Lessons learned
Last Update: April 10, 2012

So my first Wordpress website is performing pretty well. I initially planned to monetize the website using adsense alone but it evolved into affiliate products, referral links and an amazon book listing.

 

I'm getting a lot more traffic now than when I started. I was excited about getting 3 visits per day and now i am up to 80+ per day, my record is 91. 

I'm pretty pleased with those results. Big lessons learned though,

1 - Do my keyword research before creating a webpage (buying a domain name)

2 - Put as much focus on placing content on my site as I do on writing articles for article directories

3 - Make sure I use the proper plugins

4 - Write good quality content

5 - CPA seems to have a better conversion rate than trying to get people to pull out their wallets

I have a couple websites but I am going to apply everything I learned so far to this second website. The keyword is somewhat popular and in a couple weeks I'm already #22 on google!

If I can get to page 1 i'm definitely going for that number 1 spot!

Just gotta pick a good theme and I am good to go!

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That Helpful Dude Premium
Very intriguing post Kamali! What website was this? Is this the running website... or am I thinking of someone else :P Congrats on your success so far.

One quick question. How much content did you have on your website before you starting working on getting visitors to your website?
kamali Premium
I don't have a running website so you are thinking of someone else.

I actually started off doing a lot of stuff manually and I put a lot of content on my site to start with.

I guess it was a parallel process and an ongoing process. I am still adding content and still working on getting traffic.
Praise Premium
Are you collecting email/contact info. from your visitors to the website and doing and follow-up campaign?
kamali Premium
I actually do have a sign up form on the site and I have been getting a few subscribers. Like I said my first goal was just to do adsense, then i moved to promoting products and websites. I added the subscription form because it was fairly simple to set up.

Now that I have a few subscribers, i wanna do that right so I need to make time to research e-mail campaigns before I send anything out to my list.

Don't want to get overwhelmed by trying too many different things at once.

Also, I'm prioritizing my second site right now because the keywords will get me more traffic and the adsense ads will be more relevant and more profitable per my research.

Once I master that then I will put more focus on the other strategies.
mhamilt Premium
Congratulations for your site! I agree so much much with point 2... I find a lot of my 'big' sites often can get ranked with their own blog posts, and if you're able to make your site an 'authority' within a specific niche you will get a ton of traffic!! Mark.
kamali Premium
Thanks Mark!

I definitely agree with you there. At one point after doing keyword analysis on my site, I was thinking of scrapping the site and starting over.

Thanks to the WA members on here they convinced me to stick with it and focus on just making it an authority (go to) site for information on stuff.

I figure i will write about the things I know, recommend the best products and create win win situations for everyone. Seems to be working so far!
fisheagle Premium
Congrats, keep up the good work, glad you are being successful!
kamali Premium
Thanks Fisheagle! Hit a new record yesterday, 96 visits to the site in one day. I'm starting to get Adsense commissions based on page views now. supposedly you can get paid based on ad impressions (how many times your ad was displayed) for your site.

It is not a lot but it is good to know I can make money even if no one clicks on my ads
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