Poker69's Affiliate Blog

Creating a Site From Scratch - Part 5 - Roadblocks

Continuation from Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4 of my blog series, go read em if you haven't yet.

Part 5 - In this post I am discussing a big "roadblock" for my March Madness site, and posting a few results of the site to date.

Roadblock:

As a lot of you know from the forum or maybe my Skype name I came across a very shitty problem with my March Madness website. Just less then a week before selection Sunday when the real traffic would be coming it looks like I have been "sandboxed" by google.

This is my first time I think that I've been sandboxed so I don't know much about it, but it is basically when a new site in google which has been ranking fine suddenly drops down in the SERPS.

My site went from bouncing between 1st-5th on the first page down to like 50th-70th position.

I don't think anyone really knows the real reasons for why the sandbox occurs, but one of the suspected causes is building links to your site too quickly. I find it a bit strange because naturally solid sites should be getting lots of links when noticed in the blogging world, etc.

Because I started this site only about a month before the site I possibly rushed into things, and maybe google likes a slower approach to developing a website, who knows.

Anyways it seems as if I have hit a bit of a roadblock here with google, but that isn't going to stop me fully. Sometimes when you are creating a website you will hit roadblocks, and you just need to work around them. I am looking to continue to get traffic from other search engines, my other websites, and social networking sites. I will also be looking into pay per click advertising, as it is something I've always wanted to give a try.

This year I'm sure I won't get the traffic, or make the money I wanted to with the site.... but oh well shit happens... and it will be a good learning experience finding other ways to get traffic. Plus I have developed a pretty solid site that will be around next year, and I should be able to have it out of the sandbox by then

Some Stats:

Here is a screenshot of my Aweber stats so far for the March Madness site.

bracket-content - in-content form above the fold
hp-content - homepage content above the fold
lightbox - pop up light box, added the day before it got sandboxed
rightside - the form that is in the right bar of the template

I am pretty new to capturing emails, but I had about the numbers I thought I would (maybe even a bit better) with each type of form.

The in content forms are grabbing around 5% of visitors emails
The pop up is capturing 2% of visitors emails (smaller sample size)
The right bar form is capturing 0.3% of visitors emails

It was pretty common sense to me that the in-content forms would receive the most sign ups, as it is right in the visitors face when they get to the site.

I also made sure the call to action focused on the visitors need... If you have a poker website focused on bonuses you would probably have better capture %'s if your call to action is something like "Receive information about an exclusive $1000 poker bonus we couldn't post on the internet" rather than "Receive 6 Sit n Go secrets that will help you win money".

For future sites I am going to look to have the template created where there is more attention drawn to the newsletter form, as I think I could bump that 0.3% up to at least 1% if it stood out more.

Here is a screenshot of my Analytics so far

As you can see I hit a nice high with 225 visits the day before the site dropped in the rankings. For those who don't know much about March Madness, they make the selections of which teams are in the tournament this Sunday, which is when most people would start searching for predictions for filling out their brackets or betting on the games. I was expecting a huge growth in traffic starting Sunday.

I think 2.61 pages for visits is a pretty solid number. If they didn't trust the site, or like the sounds of the site from the homepage content they would most likely leave. This shows me that the looks of the site and the content are pretty solid.

Conclusion - Shitty things can happen, but there are always ways around problems, and there are ways to bounce back. I am very disappointed, but this is just motivation for me. You're a new affiliate having troubles somewhere? Stick with it, try new things, eventually you will find a way around it.

Part 6 - Calls To Action. Coming Next week.