some advice please... newbie on the ropes

[cclayton]

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Hi Guys,

I am a newbie to affiliate marketing and am testing the waters and would appreciate your advice on what I can do to improve a site I have developed. The site has been created using the laithwaites program and in the last month has suffered a real problem with traffic. I dont want to rely on PPC and even that is proving ineffective, but without that I get such little numbers of visitors - how can I get this up?

The site is thewineresource.co.uk - White Wine, Red Wine, Champagne, Sparking Wine, theres things I am still working on but I am still suprised by the lack of traffic. All constructive criticism/feedback welcome. I hope its okay to post the above here.

Cheers, Chris

[sidabm]

Her are some rules i use:-

• Why would i come to the site?
• What would i do when i got there?
• Why would i come back?
• Why would i tell anyone else about it?

[adrian]

Hi Chris,

Getting the following error on your site.

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING, expecting ')' in /home/fhlinux162/t/thewineresource.co.uk/user/htdocs/includes/boxes/information.php on line 26

Also you might want to change your title text, sparking to sparkling, unless there is a new type of wine out there that I need to try tonight

thewineresource.co.uk - White Wine, Red Wine, Champagne, Sparking Wine - Online Resource

Adrian

[fizzbird]

As above really. What are you offering that I don't get from going direct to the merchant?

Some things I'd do are:
Reviews - what's in - what's out? Bestsellers.
Some sort of educational info - the basics of wine. What's the difference between Chilean Chardoney and Australian, etc, etc.

One thing that gets me is how the supermarkets play with the pricing of wine. One week it's 3.99 - next week it's 6.99.
Which supermarket is selling xxx type wine the cheapest each week? Offers of the week and so on?

Plenty of scope if you are prepared to work at it.

[cclayton]

Thanks both!

Adrian, it should work now (I have been doing some updating) and I have amended the spelling error.

Sidabm, good questions and I will definately considor these in relation to the site.

Anymore for anymore?!

[cclayton]

As above really. What are you offering that I don't get from going direct to the merchant?

Some things I'd do are:
Reviews - what's in - what's out? Bestsellers.
Some sort of educational info - the basics of wine. What's the difference between Chilean Chardoney and Australian, etc, etc.

One thing that gets me is how the supermarkets play with the pricing of wine. One week it's 3.99 - next week it's 6.99.
Which supermarket is selling xxx type wine the cheapest each week? Offers of the week and so on?

Plenty of scope if you are prepared to work at it.

Totally right... thanks! I guess I just needed to hear it all from people... deep down I think I knew it already.

[accelerator]

Maybe create a wine education doc as a pdf or similar and give it away free for them signing up to your mailing list. Mailing list software at:

Mass Email Software

Rgds

Accelerator

[jonsp]

Hi Guys,

I am a newbie to affiliate marketing and am testing the waters and would appreciate your advice on what I can do to improve a site I have developed. The site has been created using the laithwaites program and in the last month has suffered a real problem with traffic. I dont want to rely on PPC and even that is proving ineffective, but without that I get such little numbers of visitors - how can I get this up?

The site is thewineresource.co.uk - White Wine, Red Wine, Champagne, Sparking Wine, theres things I am still working on but I am still suprised by the lack of traffic. All constructive criticism/feedback welcome. I hope its okay to post the above here.

Cheers, Chris

You mention a problem with traffic in the last month. Does that mean you were getting good traffic but it's tailed off? If so you'd probably want to analyse where the traffic came from, down to the keyword and search engine, and what's changed since.

For a site like this I'd suggest imagining you are the customer. Presumably you'r going to be spending an amount of money on wine for yourself over the festive season - what would motivate you to spend money? Would you buy from your site? If you plan to spend £100 on wine what would a site need to do to get your £100, what could a site do to make you spend more than £100?

The other question is why did you start this site? Are you a wine buff yourself? If so why not share your knowledge, put up some articles making suggestions about which wine to buy, what wine goes with what food etc. I think most people would be very happy if they could have their friends over to dinner and impress them with their choice of wine, so why not help them do that with some expert advice.

If you're not a wine buff and you just chose the niche as a likely prospect to make money you might be better sending traffic direct to merchant with PPC. Especially at this time of year it shouldn't be too difficult to make money doing this.

[Spartacus]

Why not include a forum. One thing about wine drinkers, they do love to wine on ....

[cclayton]

I am actually working on a forum at present... phew!

I just jumped onto adwords to test this out and its down till 10pm

Thanks guys!!!

