What Path Would You Take?

[Jasper68]

Hey all:

I've been loving this forum, so to see a different type of discussion going on, everyone trying to help each other out, telling it as it is etc :-)

I haven't posted a lot, other than an intro etc, but I feel a need to get some feedback. And in a way, I feel kinda foolish asking because I've been around the block a bit with online business, MFA micro-niche sites back in 2009, working building email lists with free mixed media bundles and affiliate between 2014- end of 2016.

But, self-doubt has always been one of my biggest foes, never too far away, and the mo-fo is back with a vengeance.

I finally came to realise, after doing a shitty job working in a gym for around $10 an hour (converted roughly from UK pounds, and I'm still working there) that I really need to get building a site again and hopefully get back to my own personal glory days of making my living online.

Sure, there is loneliness (oft overcome with coffee shop adventures) but fuck!!!!!!, working for someone else is FAR worse :-( I truly despise it!

So I started a site in a lifestyle niche I guess you'd call it, but with many verticals in there that I can build one at a time. And I haven't done too bad. The first article went up on 8 August and I now have 75 posts, around 130k words in total.

The original idea was to go the Adsense and Amazon affiliate route, affiliate reviews with no ads, and the informational products monetized with ads.

I picked up Chris Lee's Adsense course to get some ideas on how to build the thing out. Probably didn't really need it, although it's not bad at all.

So, I have probably 8-10 decent length review posts, 2500-5000 words, and then some loser product related posts with some affiliate links scattered in there, and then quite a few informational posts linking to each other, and to the money posts.

I've tried to keep the linking relatively contained within a loose 'silo', just to try to create some relevancy for Mr. G.

So, I've recently started getting a little traffic, only around 40-50 visits a day, with 15-25 of them from Google, some social traffic, a bit from Reddit and some direct stuff I have no idea on :-)

Made my first Amazon sale a couple of days back, gonna net around $12...whoop, whoop!!!!!

BUT....I'm kinda broke, we're getting by but I feel so terrible that we're struggling. I finally realized, after years of trying to convince myself that I wanted to do something for the 'greater good', that what I actually want is to give my wife and kids a good life.

I know I have to give value to my visitors of course, but I was a personal trainer and nutrition coach for a few years (still do a bit) and I couldn't get my head around the fact that I wanted to make money, to be able to help my kids and to take my wife on city breaks, to just let her relax and not worry about money anymore.

We were doing ok until the end of last year, but shit fell apart with the guys I was working with, and that $4000 pm income vanished overnight. Should have been planning for that...but I didn't.

Anyhoo, here I am, with 2 websites, one new with 80 posts and little traffic, my other (in the health niche) sitting still but getting around 400-500 visits a day. That site is 5 years old.

I've never sought links for it, and only have around 59 referring domains, but I rank well for a few terms around a certain type of diet. All informational content but I did chuck a few Amazon links in there and have had a few sales.

I also tried Ezoic for some ads, and make $2-3 per day with that amount of traffic...not going to retire on that anytime soon.

I also have a digital product that I created a couple of years back, it's quite good but I've never really been able to sell it well via the site, a few here and there but that's it.

So, if I am dead set on Amazon affiliate income for now (plan to do that for now and then think about other monetization methods in a year or two) what would YOU do?

Keep on with the new site and forget the older one?

Try to start some product review for the old site and just let the new one sit and age for a few months, and see how the traffic picks up?

Do both in some ratio?

I am just thinking that the older site with a little authority behind it might find it much easier to rank for some review based articles and get some dosh rolling in more quickly than the new one.

I actually wrote a couple of books on Kindle a couple of years back, and have now repurposed them as pillar content on the health site, 2 articles around 15,000 words each, quite a scroll :-)

I know this is down to me, I know that I succeeded before (albeit when it was easier to succeed), but I tend to suffer from overwhelm and then get frustrated and the self-doubt creeps in.

Any thoughts or observations, or a damn good kick in the ass appreciated :-)

Happy to answer any questions or queries about my sites etc if you need more info.

