are around 120 articles ,it is just not worth spending more time and resource on this site.
• Strictly from a monetization point of view and almost even ROI , it just sucks. I wish I could make some money but SEO wise I screwed it up so much that it’ll take 3 times the effort to disavow, rebuild, rewrite the articles.

Total Cost : $1340 – $576.89 = $763.11

Lesson’s learnt:

• Proper thorough KW Research and competitors research will help you avoid all the pain in the ass scenarios in the future.Spend as much time as possible in this phase!!
• Don’t believe the hype! some of these people making $$$$ passive got there after numerous trails and tribulations. There are few that got lucky on first try but don’t count on it, especially with SEO.
• TEST TEST TEST on you inner pages and other crappy site before throwing links on to the money sites. Google will spank your sites!!