CC9 -- Sasha Grey

[Calamari]

a) I've been attempting seo for a few years now. I've had a lot of failures with some success mixed in here and there. It's a game, a struggle, a hobby, a business, an income, and a money pit all at the same time. At some point along the way I became an seo.

But the rub is that whatever seo skills I have today can be useless tomorrow. I've dabbled in paid traffic and traffic leaks. But when I failed I ran back to seo instead of failing until I succeeded. I ran back to where I was comfortable instead of being uncomfortable long enough to learn a new skill.

b) Sporting goods.

c) To diversify the income from 100% seo to at least 50% seo and 50% traffic leaks.

d) I plan to gain skills that I can take to my other websites and diversify their traffic as well.

e) I won't dedicated a specific number of hours. However many it takes to get the job done is how many I will dedicate. I will be dedicating about 50% of my working internet hours to these traffic leaks. More if needed.

f) I'm looking for a 100% increase in traffic.

g) Same as D, I'm focused on this right now.

h) This site is up and has been running for about a year on search engine traffic. Last month I sent a bit under 6,000 clicks (not unique) to the main affiliate program and those converted at at 2.75%.

 

[drsmiley]

Moar sexy pics?
This has the makings of being the sexiest and therefore the most popular CC9 thread!
Watched.
On a more serious note, looking forward to working alongside you and the other CC9.

 

[DDixon]

This is exciting. I'm eager to see, because you already have a baseline for traffic / conversion. Wondering where you can take that with this "booty" camp!

 

[Calamari]

There will be moar @drsmiley. There will be moar.

Yeah @DDixon I'm curious to see how differently the traffic acts and converts. I'm also hoping that the leaks earn me more links, further cementing my organic positions as well as making new organic positions easier to get.

Don't tell anyone, but I'm a bit excited to set this one trick pony free in the wild.

 

[Samwise89]

f) I'm looking for a 100% increase in traffic.

I have full faith that you can do much more than just double your traffic. Aim higher! Shoot for the stars!

This site is up and has been running for about a year on search engine traffic. Last month I sent a bit under 6,000 clicks (not unique) to the main affiliate program and those converted at at 2.75%.

Nice, I'm glad you already have stats in place so we can see how it grows.

2.75% conversion rate seems a little low. I wonder if that's the program's fault or if you aren't funneling and warming the traffic enough? That's another great angle you could work on during this boot camp thing. If you could double that conversion rate up with the same traffic, that's as good as doubling the traffic!

Best of luck

 

[Calamari]

Thanks for the vote of confidence @Samwise89

When the time is right I'll dig out some more accurate conversion stats and see what I can do about improving them. I did my fair share of heat map testing to get my visitors cookied to many different programs. But I'm sure the rabbit hole goes much deeper than my limited experience has taught me.

Actually very keen to see where this goes, as with all of them. @Calamari, if you need any pics, let me know.

If you've got a supah sexah library of Sasha pics I'd be more than happy to drip them through this thread.

 

[CCarter]

My Official Take:

Anyone in the broad niche is a potential target for this site, literally. List of equipment for every type of sports or instructional guides along with recommendation for the XYZ for that niche, Wham-Bam-Moneygram. You can literally hit up every single possible fitness reddit with content geared towards their niche on best practices and generate forever dollars. The volume is pretty sick, in fact it's probably the highest volume niche so far. There are a lot of big brands and large players in here, meaning there are plenty of sites which can be traffic leaked for short term traffic bursts as well as steady long term traffic leaks.

Since it's sports related, sports sites can be used with traffic leaked content created on "How Tos"/"Best Practices" for that particular sport. And knowing each different sport has fans, forums, and sites geared around them, you can be on a 365 day rotation for traffic leaks for years without hitting the same forum again. What looks like an ordinary niche is actually extraordinary with potential.

The site is extremely simple, and I suspect it might be doing a good job cause of the simplicity. Getting traffic to the site might be just the missing ingredient. You know what, re-thinking about this site, there is a ton of money being left on the table. the CTA needs a secondary CTA like collecting emails for a newsletter. That way in the future once you get new content you can simply re-blast the list to get traffic back to the site.

We'll go into details in the coming days.

 

[Calamari]

Thank you. Looking forward to the coming details and actionable advice.

Some of the things you said are nearly actionable, but I'm not going to jump the gun any more than open the accounts and make a few posts without trying to move traffic to my site.

 

[Calamari]

Just a quick to-do/done list. It's going to evolve.

