Blah, Blah, Blog

When I said I was going to update you on my “Making It Better in 2008” progress, I wasn’t kidding!

Here is a site that has been gathering dust for FAR too long. I haven’t added content to it or made any changes in over a year (although I have sent out a couple of newsletters to the list.)

I thought of selling it, but decided to keep it since it fits into my overall target market. I also had some ideas on how to improve the site. One of the reasons I wanted to start with this one is because it makes NO money. It’s the only site I own that doesn’t generate sales or Adsense income.

So, similar to the thinking of a person who pays off their debt starting with the lowest balance for the psychological boost it will give them, I am starting with this one. Anything would be an improvement. LOL!

For starters, this is a content site all about limiting screen time. It has articles on why too much TV is a bad idea, and ideas on what to do instead. It makes affiliate recommendations, mostly books about research on TV’s effects and a couple of other products (some from Amazon.com and a few ebooks). It has a newsletter (actually just an autoresponder with a bunch of messages) with tips and ideas for family time that don’t involve screens. There are over 1,000 subscribers on the list. There is serious potential there, so I need to work on getting those folks to buy too.

I thought it had potential however, and was already getting some decent traffic and had incoming links from similar sites in this “un-TV” genre. It gets search engine traffic from a couple hundred unique keyword phrases.

Here is a screen shot of the Before:

And about half an hour Later:

You probably can’t tell a whole lot from the pictures, but I did the following:

1. Removed Adsense ads from 90% of the pages. The ads were making NO money. When I emailed a friend about the site, she said she wasn’t surprised that this was the case, since the ads were showing up all about watching TV on the computer. DUH! People who are trying to watch less TV aren’t likely to click on ads about watching TV, are they? So that was an obvious thing to change.

2. Changed the left nav menu so the links were smaller and shorter. I also added several affiliate recommendations to the left menu, and that font is a bit larger, making them stand out more.
3. Wrote a bolder, more direct headline.
4. Made the font larger and bolder on the right nav to draw attention to the newsletter sign up box.
5. Added a picture of a product that I found on Amazon, it’s a perfect fit: a device that plugs into a Tv, computer or video game that enables a parent to set a timer that will turn the device off completely. This is a higher priced product than most I promote so I’m interested to see if it converts well.
6. Made the page wider to give it a more modern look.

That’s it for now. Later on this month I’ll: add some more content, hire a ghostwriter to write an article I can send out, do some keyword research to guide me when I add new pages, and look for more appropriate affiliate products to recommend.

Stay tuned. No pun intended.

Tags: adsense, affiliate marketing, focus, improving what you've got, target market

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 17th, 2008 at 8:43 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.