Help Me Get Ranked!

[ghochhalter]

I have an affiliate marketing website where I promote motorcycle saddlebags and gear to put in them - http://www.themotorcyclesaddlebag.com.  I am a total newbie to internet marketing and don't have a good grasp on SEO but I know what it means to get your pages displayed!

When I first put up the site, I was getting ranked on my search words between #10 and #20 and I thought it might improve as I got more traffic.  However, a couple weeks ago, I completely dropped out of the ranking - I'm essentially invisible and I don't know why.

As I understand SEO, you need to "naturally" use your keywords several times in each of your pages.  So, for instance, I'm going after the motorcycle saddlebag search term and I've written several posts talking about motorcycle saddlebags - what they are, a number of great saddlebags, how to select saddlebags, and I still get nothing.  There's obviously something I'm missing.

I created a sitemap and asked google to crawl it, which they have.  If I look at the google webmaster tools, I see I'm indexed (which I guess means at least google knows about it) but I don't picked up even with my primary search term.  Where have I gone wrong?

Thanks,

Greg

[admin]

Hi Greg,

I had a look at your site, fantastic products!

I tried a tool to see if I could find the site position in Google and I could not find it. Here is what I see as your major issues:

It lacks content. To buy the products you are redirected to a separate vendor. So it appears what you are trying to do is make money off the Google ads and a commission from the sales of a vendor. Noting wrong with that but you are going about this the wrong way.

Sell the bags on your own site, when they are purchased have the vendor drop ship them to your customer but make sure they are willing to do this and will work with you.

Domain is new and set to expire in less than a year. If you plan to keep the site, pay some money and register the domain for 5 years.

The age of the site. It is new. It is going to take some time. There is only 1 inbound link to your site so far. You will have 2 when your business listing you placed here gets indexed.

You are using wordpress for a "website". I do not recommend this. I prefer to have a website with a link to my blog and from the blog back to the website and also to have a proper shopping cart system for product sales.

You really do not need a privacy policy and TOS as major links, those can be placed in the footer, no one reads it anyway but you are limited to what you can do by the theme you have chosen unless you want to pay someone to modify a theme for you.

Summary:

You need a website that is promoted by a blog. Keep the blog a blog. Focus on promoting the blog first. When you have a following of the blog then promote the saddlebags in the blog. If you are looking to make money serving Google ads, you will be lucky to make $10 a month. The ads I serve on this site barely pays for the hosting. I have them more as a resource for the viewers to find information on marketing that is outside my scope of services. There is no money in it until you have 20,000 visitors a month. Then your laughing to the bank.

You need to get with a local riding club and get everyone involved in the blog, make it interesting, people will link to it then and you will be on your way. Right now, don't expect much with what you have. It has a lot of shortcomings in Google's eyes and that is why it is not in the search results. It honestly appears all you are really trying to do is make money off the Google ads because someone else is actually selling the saddlebags so you will not get any Google love doing this or any from your visitors. Until you have unique and compelling content that someone will link to, you will never find yourself in the search results and you will not make any money off the ads.

You need to give people a reason to visit your site.

There are some articles in my blog that can help you with some ideas.

http://www.mymarketingcompany.com/wordpress/

[ghochhalter]

Hi Roy,

Thanks for taking the time to reply. 

Your reply is not what I wanted to hear, but sounds like what I needed to hear.

Perhaps I have gone down the rosy path, but I was trying to be an affiliate marketeer.  My understanding of this discipline is limited (as you have seen), but I thought the idea was to provide a website and recommend products.  If a visitor was interested in the product, they could purchase it from the supplier via my website and I would get paid either a percentage of the sale or a set amount per sale.

I've seen it work with some of the products I have purchased from my bike - I read about it on a given website, said I wanted to buy it and was redirected to another website that actually took my credit card information and sent me the product.

So, I must have missed something.  Since you seem to be giving straight answers, is affiliate marketing via, say, Commission Junction or ClickBank a viable way to make a decent amount of money?  What's decent - say $1,000 a month over expenses.  Am I living in a dream world?

Is the really only viable way the internet answer to mail order?  In other words, set up a website promoting products, say motorcycle jackets.  Provide reviews and such to help a visitor select a jacket, then sell them the jacket, collect the money then forward the shipping information to the supplier and have them "drop ship" the product?

If that's the answer, surely wordpress is woefully inadequate for the task.  I need an industrial strength website, processing secure credit card transactions as well as shipping agreements with the various suppliers.  All of that is doable, I guess, by a complete novice with no money to spend. 

My goal is to build a web based income stream that will supplement my retirement in about 10 years, so I've got time.  What I don't have is a realistic approach (maybe).

Any comments you'd care to pass on would be gratefully received, even if they sting a little.

Regards,

Greg

[admin]

Surprisingly there are a lot of companies out there that do noting but stock and drop ship products. I would say 70% of all the new products sold on ebay is done this way. Do a search for drop ship wholesale or something similar. I did some work a couple years ago for someone doing what you want to do. They sold on Amazon, Ebay, and had their own website.

The whole idea behind what you are doing is really a smoke and mirrors business, nothing wrong with it as a lot of people do it and it works fine. The internet has brought a lot of opportunity for reselling that did not previously exist.

To give you the straight answer, you need to develop a "real" website. Use things to draw people to that website. blogs, motorcycle forum, etc. Before you can sell anything you need exposure so like I said before, you need to give people a reason to come to your site and keep coming back to it. Then you will get the sales from it. Until then, start off with a store on ebay, contact the manufactures of the products you want to sell and see what they are willing to do for you, try to see what those drop ship companies I mentioned have as far as products you are interested in selling and start there while you build your own e-commerce site. You can keep an e-mail record of your customers from ebay for future promotion of your website through product newsletters, etc.