Things I have done:

• Joined 5 forums and started greasing them up.

Things I will do this week:

• Join 5 more forums and lube them up.

Things I will do this month:

• Start a mailing list for my most highly trafficked page
• Make the site mobile friendly

The only challenge for me here is making the site mobile friendly. The easiest thing to do would be to change the theme. But that's not something I want to do. My current theme allows for silo specific sidebars, which I really like. And things are placed how I want them in order to get people to click where I want them to.

As a last resort I'll change the theme, but I'll probably end up hiring someone to fix the css for me.

 

[Calamari]

Things I have done this week:

• Joined 10 forums and started posting

High Priority To-Do List

• continue light interaction on 10 forums
• make site mobile friendly

To-Do List

• Start a mailing list for my most highly trafficked page
• Move site to a faster host
• Choose your own adventure product selector (thanks for the idea emp)

 

[badya122]

Things I have done this week:

• Joined 10 forums and started posting
• Things I will do this week:
  • continue interacting on 10 forums
  • make site mobile friendly

What is your approach in this technique? Are you just being a casual forum user, asking questions and replying to some, or are you going all in and already posting links to your site?

 

[Calamari]

I'm not dropping any links until I am told when, where, and how. I just know that I'll need some legit looking accounts to drop links with, so I'm a casual user.

 

[Calamari]

Updating the to-do list this morning.

Finished making the site mobile friendly this morning. It's not perfect on the mobile end with the logo. I put that task on my more detailed off-line to-do list and will probably get to it this weekend, but I have more important things to do.

Got a subscribe to email list form in place at the end of every post early this afternoon.

I took the easy way out with moving to a faster host and upgraded my shared server to a vps today. I don't know how long the migration takes so tomorrow morning I'll check the page speed for improvements. I'm going to set a goal of under 2 seconds. If that doesn't happen after this upgrade I'll have to dig deeper and see what fat can be trimmed.

Things I have done this week:

• Joined 10 forums and started posting
• made site mobile friendly
• added email sign up to bottom of all posts
• Upgraded shared server to a vps

High Priority To-Do List

• continue light interaction on 10 forums
• check all affiliate links - found one that goes to a discontinued product today

To-Do List

• create auto-response welcome email for email list
  
• Choose your own adventure product selector (thanks for the idea emp)
• Social media (Probably pinterest and facebook)

Removed From To-Do List

• Post Sasha Grey bukake collection to thread

 

[Calamari]

So this was more fun than I thought it would be. I can see how people get addicted to it. My goal was to go from my average of about 3.5 seconds to under 2 seconds, so I can cross this off tomorrows list.

This is one of the higher trafficked deep pages. The home page is quite a bit smaller and not highly trafficked. This and others like it are the ones I care about.

Update: Grade is now 95/100 with 29 requests. I'll be damned if I take the time to make another picture.

Of course this was my best time out of about ten tries. In ten tries I get 2-3 like this, 1-2 just a hair over 2 seconds, with the rest anywhere from 1 - 1.3 seconds.

The biggest sacrifice I had to make was my social buttons that I used for social proof. I think that the trade-off will be worth it.

The most surprising part was how long piwik was taking to load. Since it's a self hosted tracking solution, and it was hosted on one of my shared servers, it was taking a full second to load the script, and it was almost always the last thing to finish. I moved it to my new vps and now it loads in under 400ms most of the time.

I also was able to bring my requests down from 72 to 29 thanks to pingdom making it so easy to figure out what each one was.

I could shave a bit more time off by doing a couple more obvious things, but I'm sure I've hit the point of diminishing returns here. It's time to move on.

 

[lyannastark]

Yesss I know the social buttons are hard to let go of! I struggled internally with that for a couple minutes, but I know my man CCarter and his coding chops has got our backs. So I'm not too worried. And yes, I also see how constantly refining site speed is addictive.

 

[Calamari]

Yesss I know the social buttons are hard to let go of! I struggled internally with that for a couple minutes, but I know my man CCarter and his coding chops has got our backs. So I'm not too worried. And yes, I also see how constantly refining site speed is addictive.

Yeah, I really like social proof because I know that I notice how many shares/likes a page has when I land on it, and it makes me think for a split second that this page may have some value. But if the content sucks I'm still gonna bail no matter many shares a page has. So I'm betting that my content is good enough to make visitors stick. I'm sure your content will do the same.

Great work @Calamari ! Thanks for keeping us updated. It's been good to follow your progress so far

np Vinny. I'll continue to share, just maybe not every day as I have so far. I don't think I'm going to update the on-line to-do list today because it looks mostly the same as yesterday.

