Well, Panda slapped Hubpages. No news there! My HP income dropped pretty drastically as a result. Life was not looking up…
I went through my five stages of dealing with grief and am working on the “acceptance” phase. I still want to complain and grumble, though.
What I did was buy three urls and am developing them based on whatI learned from HP. I want to share my progress as I develop the sites and start tracking sales and adsense revenue.
Here is a quick rundown of the sites:
Site 1: I am following the Amazonian Profit Plan. Well, fairly closely. I chose products that range in price from about $50 – 400, but most of them are around the $100 mark. I have written three detailed reviews of products (more coming) and inserted inline affiliate links into the body of the article. I inserted the review as a post, but I am not sure that I should have. I have already linked to the posts, so I don’t want to cancel it. I may start writing new reviews and inserting them as pages though…I will have to see if that helps or not.
The good news is that my site started off VERY well. I went from 0 hits per day to over 80! I also sold several items through the affiliate link and earned commissions during the last two weeks of April.
The bad news is that my views in the past several days have TANKED. I am NOT sure why, but will probably create new reviews as fixed pages. Maybe it is the initial jockeying for position with google and new sites?
I did a little bit of web 2.0 backlinking, but nothing serious.
Site 2: I bought this url more recently and set it up with several pages using the WP Shopping Pages plugin. I also wrote two reviews and included them as fixed pages as well. I am reserving posts for shorter snippets that can link to the original pages.
I am more excited about the long term potential of this site as the products are typically $200 – 400 which aligns more to the Amazonian Profit Plan.
Unfortunately, I have not had the initial success that I have seen with site 1. No sales yet, and almost no views into the site. Just today it started to rank for four different keywords, but all the rankings were in the 60′s and 70′s in the SERPs. The good news is that there is definitely room for improvement!
Site 3: I bought the url and installed WordPress, but that has been it. I have not added any content yet.
I will update you periodically.