Thanks for reading :-)

PS. Thanks so much for all the incredible amount of work that has gone into the course and the time you all give to helping each other, it's a truly wonderful thing to see people looking out for each other like this.

 

[Ryuzaki]

The first article went up on 8 August and I now have 75 posts, around 130k words in total.

Nice, that's a strong hustle.

I finally realized, after years of trying to convince myself that I wanted to do something for the 'greater good', that what I actually want is to give my wife and kids a good life.

I think that is doing something for the greater good. You have to start with your tiny sphere of influence, but that then ripples out because your wife and kids are then being good people to others. The best and first thing we can do is improve ourselves, then family, then inner circle, then community, then state, then nation, etc. It's not even possible to jump out to the next concentric circle in the sphere because we need to have influence in each previous sphere to have a chance at manifesting any power beyond them. It's the old "cart before the horse" thing.

my other (in the health niche) sitting still but getting around 400-500 visits a day. That site is 5 years old. I've never sought links for it

That's a huge opportunity missed that you can still take advantage of. Your site ages, but so does your links. That site might pop off fairly decently if you can start scoring links around, to the homepage with URL and Brand anchors, to the inner pages, and if it's all interlinked well the entire traffic profile should rise.

And yeah, it'll have a better chance of ranking than your new site. But that doesn't mean you should abandon the new one either. And no, you shouldn't just let it sit and see what happens. SEO needs to be a continual activity. You should be doing so much that you can't tell what brought the results and what didn't. Just keep moving forward on it.

In the position you're in, you've probably got a better shot with the 5 year old site if it comes down to SEO and money 'now'. If it comes down to pure marketing then it doesn't matter, but you'll get the compounding, passive benefits of SEO more so on the older site.

The only downside to having two sites going is that you're splitting your attention and time in half. But if you start finding link opportunities, you can just go ahead and knock each one out for both sites. Like going ahead and creating a Twitter profile for both sites (and using them).

and get some dosh rolling in more quickly

This seems to be the main issue. Your old income stream was killed and you need a newer one pronto. SEO is the last concern you need to have if you need money now. Do the proper on-page SEO and then go where the traffic is and promote. That can be your link building and hopefully you'll get on other people's radars and start getting links and shares that way. But you need to be thinking about marketing. SEO can take an entire year before anything pops off. Google's starting to fight spam the lazy way by throttling the ability for new sites to rank well for longer and longer.

Alternatively, I'd consider putting some of your skills to use while you keep working your day job and keep planting SEO seeds. So you'll have constant income from the gym, and you'll get big pops of cash from freelancing, and then eventually you'll be seeing your website efforts slowly ramping up. So if you can find local businesses that need a new website design, some content, etc., you can grind out some cash that way. If you can put that bug in people's ears the word can spread around through word of mouth so you don't have to spend a ton of cash advertising.

But yeah, you might try to find a longer-tail money phrase to slap up on the old health site and start tracking the term and see how it reacts after you drop a decent post on there for it. It might react fast since you're aged, and then you can get some direct links to the page and be off to the races. It's hard to say that that is what'll happen but it's worth a shot. It's a pre-built aged asset. I'd think about getting some easy win links to it too. A good round of link building might double or triple your traffic to it.

What I'd honestly be doing though, and I think this is the best advice I can give you, is to be constantly applying for higher paying jobs until you land one. Because if you're spending 8 hours a day, it doesn't matter where you're doing it, it just matters how much cash you get out of it. You'll have the same amount of time for other hustles after work as you do now. But when times are hard, a guaranteed cash stream is better than some other options and might leave you with some investment cash to help free you from the tyranny of working for someone else faster.

Good luck with all this. I'm happy to talk about your websites and approaches as much as you want or need.

 

[Jasper68]

Cheers @Ryuzaki , really kind of you to spend the time on this.

Luckily, at my 'ripe old age' I don't have a big mortgage, and my kids are almost grown up, one still at home, so although things are tightish, we don't have huge outgoings either. I guess I really would be set if I could add another $1k pm on top of the work I'm already doing. I am working around 24 hours a week at the gym, there is no more than that, but it's local, I can actually listen to podcasts and do a little writing while I am there, so it's a cushy number really.