 

[Calamari]

High Priority To-Do List

• continue light interaction on 10 forums
• check all affiliate links - found one that goes to a discontinued product last week
  
• create auto-response welcome email for email list

To-Do List

• Choose your own adventure product selector (thanks for the idea emp)
• Social media (Probably pinterest and facebook)

Things done:

• Joined 10 forums and started posting
• made site mobile friendly
• added email sign up to bottom of all posts
• Upgraded shared server to a vps
• Got load time under goal of 2 seconds

I'm getting 1-2 sign ups for the list daily, so that's nice. It seems that the opt-in email was hitting the spam box until I changed the email address to a self hosted one instead of the gmail one. I can turn off the opt-in email option. Is that a bad idea?

Over the weekend I didn't do too much. I logged in once a day to the forum accounts and made a post to each. I'm noticing that some are much more active then others and one is spammed up pretty good due to lack of moderation. There's more spam on the board in recent history than real posts. With practice I'll get better at finding active forums to target.

 

[CCarter]

Find forums with tapatalk directory search, but we'll get to that...

 

[Calamari]

Updating my affiliate links was a pain in the ass. I had a few that went to 404 pages or product not found pages. I'm going to have to check them once a month.

Next up is some specific content. I got some great ideas this morning and now I'm off to the store to pick a couple things up. I'm going to have to set up a light box and take some pictures for my first effort. Another pain in the ass but worth the effort if past performance is any indication.

High Priority To-Do List

• continue light interaction on 10 forums
• content creation

To-Do List

• Social media (Probably pinterest and facebook)
• create auto-response welcome email for email list

Things done

• Joined 10 forums and started posting
• made site mobile friendly
• added email sign up to bottom of all posts
• Upgraded shared server to a vps
• Got load time under goal of 2 seconds
• affiliate links checked and updated

 

[Calamari]

Got caught up on all the "homework" assignments for the CC9 this morning. That was my top priority, now I'm back to content creation. Took some pictures for a piece of content the other day. I wasn't crazy about the way the pictures came out so I'll try again with my light box that arrived from Amazon last night. By tomorrow night I'll have a psd that should do well.

I'm also going to write a couple pieces from the headlines that I created this morning from the CC9 headline writing exercise. I have one piece written so far, but I'll get two more done by COB Monday.

High Priority To-Do List

• continue light interaction on forums
  
• content creation

To-Do List

• Social media (Probably pinterest and facebook)
• create auto-response welcome email for email list
• mailchimp
• send first email to list

Things done

• Joined 10 forums and started posting
• made site mobile friendly
• added email sign up to bottom of all posts
• Upgraded shared server to a vps
• Got load time under goal of 2 seconds
• affiliate links checked and updated

 

[Calamari]

BuSo deserves an update to this thread.
I had been making a point of getting homework assignments done as fast as I possibly could. I did however manage to completely miss one that was assigned last week. I'm trying to make time to get it done before the deadline. It's a big one and I don't want to half ass it so I'm working to make it as good as I can the first time.

I'm in Disney this week with the fam so it is making it hard to find the time but I'll get 'er dun.

 

[Calamari]

Assignments completed this afternoon. I hope to do my job well and have some exciting traffic leak numbers soon. Let the games begin!

 

[Kimoto]

@Calamari and all other CC9ers,

Reading what's your activity with the forums, I don't know exactly how much time you spend interacting, but imo there's a reason to invest efforts in 1 max 2 forums - the biggest ones. You can establish you name a bit quicker and definitely your presence will be more tangible.

Later if everything goes right, you'll be able to open a real traffic leak lasting for long time and move to the next. Probably a separate thread about forum traffic leaking would be beneficial, but I'm fine to stick with Carter's agenda.

 

[Calamari]

I'm sure you are right @Kimoto. I'm not doing much real interaction with these. I was just fluffing them out so that I wasn't a new user with a super low post count for when I start actual traffic leaking.

I'm sure that in time particular forums will be identified for me to do more in depth leaks on.

 

[Calamari]

Getting back to business as usual today after Christmas and then a week long family vacation. Started the morning off by adding a fresh post to each one of my forum accounts. I crossed two off the list as I realized they were shit. Even with the very light interaction I'm doing. I am starting to see how different forums have different herd mind personalities that can be exploited.

I'll also be writing all new to-do lists this afternoon and I'll transfer the goods at my next update.