Aquarium Fish Site Review

[fastfish720]

Thanks for the honest reviews everyone!

I've also launched another product site:
aquariumproteinskimmer.com

The goals of this site is to replace some of my older sites with some better optimization tactics and to have a new template that can be quickly duplicated for my different products and to see.

[ubonline]

Hi, nice site! Only 2 suggestions:

1-move the categories higher on the left. As a consumer, I would probably rather see the content before the archives.
2-add some type of related image in the header.

Good luck!

[Kutaone]

You have great content and from I have seen from the rankings...no matter how good you optimize as long as you have great content you will tend to show up near the top. (I'm a noob to I've been wrong before.) Is the most beautiful site I have ever seen? No but I doubt people are looking for a beautiful sight when they search for your keywords and i bet they are looling for the info you provide more than the look of your website.

I like it and if you made that much in your first few months you are kicking the crap out of me.

I really appreciate how you broke it down too as it helps noobs like myself so thank you.

The only suggestion I might have is if you could add a forum so people can chat...show their set up etc...

I do have one question...what did the 1500 for a marketing company go to? (I know it went to a marketing company but what did they do?)

Thanks in advance for your experience...

Kutaone

[fastfish720]

I will clarify. I use a marketing company in India to post Craiglist Ads promoting my website. I do not use affiliate links in my Craiglist ads as that is against the TOS. All I want is a flood of people coming to my website.

[fastfish720]

August 2009 Update:

I found out I had some serious cash leakage in my websites and added a different affiliate cloaking system with cookies. (http://www.amazingcloaker.com/) I've also been developing 50 templated website with saltwater related content. I just need to do the SEO portion and link them together. These websites are a spin off my my 50 articles. Some examples are sea-anemone.com, bryopsis.com, whatisliverock.com Expanding off of this, is this template could be applied to any niche article.

I have also been out done in the blog category of saltwater fish tanks, so I'm actually RSSing in some of their content and sending them lots of visitors. But most importantly my content is updated daily and I'm cooking all of the people that visit my site that might produce sales later. The master blog website is saltwater-fish-tank.com. This on average is producing $500 month before installing the cloaking system.

I have also developed a couple of other product websites like aquariumproteinskimmer.com and saltwateraquariumlighting.com to generate sales. These websites are already receiving traffic and producing sales. I really like the template I made as it's really fast to reproduce. These sites get traffic from links, SE and adwords - bottom fishing. These websites could be templated for almost any product.

What's Next?:
Lately I've been extremely busy with different stock market investments, so I am considering promoting a broker/trader to my followers on a different network. But oddly enough my application was declined a couple times.

I also am exploring the idea of joining every popular affiliate program I can find. And then simply creating a cookie for it and pasting it into my coding. That way if someone finds my fish website they will also get cookied for stores like wal-mart, target, bestbuy, att, verizon, etc where the plain average consumer might shop.

[fastfish720]

I took everyone advice and overhauled my blog this weekend: Saltwater Fish Tank Help and Advice | Saltwater Fish Tank Set Up

1. I found a new template

2. Added some new affiliate products/sponsors

3. Got permission to stream in another blog's RSS feed so my viewers ultimately get more content and the other website gets more traffic. It's win/win because I get the cookie.

4. Added side banners for more promotion

5. Cut down my recents posts to display only 5, rather than 10.

What I still need to do:

1. Fix an RSS script so it doesn't double post a page signature (not a big deal)

2. Get the RSS script to add keyword tags automatically

3. Create 250x250 banners for several unique products

4. Create a unique Saltwater Fish Tank banner

Goal:

The site runs itself and I'll rely on paid marketing and SE for visitors and the other blog for constant content. This will be a hands off website that should generate a residual income off into infinity.

I should achieve $600 revenue stream from the website this month and as the cookies continue to build I expect to generate about $1000 monthly for a run cost of about $120 per month and profit of $880 per month. This doesn't include my other product based websites.

[Linda Buquet]

Originally Posted by fastfish720

I also am exploring the idea of joining every popular affiliate program I can find. And then simply creating a cookie for it and pasting it into my coding. That way if someone finds my fish website they will also get cookied for stores like wal-mart, target, bestbuy, att, verizon, etc where the plain average consumer might shop.

This is called cookie stuffing and steals commission from other affiliates and is against the terms of service of most programs and can get you dropped without pay.

You can only drop a cookie when someone actually clicks a link.

[fastfish720]

Good to know, won't waste my time doing that then.

[fastfish720]

**Had my highest Affiliate Sales Ever in August.

**September is the start of the Saltwater Aquarium Busy Season, Sales are on pace to break August's Record by 35% and we are still in a recovering economy.

What's Different?

1. SWFTank website is almost completely automated, just needs a few tweaks and some banners. Won't required much effort from here on out.

2. 50 New Websites launched and I let them sit out there with just content and no keywords or SEO for the last month. I just finished SEOing and SESubmissioning the websites this week. I'm excited to see what kind of traffic these sites get. I am already getting organic visitors and people are already linking to the sites with no linking effort on my part.

50 Websites Breakeven

My average commission is about $10 per sale. Each Website will cost about $8 to renew every year. So $400 in domain renewals per year. So I need to make about $33 per month from the 50 websites to breakout even (minus the cost of time). So with a sale per hundred visitors to a website. I would need to average 333 visitors per month, or 6.66 Visitors to Each Website per month. I think this breakeven point is not even an issue.

[psp]

Commissions were $580 first month, $660 second month, $250 closing this month.

For a new site, you've got a tremendous value. Rock on...!

What is the source of income? Is it purely affiliate commissions?