Pro Interneter

Yesterday my Amazon Affiliate Site had 17 Google Organic visitors, which resulted 29 clicks and 4 sales (13.7% conversion rate) and should bank me $8.00. I’m not really clear about why I keep having days where my clicks outnumber my visitors, maybe my linking scheme is working well enough and people are clicking the “Click Here” links multiple times.

I think it is important to note that all of my sales came for the same item, and I don’t know if it was one person buying 4 copies, or if it was 4 different people - but this particular brought 12 of my 17 Google Organic visitors. This is how things have been working so far for most my blogs - if you can get one post that drives a good amount of traffic, the other things will fall into place. Having that extra traffic gives you a warm fuzzy feeling inside while you spend time building more posts, and hopefully learning something from what made your one post good enough to bring in the visitors.

Over the last two days, I have had 40 Google Organic visitors to my Amazon Affiliate site - 20 visitors each day. On Monday I had 15 “Product Link Clicks” and yesterday I had 2 “Product Link Clicks” - not sure what causes a difference like that since I haven’t changed anything on the site. Of these 17 Product Link Clicks, I haven’t had any sales. Overall I have had 100 Product Link Clicks and 3 sales, totaling $3.21 in profits for myself.

I’m guessing that Christmas is also helping to balloon my numbers a bit, as a lot of people will be searching for gifts now. I’ve been able to target specific search terms for each page, and have found certain search terms that work better than other. Basically you’ve got to look at the competition and see where you can slip in at a weak spot.

So I have thus far maintained my 3% conversion rate. I would like to keep it above 3% and get a few more sales before Christmas.

I’ve been getting pretty good traffic to my Amazon Affiliate site… By “good traffic” I mean that today I have 17 visitors so far. I had a spike in traffic last week, then a drop, then it has been climbing steadily ever since. I think this is partially due to the advantage that you begin to gain as you build a cache of posts on your site. The more posts you have, the more pages you have that can be searched. I’ve been posting 1-2 times per day, and focusing on specific long-tail search terms.

Thus far, for the entire life of the site, I have had 3 sales via Amazon. Not all of the the items have shipped yet, but the total income for me should be right around $3.19. It all equates to one sale per every 9.33 Google Organic visitors - which I think is pretty good. If I get 1 or 2 more visits today, that should get me 2 sales today - hopefully banking $2+ …

It’s all the beginning stages though so I don’t want to get my hopes up or set any unfair standards. Just keep posting, doing good SEO, and the hits will start coming.

I’ve been reading some things on different SEO blog about how you should optimize your blog homepage. Here’s a few things I’ve picked up along the way:

• Limit Homepage to show 5 posts
• Use links on your homepage sparingly - only link to the most vital posts
• On your homepage, Use excerpts from your posts. This will prevent duplicate data
• On your archives, Use excerpts from your posts…

I guess that’s really all I’ve got at the moment. Basically, you want to use your homepage as your landing page, and to hand out linkjuice to whichever posts you deem as the most important.

On Blog Project A:

• I created a “Hot Posts” list in my sidebar - to pass linkjuice to the important posts.
• I display full text for my latest 2 posts, and excerpts for the rest
• Limit display to 5 posts per page
• Got rid of “Most Popular” posts, because it wasn’t linking to post that I really wanted juice for.

Basically, you should have links on your homepage to whichever posts you deem most worthy. If something is important, you should plug it on your homepage or in your latest post - otherwise, let it reside in the archives. If you have 100 internal links on your homepage, you’re splitting your linkjuice by 100. It’s better to limit the links on your homepage, thus giving each one a bigger slice of the linkjuice pie.

Here’s some events coming up in our fair city.

New Year 2008
New Year 2008 : NV Penthouse Lounge
New Year 2008 : Champagne Supernova
New Year 2008 : Cruise

Sports Related Events
Chicago Hash House Anthrax Run
Holiday Sports Festival 2007
Paralympics Table Tennis Chicago

Holiday Activities
Navy Pier Winter Wonderfest
Chicago Christkindlmarket
Chicago Star Wars Exhibit

Big News
Chicago Smoking Ban
Downtown Chicago Casino
Chicago Cool Roof Grants