Screwing Up – By the Numbers

Since sales on our older ebook products had fallen off dramatically over the past year, along with our rankings, I decided to blow up our websites and reinvent them as fully optimized money making websites.

And although normally, I suggest you write keyword rich content, I decided to go with the truth and let the search engines categorize this particular article wherever they wanted.

I looked around and decided to convert all of our websites to CMS, monetize them with advertising. And introduce new e-products.

CMS (content management system)of choice, Joomla. It’s a free product and I do not recommend that you use it without extensive testing. On the plus side, you can’t beat the variety of mature add-ons for Joomla or the support of the Joomla community. And yes, I’m saying this for free – there is no affiliate income from Joomla…so you know it’s got to be a great product.

Advertising choices, Google’s Adsense Publishers program. And because we have one site that sells vintage erotica ebooks with racy covers, Black Label Ads. Black Label hasn’t been implemented yet. I’ll have a follow-up article on them.

SU #1 – Do not convert any website without figuring out where your current traffic is coming from and whether or not you can keep it. 90% of the traffic for this website was coming from an exclusive niche product that was so successful, that we had to give it it’s own website. Once we blew up the site, we had to kiss this traffic bye-bye.

SU #2 – Do not convert any website without researching your new keywords. And again, I have to recommend a free product. www.keywordsdatabase.com. While it did not give me all the keyword payouts for some specific keywords, it was more on track for what I could honestly expect to get as a publisher for certain keywords, than most of the paid products.

All I had to do after researching my keywords on the Keywords Database was to also input them in Google search and see how many results it returned and how much paid advertising there was for that keyword. (See article “Choosing Your Keywords.)”

One of my most popular sites has a keyword that gone from hot to not.

SU #3 – Do not convert more than one website a day. So if there is a problem, you can see it before it affects every website business you own.

I’d implemented a new SEO program that was so intuitive, I never read the instructions. I asked for an option that I shouldn’t have and began to bleed 404 errors. All of them were template errors. This set me back four days, between researching the problem and choosing and customizing the new templates.

SU #4 – Never make software changes to your site right before you go on vacation. See SU#3 and imagine a vacation in New York, chained to your laptop. I literally made site changes until 10 minutes before the cab was due to pick me up for the airport. Wrote articles at the airport and on the plane, plugged in the moment I arrived at my destination and had to stop and fix things. While this is working hard, it’s not working smart.

SU #5 – Never become emotionally attached to your websites. I had a bright beginning and was very motivated to blow up eBook Living. But it was my first successful website business and I kept finding excuses not to add to it, once I’d changed it.

I gave my inner child a week to get over it and to figure out, how to change the site into a serious money making on line business.

SU #6 - If you are keeping some pages from your old website, have them redirected to your new web page name.

Gave up some serious page rank on this and am still finding indexed pages with page rank, that did not carry over to the new site.

SU #7 – I was being scrapped by a couple of over-seas websites. I put a few of the IP’s into the search bar and came up with a website that listed the IP’s and about a hundred more and claimed they were all malicious bots.

I banned the IP’s, trying to get a beat on my traffic and to try to keep my articles from being stolen. You know what? In the list was AOL’s IP range and a couple of other ranges from European search engines.

It took me nearly a month to figure this out. See traffic go down the toilet.

However, I’ll be getting a check from Google soon. Made an affiliate sale, sold a couple of ebooks, and watched one of my websites climb back up on “some” key search word terms.

Life is good.