It will take a good year if you do everything right for your e-commerce site to START to pay off but then it will be fairly easy, few updates here and there as product lines change, but not like it will be in the beginning setting the thing up. It is a lot of work. To hire someone to set you up a website that will produce results and has all the promotion tools, you will be looking at about 15 - 20K. Believe me, when doing this, you get what you pay for. I am sure you have seen sites that you would not buy from because they just didn't "feel" right? Well, that is what you have now. Honestly, it takes money to make money, that 15K is not a lot of money if you can make 30K a year from it and that is a lot cheaper than renting a store on main street and stocking inventory and doing the fit out, so in those terms, its a good deal.

Paypal makes getting paid and paying your vendors really easy, so the moment you make a sale you can place that order and pay the vendor for it. Done deal, you do not have to touch anything.

Ebay is an expensive way to do business in the beginning but they have the traffic you do not have. You will be lucky to clear 10% profit from your sales there. It is all about volume on ebay, but the contacts you acquire will be good for the future. You can expect a 20% profit from a well run e-commerce site.

Most of the vendors will also handle returns so make sure you discuss this with them before you start selling their inventory.

[paperkool]

I have an affiliate marketing website where I promote motorcycle saddlebags and gear to put in them - http://www.themotorcyclesaddlebag.com.  I am a total newbie to internet marketing and don't have a good grasp on SEO but I know what it means to get your pages displayed!

When I first put up the site, I was getting ranked on my search words between #10 and #20 and I thought it might improve as I got more traffic.  However, a couple weeks ago, I completely dropped out of the ranking - I'm essentially invisible and I don't know why.

As I understand SEO, you need to "naturally" use your keywords several times in each of your pages.  So, for instance, I'm going after the motorcycle saddlebag search term and I've written several posts talking about motorcycle saddlebags - what they are, a number of great saddlebags, how to select saddlebags, and I still get nothing.  There's obviously something I'm missing.

I created a sitemap and asked google to crawl it, which they have.  If I look at the google webmaster tools, I see I'm indexed (which I guess means at least google knows about it) but I don't picked up even with my primary search term.  Where have I gone wrong?

Thanks,

Greg

I don't concern myself that much What Google thinks.  The ultimate important thing is that the people come to the site.  Google is always changing their rules and it is sickning.  Show me someone who will disagree that they are sickning.

Make use of forums and Social Bookmarking.  Eventually Google will have no choice but to give you a favorable position because of popular demand!

[admin]

Paperkool! I knew I liked you!

Yes it is very sickening the circus Google makes you participate in and I too am VERY sick of it. I optimize for traffic, NOT Google. I recently posted a topic in the Google forum how tired I was of their circus and boy you should have seen the forum fly replies! The Google crowd was out in force!

But unfortunately if you want a site to rank well you have to make google happy, one way or the other. Some of the Google circus stuff does produce some traffic... I hope bing makes life easier, producers of quality content should not have to "prove" themselves by link swapping, blog posting, etc.

With all their money and "brains" you would think they would be smart enough to to figure out a better way of indexing quality content.

[Kreacher]

Howdy Greg,

Let it be known to all that I am NOT a professional in any definition of the term. What I write is just my opinion and is worth whatever value you place on it.

To start, if you are going to be a store, then you do not need to be harking Google Ads. In my opinion, this detracts from your sales and diverts potential customers to other sites to buy while paying you pennies. If you are going to do Adsense, then create a blog or some other kind of site and go for it.

I don't know what you use for a web browser, but I use Firefox. There is an add-on for Firefox named SeoQuake. I think there is a version for Internet Explorer as well. In my opinion, it is worth the time to install and use. You want to see what your site is doing as far as keywords and such and SeoQuake can provide that information.

Good luck. It takes time and there are no guarantees. Try to get more pages up. Content doesn't just mean how well worded the post or pages are. Content can also mean how many pages you have on your site.

Try to get some blogs or other places to link back to you. Try this "http://www.webconfs.com/backlink-builder.php". Plug in a keyword or phrase and look at the sites that it lists. Use good judgment and try to pick a few that can help you.

You are trying to sell "add-on" for motorcyclists. Consider that they might not search for the term (keywords) "saddlebag". They might be searching for the term Harley or other brand of motorcycle.

Two places to go find out how your keywords rank and what the competition is for them would be "http://www.google.com/trends" and "https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal".

Key places for keywords are in the title of your pages and in the content of the pages. Keep the title of your page to a 100 character limit, including spaces. Right now the title of your page reads "Motorcycle Saddlebags and Gear". Try expanding that a bit to include some popular brand names like Harley Davidson and such.

Don't be afraid to "name drop" in your page content. Mention some popular motorcycle names that you have saddlebags a for. Make proper notes that the name is copyrighted or a trademark as needed.

Most search engines state that they pay no attention to the keyword or description tag. Who knows? Doesn't hurt to optimize them as well. The keywords in the keyword tag should be found in your page content. The description should use the keywords as well. Keep the description and keywords tag to a max of about 250 characters. No more than three words in each keyword phrase in the keyword tag. Take a look here "http://sitereportcard.com/"

Have fun!

[admin]

Great reply Frank!! Thanks!

[jeffrey99]

Try to promote your site using the SEO tactics like social book marking,forum commenting etc...



search engine optimisation uk