In my post about lessons I learned in 2008, I mentioned that when my stinky cheese website took a nosedive, I didn’t act quickly enough and my income tumbled down with it.
This past month I’ve been working hard to resurrect this dead site, and thought I would share some of the things I’m doing and the results with you.
Launch a blog – I had a blog installed on the domain and started blogging with regularity. While the topic is something I write about easily, I hired ghostwriters to write quick blog posts for me. This was more cost effective than hiring writers to create entire articles.
First I sent the ghostwriters lists of keywords to write about so they could quickly come up with content. I then expanded on what they wrote. This enabled me to add over a hundred blog posts to the blog very quickly.
Write articles – I created several new articles on the topic to direct traffic to the site. I submitted them to article directories and places like iSnare for distribution. Where appropriate, I published them on another site I own. I also wrote different versions of the article for use as guest blog posts.
Get incoming links – I did this in a number of ways. I paid for a couple of incoming links. Writing articles got me more links. I asked fellow website owners who had content in this niche to link to me (several of these were fellow Mom Masterminds members, who willingly did me a favor. One of the perks of membership!). I also made sure I linked to appropriate pages inside the site itself.
Google alerts – I signed up for Google alerts in the keyword I want to rank for for this particular site. This accomplished a couple of things. Each day I’m sent an email telling me where bloggers are talking about this keyword phrase, so I check out their blog and leave a comment if I can add something useful to the conversation, linking to my site. I also get ideas for new topics because I can see what’s going on in the news in this niche.
Twitter – Often after adding a new page to the site, I Twittered about it.
I’m pleased to say that after a month of this, the traffic for December has increased by 80% over November, and income has really jumped too. It’s not where it was back in March, but it’s quickly getting there. I feel confident that at the end of January it will be.
P.S. If you need some help breathing new life into a dead site of your own, how about a website review?
Thanks for sharing your blueprint for increasing the traffic and earnings to your “stinky cheese” site! I learned a couple of things that would be very easy to try out.