I'm almost loathed to go and get another job where I might actually have to do something :-)

Yeah, I've definitely thought about doing some freelance local stuff for people. I've done some Facebook ads for other people, can edit audio and video quite well, and plenty of outreach, list building, and autoresponder stuff. Compared to many small business owners, I know a shit load, just struggling to put it into practice for myself :-(

I concur with your thoughts on this. I'm keen to get some product reviews up on that aged site, see if I can get some early wins there, even if I split my writing for a couple of months 50/50 between the two.

I'm kinda sick of the fitness industry, which is why I've stopped online coaching etc, but I'm not sick of the idea of making some cash, and writing for that niche is pretty easy for me, which is always nice.

Thanks again buddy, really blown away by the level of help and commitment you guys offer, it's certainly not common, but it IS a breath of fresh air among the cut-throat, sleazy used car salesman IM industry :-)

Thanks again!!!!

 

[lion1978]

Just out of curriosity, you mentioned that you had a digital product that you created some time ago, but that it never really took of, does that product still have value for the intented user or to put it in another way is it up to date? and if it is, then is it in the same niche as any of your sites?

The reason I am asking is that if it is up to date, I'd probably focus more on that rather than an amazon affiliate site at first, and get some awesome sales copy done for it, then get some creatives and sign up for an affiliate marketplace like jvzoo, clickbank etc. as a vendor and have other people help you build that business while you'd also get the leads, which in turn will help you build a backend of that business promoting related products and earn an affiliate commission and hell, if your product is even the slightliest related to any of your sites then use the list you've build to promote that site, and start to create an audience that way, after all if they bought from you they probably trust you a little right.

 

[Jasper68]

Just out of curriosity, you mentioned that you had a digital product that you created some time ago, but that it never really took of, does that product still have value for the intented user or to put it in another way is it up to date? and if it is, then is it in the same niche as any of your sites?

The reason I am asking is that if it is up to date, I'd probably focus more on that rather than an amazon affiliate site at first, and get some awesome sales copy done for it, then get some creatives and sign up for an affiliate marketplace like jvzoo, clickbank etc. as a vendor and have other people help you build that business while you'd also get the leads, which in turn will help you build a backend of that business promoting related products and earn an affiliate commission and hell, if your product is even the slightliest related to any of your sites then use the list you've build to promote that site, and start to create an audience that way, after all if they bought from you they probably trust you a little right.

Yeah, I created it for people in my niche, very targeted at the type of user I get the most visits from, to a certain few articles that make up the bulk of my traffic.

I had a funnel, never really been good at converting people via an email sequence although I have tried many things. Also tried to get optins and then send them to a landing page with the product, not much uptake, even with coupons.

to be honest, I created video and everything, made it into a course. I have the product up on Clitbank :-) but without some sales and gravity metrics it's hard to get people to promote.

I am selling for $27 in digital format. Fuck, if I could even sell 2 a day to the 400+ visitors I get I'd be laughing and able to give up the shit job :-)

You are right, I need to focus on it. It's good value for the money I am positive. Nutrition and training program etc etc, and can get the videos included on a pdf, or just move the whole thing over to Coursera or something and have it as a course there.

With 400+ organic visits, even a .5% conversion would get me out of the shit.

I just need to test I guess

Thanks for the feedback

 

[lion1978]

I am selling for $27 in digital format. Fuck, if I could even sell 2 a day to the 400+ visitors I get I'd be laughing and able to give up the shit job :-)

You are right, I need to focus on it. It's good value for the money I am positive. Nutrition and training program etc etc, and can get the videos included on a pdf, or just move the whole thing over to Coursera or something and have it as a course there.

With 400+ organic visits, even a .5% conversion would get me out of the shit.

Try to pm me the links for your site and you product landing page and I'll have a look at it.

Nutrition and training program etc etc,

If that is what you are selling then 27$ is too damn cheap bro, you could easily up the price or turn it in to a monthly subscription plan kinda thing