Just a general review ;)

[StueyB]

Hi Everyone.

I'm after a little advice. I have a site as some of you know. Fetishbasics.com and fetishbasics.com/blog

Now I am getting reasonably good levels of traffic, ie over > 50,000 page views a month.

However I am failing to turn this into $.

I'd welcome all feedback. 90% of the traffic goes to the blog atm. I tend to push toys from Extreme restraints mostly, cause I know they have good stuff ahem

However when I push the toys, im getting a very small click through, perhaps 20-30 sponsor hits a day.

Even when I try and push pic of the day and such, it never really converts.

Im trying to set a target of (don't laugh) $200 this month. If anyone fancies helping me get there i'd appreciate it.

PS Can anyone recommend a good reasonably priced host, as Dreamhost seems to be sucking a bit just atm.

Cheers

Stu

[phuckbunny]

First all, design is nice. As for the rest, I'm not fully getting the concept completely. But here are my thoughts:

You seem to have several things going on at once, a blog, a tgp and a instructional site portion that's kind of like bdsm 101. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, on the contrary, it's a good idea and you have a good domain name. If you're saying that most of your traffic goes to the blog, and if it's SE traffic then you should be golden soon, so work on the blog part. There's only three posts. It needs a whole lot more and needs to be updated on a more or less regular basis, then monetize that blog as Hammer says, by getting more hits to your sponsors.

I see you're running WP on the blog section. You should add more plugins, optimize your posts for SE and make more places for the surfer to click where you will potentially make a sale.

As far as making money mostly from toy sales, in my limited experience you need a lot of traffic to make that worthwhile. You should be promoting more of wiredpussy and hogtied on your blog.

I'm thinking of switching hosts as well. A lot of the frogs here seem to recommend ATCI and I may give them a whirl.

Don't know if this helps.

[mynameisjim]

$200/month seems like a reasonable goal.

I would say send most of the sex toy ads to the sidebar and promote paysites in the body. Similar to the pic of the day you're doing but with a blog post around it. Don't go all sploggy but try to mix it in.

Allow more posts to show on your main page since it only shows three at a time. I missed the "previous entries" link the first time through.

The key is to keep trying new stuff and find what works on your traffic.

[KickAssVic]

i'd say look for the right sponsors. hogtied and wiredpussy were suggested by phuckbunny and i think those are very wise.

next, get in contact with someone at a program you are deciding to back. and let THEM help you work on your situation till it starts converting. if they don't offer this support you might want to look at another sponsor, at least until you've got your game more fine tuned.

[Hammer]

I would use a product sponsor as an additional source of revenue but never as the primary source.

[StueyB]

Thank you everyone for your input. Most welcome. I've taken your input on it, and will be making a few changes (and a lot more posts ) in the next few days. I think it mainly comes down to playing traffic scenarios and maybe being a bit more pro active in pushing hogtied etc (I myself like the site a lot) and see where thats me.

As for getting sponsors more actively involved, I will investigate that because it is something I had considered but wasn't sure my traffic levels where worthy, ifyswim.

Hammer, would you care to elaborate a bit, I am not really understanding what your mean?

TTYL Everyone,

Stu

[Hammer]

You said you're pushing toys but the conversions are low. I'm guessing that you mean that your primary source of income from the site is toys, in which case, I'd recommend pushing something else and using the toys as supplemental income.

[anotherF]

Why not introduce a forum and try to build a comunity, it may be easier to sell products to people who trust your site!

[StueyB]

Hi

Building a community is certainly an idea, but the big boys rule this arena i think. Any ideas where to start ?

BTW Thanks again to everyone who has helped

[Cozy Monica]

I think Hammer is right, you need to push something other than toys. Toys will not make you enough money.

Try pushing kink.com and wasteland. They sell well for me.

Your blog is a good place to make sales with your posts.

On your blog, you will get the most clicks in the top-right corner, so it's good to see you have an ad there.

You need more ads in your right-hand side bar. Try putting an ad after Categories, and before Syndicate. Get ads all down the side there. Try text ads and a few banner ads to see what works best.

