Why This Niche Site is Failing

Key Takeaways

what would it look like if this video had a pop-up right over it so you couldn't even see us and there were ads littered around the sides and we had shirts asking you to buy our apparel and our content was monotone and really kind of boring nobody would want to watch it right well today we're going to see the website equivalent of that video and it's somebody who's frustrated with their progress and has written in to us asking for help and so by no means are we trying to to pile on to that person or anything these are common mistakes that lots of website owners make but we do want to be just clear with how we think about things and not try to nerf things too much this is how we really feel yeah this case sentences web site I mean he's he's written over 80 posts he's got lots of content he's two years into this thing and just struggling to earn an income from its struggling to get the traffic there and this traffic is very low right now very very low with 80 posts in two years in this website should be way further along and so we're on your side maker of Preppers unlimited we're on your team and the reason we're saying these things is to help you move forward not to make fun of anything happening on the site and for the rest of you out there hopefully this is going to help you to maybe correct some current mistakes on your website or help you avoid some of these common mistakes so you don't do the same thing and get two years down the road and just be frustrated we do do this as a service you can go to income school calm and click on private coaching it's expensive because it requires our time sitting there working with you on your website but it is an option most of you shouldn't buy that you should just get project twenty-four and learn how to do it yourself but if you have a site and it's like this we can save you a lot of time by going through this a ton of time in fact if you think about it this site I believe if they just implement what we talked about in the next few months it's going to turn around and more than pay for what coaching would cost each month okay so so anyway let's let's go ahead and dive into it all right first thing is you can't even see the content cuz of the pop-up now this is an exit intent so it doesn't come up until you're kind of scrolling toward the top they both I noticed this as soon as you open the page it pops up and then it pops up again as exit intent worse even it's too much and Google is attacking this kind of thing this is effectively an ad it's a house ad it's for you for your email list but it's an ad and this is a content blocking ad you can't see the content until you click away from it so Google's business is being attacked Google does ads right and it likes the way it shows ads you know pretty unobtrusive on people's websites well when other ad providers have autoplay videos and pop-ups and things it hurts Google's business and so Google is using Chrome to block this kind of thing in the future and they're hurting you in the search engine rankings when you do content blocking type of ads and so don't do this yep we've completely removed pop-ups from any of our web bodies and I'll use them for a year yeah wasn't an issue but yeah we're in fact this is you know this is a method we used to teach to get people to their email list yeah there was a time that this was the way to do it yeah but but not anymore those days are gone so get rid of it okay you know how are you gonna get people to your email list there are ways that you can put that push this starter guide out there from your content go ahead and link to it from your content have a great offer in your content saying that go go get this and you get it all right and so just looking just look just a visual at the web site there are ads everywhere pop-ups everywhere I look at the the main menu here and they have their own apparel they're doing a giveaway I mean it's attack attack attack of the visitor and get money from them it sucked the blood and money out of you and butter in my pocket is what this website is set up to do yeah and when that is your your the way that you're creating your website will guess what people don't like it exactly it's monetization first user or customer second okay when we build websites we actually don't even start the monetization until we have probably close to 30 articles on the website and that is because we want to create our initial content with the customer entirely in mind without even without even thinking about how we're gonna make money off of them honestly we just want to make super helpful content super useful content that's gonna attract people mm-hmm yeah and and ads will hurt your cert your performance because it makes this the page load slower when I put on ads on one of my largest sites kaboom there was a noticeable drop in search rankings and just general traffic the next month because there was a lot of ads now you often I think it is worth it ads are good I think a lot of websites should be monetized with ads but here were you're desperate to grow traffic keep them off for a while let's just build great content all right let's get into the content why isn't he getting search engine traffic good this is let's focus on so like there's the a hundred percent of things we need to do there's the ninety percent the things there like this is what's actually gonna make the difference and then there's the ten percent logo and kind of misaligned things which we're going to talk about that's the ten percent stuff that's not nearly as important let's talk about the ninety what's going on why isn't it getting traffic all right so first of all we're just gonna kind of go through some of these headlines here and as we read deadlines you've got you know loft tech pioneer 15-watt rechargeable floodlight review review he wants money review hex mag series - magazine review he wants to have a heavy duty EDC everyday carry mail review he wants money Kershaw knife stuff bladed a flexible price money Sawyer mini vs. life straw again those are you know two products for comparing 300 Win Mag versus 7-millimeter now that one may be more information is a little bit more informational especially considering that I can't buy ammo online without going through dealer so I don't feel like you're trying to sell me here but it's still pretty product focus okay so let's go do a review okay 300 Win Mag versus 7-millimeter this is gonna be a huge keyword very much if you're a gun guy you know this is not like I've sir hiding it this is a big thing and so let's scroll down and let's look at the post this is not enough it's too short you have a post it it probably felt long when you wrote it yeah this is a response bus this is I don't know maybe this is 1500 words here I'm guessing it maybe maybe up to today even I'm not even not that it's maybe not even be a thousand look at that and this is a massive keyword this needs pillar content 3,500 words extremely well-researched charts of unique research you've done this is too big of a keyword to just hit with a tiny little quick turn it out kind of post you know and you you want to do some research go go into a Facebook group of shooters right people hunters whatever um various Facebook groups and and ask around you know say you know I polled 700 people and here's here's what they said here the here are the reasons why some people select this one in here the reasons why some people select the other yeah