IISFS Experiment Part 2: Getting My Site Up

So today was the day to get my site up and do a few other tasks…

I should add that I did one thing that I don’t necessarily advise doing – I jumped the gun a little bit…

After my last post, I was so excited about the niche I’d found that I went out and ordered 30 articles right away

I picked 30 of the best keywords under the “Pencils” main keyword (old example, remember?).

These were words that were either specific product names, had the best ratios of searches per day to competition (using quotes), or both.

If you want to know the numbers approximately, refer to the “Part 1” post. They were all pretty close to the numbers I mentioned there.

To give you the finances, I paid $195 for the 30 articles. It’s about $6.50 each – a little more than I normally pay, but I chose my best writer because I wanted them delivered fast with no hassles, and they were also on specific keyword phrases (product names) so required a bit more research.

So at this point I had a niche and some content and I was ready to rock… Let’s continue…

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The first thing I had to do was find a good affiliate program to promote the products I found to be being searched for.

It was frustrating because being in Australia, every approval takes longer, especially those from networks like CJ, Shareasale, Linkshare etc…

So I applied for a few affiliate programs but haven’t heard anything from them yet.

The first thing I wanted to do was get some simple pages up, and do the thing that most of us DON’T do and that is…

TEST THE AFFILIATE PROGRAM.

I was hoping to get auto approved but no such luck. What I wanted to do was make a small review page, just like the one I would eventually try and get ranking for my search terms, and start an Adwords campaign.

The aim would be to test how many visitors I had to drive to this thing to make a sale – if it was under 200 I’d be ready to proceed, but over 200, I’d be ready to move on to another product.

The good thing about this site is that with a generic domain like pencilspencils.com, I can review many products so I don’t have to give up on the site if that one product doesn’t convert.

Anyway so since I don’t have affiliate links I can’t do this yet, but I was pissed that I couldn’t make any more progress.

So I decided (again not necessarily recommended) to surge forth anyway…

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So I setup my WordPress blog.

I actually used our current (still being heavily worked on but nearly ready for release) Firepow software to make the site setup faster and put all my plugins in at once, but I didn’t take advantage of any of the other features, just to keep it as close as possible to me being a total newbie

Here are what I think to be the most important parts of setting up the site:

1. Obviously the blog was located in my root domain, pencilspencils.com

2. I installed a nice clean theme, white background, right sidebar (wasn’t too concerned about that), pretty simple.

3. I changed the permalink structure immediately to /%category%/%postname% – this makes it so that all my post urls look like www.pencilspencils.com/2b/2b-pencil – best for search engine optimization.

4. Firepow installed a tonne of plugins for me, but the only ones I made use of (keeping with the minimalist theme) were:

a) All In One SEO Pack

b) Google Sitemap Generator

c) Crawl Rate Tracker (just for my interest)

d) PXS Mail Form

e) Actually that’s all I used for now – I’ll take advantage of more plugins later but these were all I cared about to start with.

5. I generated a sitemap with the sitemaps plugin – this builds a search engine friendly sitemap and also pings Google to let em know my site is alive, important first thing to do for your site – I want them to send me traffic some day don’t forget

6. I created a contact us page. Not for any reason really other than it makes my site more respectable when the spiders do come crawling.

7. I created a welcome post – just so there was SOME content on my site. It was short, was just saying something generic like “Hey this site is great, it will contain reviews of all kinds of pencils to help you write better essays” lol whatever. The purpose of this was to make an initial post so I could ping and get some spider crawl happening straight away, and also so my site didn’t look totally dumb.

8. Oh and finally, I slotted a single bar of Adsense into my sidebar – just for interests sake. I’ll take it down once I start driving the Adwords trafffic to the pages, but just in case a random human visitor comes stumbling through, I want to make sure he MIGHT make me some money.

That should about do for this post. The next thing I’ll do is get some content up there and start this ad campaign – hopefully my darn affiliate accounts are approved soon.

What do you guys think so far? Can I clarify anything I’ve done here? I think it’s all fairly primitive