Besides making changes to the site itself, you need to get more traffic. The more traffic, the more clicks, the more conversions.

You have some good articles there and you can use them to make feeder sites. Create mini sites with a handful of articles, maybe a mini gallery, and links back to your blog and main pages of your main site. You can create all kinds of these, and make sure they focus on specific keywords. Like make one focused on bondage, one on tit torture, one on submissives, one on foot worship, things like that.

You could easily be pulling $200 but you're going to probably need more sites to generate the traffic you want.

Start submitting your link to various adult social networking sites and linkdumps to get the link backs you need.

[StueyB]

Monica,

Thanks muchly for the info. Now here is an interesting question.

I have about 40 odd domains due for renewal. Didn't really do a lot with them but since they are at least 3/4 years old, even though the title don't exactly fit. I believe these are more useful than brand new domains. For example the-bdsm-video-store.info, real-life-bondage-sluts.info (and they are all .infos)

Should I reuse these or just drop them and get some new ones ?

[Cozy Monica]

Keep them. Older domains are almost always better than ones you haven't had before.

Do any of them have PR? Has Google found any of them already? If so, those are the ones you REALLY want to keep.

[StueyB]

Ok, don't laugh but my new feeder site is up. It's a microsite of my own making

http://www.gimme-strapon.info

It's the first of several but because it took me a while to do, it may have a some errors, but I think I have covered most basis. As for keywords, strapon features heavily, but I dunno if its good or bad.

[Hammer]

What you've built there is actually a fantastic SE magnet (doorway page). Well done.

One suggestion. Take the h1 tags off of everything but the main title. Right now the first h1 tag the SEs will see is the word "article" and you don't want that.

[StueyB]

Thanks for the kind words Hammer. I have another site in the pipeline, and im going to reuse this template once more, then design a new one. If I replaced the <H1> with CSS style of the same look, is that good, or should I just NOT do <h1> like tags, even in css?

[Hammer]

You definitely want the heading to be an h1 tag because it's great for SEO. Make sure your chosen keyword(s) are always in the h1 heading. An h2 subheading is a good idea too with a few secondary supporting keywords. My point was that you only want one h1 tag per page.

As for CSS, you can use it to change the way the heading looks. The SEs still see it as an h1 tag and weight it accordingly even if you used CSS to make it look like the rest of the text instead of a huge heading.

In your case though you want it to be the heading of the page so it's fine the way it is but if you wanted to use CSS to change the size it wouldn't hurt the SEO benefits.

[Cozy Monica]

I agree with Hammer, you've built a fantastic doorway/feeder. It looks really good for the surfer AND for the search engines.

Hammer, I feel kind of silly because I never thought of using css to make the H1 text look better! I've always had that as a pet peeve, that the h1 text looks awful but search engines love it.

[StueyB]

I've done another one, not going to pimp it here though as i'm sure everyone is sick enough of it already

However an interesting question arises.

Ok, I have a lot of domains, mostly just full of holding pages and at the moment 98% of my sites and traffic are fetish.

Now obviously you can only create so many doorway pages before you have to change the layout etc, which takes time.

In your professional opinions, should I for the time being stick to fetish or try and utilise the other sites? I think that the non fetish would be akin to starting afresh to be honest. ie traffic is minimal. It's also starting to wander out of my spear of knowledge which is mostly fetish.

Should I just put these on a backboiler and just run with fetish? or is that a dangerous thing to do ?

Also there is no real way to interlink MILF to sexual torture but you can get away with mixing some fetish with less mainstream, ifyswim

[Hammer]

Stick to what you know and as for doorway pages, you're not going to run into any problems with duplicate content until you have hundreds of pages.

[StueyB]

Quick question to all you pros.

Ok I am finally getting stuff off the ground. However, my traffic is beginning to fall (dramatically) so is a warning page with links to link lists etc the way to go to get traffic, or just generally increase traffic.

I am in most of the major bdsm directories, ie fetbot and such, but the traffic levels at the moment are quite small from them.

Any suggestions welcome.

Stu