Who wants to help a newby?

[thejammywitch]

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Hello A4U! I've just joined.

I'm very new to affiliate marketing, having had my career aspirations transformed by George Marshall's incredible book, Get Out While You Can.

So, I've bought a domain and got my first ever affiliate site up and running. Lots of clicks, 6th place on Google. Then 'sandbox' happened and Google can't seem to decide where it wants me; I keep fluctuating from 6th to bottom of the first page.

Although I've had about 150 unique visitors since launchings and over 300 clicks on product links, no one has bought anything. Whyyyyyy?

Is it that I've potentially picked a bad idea to start off with? My site is concerned with selling all things flower accessories. I chose this because Google Adwords told me that 210 people google exactly this phrase every month, and yet there were no exact domain matches.

I would seriously appreciate anybody having a gander at my first affiliate effort at floweraccessories/co/uk, and maybe telling me what I can do.

My current plans involve putting in more text links to merchants other than Amazon, perhaps creating parent/child pages (dividing 'hair' into 'clips', 'bands' and 'slides' for example) and regular updating of the blog.

Thanks in advance.

[boxfish]

Nice first site.

If you look through the first page results for 'flower accessories' it seems to be a mixture of floral accessories and flower accessories. Accessories with floral patterns vs accessories for flower arranging.

Half of your traffic could be looking for something you don't sell, whereas the half who are after what you are advertising probably want something more structured such as navigate by category, hair accessories, ipad covers, kindle covers etc. It is a very broad phrase in that 'accessories' covers everything so conversions will be low unless you can direct them to the exact product they are looking for so different categories sounds like a good idea.

[jezza101]

Yeah, as the above says, conversion (how many of your visitors make a purchase) will depend on what the visitor is looking for and whether they find it on your site.

The people who convert are the ones who are sitting in front of their PC with their wallet open looking to buy something! So whilst it is nice to see visitors on your site traffic quality is perhaps more important than quantity.

How do you find quality traffic? Well that's the question!! One way to look could be to check the Google Adwords keyword discovery tool. Point it at your site or enter some example words yourself and see what comes back. In general other webmasters are going to pay more for high converting keywords so this will start to give you an idea about what traffic others are chasing!

You might even decided to purchase some of this is traffic yourself, but perhaps that's something to have a go at as your experience grows.

I would highly recommend sticking to one site and taking the time to learn as it grows. It can be very tempting to keep trying other ideas and ending up with a dozen sites that are costing you money to host without bringing anything in (this is from experience!!). I see no reason why you won't see a return from your niche if you give it a good go and hopefully it will lead onto bigger projects with more scope - but one step at a time !!

[thejammywitch]

Thank you guys! If you look again, you'll see that I've added three subcategories under 'flower hair', which now has a nice drop down menu.

I have more questions!

Can anyone here explain the All In One SEO Pack for Wordpress to me please? That is, I'm not sure what each of the meta tags mean, and what is the significance of the '%'? It says things like '%blog_title%', and I don't know what that means or how to edit it..

I want to control what Google displays about my site but I'm not sure how to do it using this plugin.