It’s been awhile now since I took over the marketing aspect of Cenasource. When I started, the site was midway through the month of April, and after finishing March with a massive 52 unique visitors, in April that number grew to a mind-blowing 121 unique visits. At this point, I was planning my retirement to the tropics… however a little voice inside urged me forward, and lo and behold, in May the site grew to 852 unique visitors.
So far this month we’re on track to have 2000 unique visitors. I have a personal goal of 2200, but even that number is peanuts as my competition routinely gets 60,000+ uniques.
How have I kicked the site into growth mode? Well, it’s a combination of elbow grease and learning a valuable lesson or two..
In the past, when developing a site we blanketed our niche with link request emails, quickly gathering 40-50 affiliates in 2-3 weeks. On occasion. this earned us a brief page 1 rank followed by a crash and burn off the top 1000.
Having learned the hard way that this is not the way to a stable earnings future, I’ve keyed the requests down, often sending just 2-3 per day. Along the way, I discovered a few directories that actually send a little traffic.
The most important lesson however was quality over quantity. In my travels, I’ve discovered that it’s much more efficient to send one personalized request per day than 10 template emails. Why? Well, there’s a number of big sites out there in the celebrity niche bringing in thousands upon thousands of unique visitors per day, and even if I don’t land a top or elite affiliate spot, even getting into a site on an affiliate page brings 5-8+ visits day.
I also paid for a directory submission package in April that has started bearing fruit by a big jump in my MSN ranking (from 350’s to 51). Updating the site as often as possible has also resulted in my site being visited several times a day by the Google bot; the big G ranks the site extremely well for a number of long tail terms, and Yahoo is now starting to take an interest. I still have a long way, to go but you have to start somewhere.
Moral of the story:
Your ability to get 1-way links is largely dependent on the niche you pick - this blog, for example, can easily get links from visitors, likely because of the more open-minded and exploration-esque nature of the online business niche. When you explore niches in which people can afford to be closed minded, chances are you’ll have to resort to begging for partner sites, or at least until you’re big enough to have other people come to you.
Most of all, be creative and don’t be afraid to try something different. My next plan is to use payperpost to acquire some deep links for the site, since all my links currently point to the homepage - which isn’t very healthy or natural looking.
Anyway, best of luck out there.