[accelerator]

The thing about a forum is you have to ask whether wine drinkers are the type of people that spend a lot of time on internet forums. I'm not sure they are. Forums work better when the subject matter has geek appeal.

Rgds

Accelerator

[drivetowin]

Not sure if you are working on the site at the moment but it's giving an error message:


Warning: mysql_pconnect() [function.mysql-pconnect]: Unknown MySQL server host 'mysql11.streamline.net' (2) in /home/fhlinux162/t/thewineresource.co.uk/user/htdocs/includes/functions/database.php on line 17
Unable to connect to database server!

[MortimerJazz]

A quick thing from me as well. I've just noticed a spelling error in the scrolling text at the top of your page:

Champagne needs, we are here to prodive you with all the wine information

[jamiecarruthers]

From a quick whois lookup, it seems you registered the domain less than a month ago.

From the title tags of your homepage, it looks like you are targeting some incredibly competitive keywords - white wine, red wine, sparkling wine...

If we take a look in Google for the term white wine, the top result is from the domain The Winedoctor: regularly updated wine writing by Chris Kissack (first registered in 2000). In Yahoo! Site Explorer, this is showing over 9000 links pointing at this domain, your domain is showing 30.

My point is, with such a new domain, against such fierce competition, you should be targeting 'long tail' keyterms, and the best way to do this is to create great, unique content.

Do some keyword research using the vast array of keyword tools available to discover some common queries in your market - punching white wine in to Free Keyword Suggestion Tool from Wordtracker gives us a nice list. White wine sangria recipe has a few searches, so why not write an article about it?

A few nice links to your domain (which unfortunately you are lacking!) should get these articles ranking fairly quickly.

Despite what some people might say here, good links can still be obtained by a *few* directories - go for these ones:
DMOZ
Yahoo! Directory
BoTW

and choose a handful of niche related directories. When you have enough quality editorial content you can then go on the prowl for links from other related sites.

I noticed you have no heading tags on the site. What I would recommend is that you change the site name from thewineresource.co.uk to The Wine Resource - especially in your title tags.

Then, add an h3 in to the header with The Wine Resource in it and use image replacement to show your logo.

Now, everytime someone goes to a deep page on your site, such as Westend Estate Sauvignon Blanc 2007 - 239516263 - include an h1 tag with the name of the wine (or article when/if you write them!) within it.

It will help show the search engines what each page is about.

Or, you could use PPC

Hope that helps!

[cclayton]

From a quick whois lookup, it seems you registered the domain less than a month ago.

From the title tags of your homepage, it looks like you are targeting some incredibly competitive keywords - white wine, red wine, sparkling wine...

If we take a look in Google for the term white wine, the top result is from the domain The Winedoctor: regularly updated wine writing by Chris Kissack (first registered in 2000). In Yahoo! Site Explorer, this is showing over 9000 links pointing at this domain, your domain is showing 30.

My point is, with such a new domain, against such fierce competition, you should be targeting 'long tail' keyterms, and the best way to do this is to create great, unique content.

Do some keyword research using the vast array of keyword tools available to discover some common queries in your market - punching white wine in to Free Keyword Suggestion Tool from Wordtracker gives us a nice list. White wine sangria recipe has a few searches, so why not write an article about it?

A few nice links to your domain (which unfortunately you are lacking!) should get these articles ranking fairly quickly.

Despite what some people might say here, good links can still be obtained by a *few* directories - go for these ones:
DMOZ
Yahoo! Directory
BoTW

and choose a handful of niche related directories. When you have enough quality editorial content you can then go on the prowl for links from other related sites.

I noticed you have no heading tags on the site. What I would recommend is that you change the site name from thewineresource.co.uk to The Wine Resource - especially in your title tags.

Then, add an h3 in to the header with The Wine Resource in it and use image replacement to show your logo.

Now, everytime someone goes to a deep page on your site, such as Westend Estate Sauvignon Blanc 2007 - 239516263 - include an h1 tag with the name of the wine (or article when/if you write them!) within it.

It will help show the search engines what each page is about.

Or, you could use PPC

Hope that helps!

Apologies for not getting back sooner... I just wanted to say thank you for your comments... I have been working on a new solution with the help of the Affilistore product and so the sight can be seen here Order your white wine delivery, red wine delivery, sparkling wine delivery and champagne delivery online today - delivery to your door. From The Wine Resource. All your comments and time are much appreciated and the one thing I need reminding of is patience! I am working on that!!