that's only main content yeah you know and by the way I spent two hours making a downloadable chart for you that you can just print off right now it's like going way the extra mile if you're gonna rank for something like this right very okay time to talk about reviews so most people think if you want to monetize with Amazon you need a lot of review posts and I have not found that to be an effective strategy in fact I find pretty consistently that review posts get the lowest traffic on my website there just aren't that many people searching for a review on google of many many many products now if you're writing about something like a major camera a car you know the 2018 for two f150 you're writing about you know a major computer the iMac pro something an iPhone 10 these are major products that millions of people are going to be searching reviews for go right ahead but if I'm gonna buy you know a life straw for example yeah that's if I remember that's a pretty inexpensive product it's a water purifying straw I don't need to read 4,000 words about it I'm gonna go straight to Amazon I'm gonna look at the user views I'm like four and a half stars by I don't need to read a huge review of it and that's true of so many products on the web though that's not how we're teaching to do Amazon affiliate in fact most of our posts have no Amazon links whatsoever most of our posts do have just some mention of you know my favorite dirt bike helmet ever is a link and that sends you to another page on our website where we won't wrote one post where it's just all affiliate and it's all telling you about my favorite dirt bike helmet um so it's interlinking to just five or six pages on your website to have all your amazon links and your favorite products etc but just review after review after review is not a great strategy that's what I have on kind of a similar niche is my website knife up calm its review after a review after a review because I didn't write that content I popped a website when it was like that and if I were building it I wouldn't do it that way and the content that I am adding is not that so don't feel like if I want to be a successful Amazon affiliate I need my website littered with review posts that's a great recipe to never get traffic absolutely having too many affiliate links is also gonna actually hurt your Google rankings if people are not going to spend a lot of time on the website another thing it's not that you can't sell a lifestyle right it's not that you can't if you had on your resources page or on your recommended products page you had a whole page that was all about water storage and purification for Preppers then on there you're gonna have like okay this section is all about like you know the high quantity stuff this is all about kind of my bug-out bag stuff maybe you're gonna have a recommended gear page that's like here's my bug-out bag contents and in that is gonna be a link to the to the LifeStraw right sure come at it with an angle yeah you know come at an angle you know maybe your post is best water P or you know it's whatever it's just about hiking in high mountain lakes and then you mention a life straw because guess what people who are going to go to a backpacking trip in high mountain lakes will definitely need a water purification solution yep and so you link to your resource page there come at it at an angle and it usually works better so another issue that I have and we noticed that there are a lot of product review posts but also just let's look at the headlines ok target sports USA overview emergency water storage tanks what about them yes big problem emergency water storage tanks is a product it's not a title are you gonna tell us how much they cost are you gonna tell them why it tell us why you need them or how long they last or how to keep the water pure in them what about it emergency water tanks it's like if I called the blog post camera right what do I do with that yeah yeah so that's that's a problem we need to spend a little bit of time working on the headlines try to try to come up with stuff that is going to be a little bit intriguing a little bit unique just interesting and I think that that's gonna make a little a big difference honestly as because I mean even if these were to show up even if Google promotes your your post weighs up and thinks yeah I'm gonna give this a try people aren't gonna click on that because they don't even know what this article is about water stores like rolling the dice who knows what this supposed to be so that's that's an important thing man this this pop-up it's all over the past everywhere all right that leads me turn it to the next thing I went ahead and clicked on that post about water storage tanks something that I want you to notice here is just the formatting of the article formatting of the wording look at how big these paragraphs are these big blocks of text think about yourself when you go to a website do you like to read big blocks of text or do you like it when it's broken up into paragraphs of a few sentences maybe some bulleted lists or numbered lists some images you know what what is it that you prefer to read and think about this this actually I think makes a big difference think about what this looks like on a mobile phone mm-hmm you've got a paragraph here that looks long on bill IMAX yes like your your whole eye phone can't just be words you just you'd see you described about four or five times down just to get through a paragraph and nobody's gonna stick around and read that but not fun nope so yeah it's the equivalent like we said in the intro it's the equivalent of if we talked like this on our YouTube video that's the text equivalent of this and the way that you make your text exciting and fun like how we talk with our hands and we use voice inflection is by formatting it in interesting ways having bulleted lists and bolding some things and having short little easy paragraphs it just makes it more fun to listen to and read yeah we told you longer content and now we're telling you shorter paragraphs and there's nothing wrong with that use you know you use headers pretty well here but you know break up headings is good yeah yep using these subheadings to break up your post into into smaller sections is a great way to go that paragraph I would make into five or six paragraphs yep I make it short easy easy too it just makes it feel like your flan when you read that alright there's another big big problem on this website but it's so easy to miss that I bet some of you watching this right now have made the same mistake but it's catastrophic to the website so like a very very important part of your SEO is the title you pick for each of your blog posts for your website itself and by default when you just install WordPress and you start going you start writing posts you know it's not going to know what you want your title and subscription just of the website and or description of your website in general to be and so a quick way to check this is just to do site colon and then your domain name site colon that income school comm or whatever your domain name is so we did site colon Preppers unlimited Ickes and the title of this whole blog is WordPress website design maintenance support and SEO that it's very bad that's for your SEO you've got to remember to set this yep that and the SEO description the snippet that's that Google is using to say what your whole websites about says website design elevate design builds beautiful fast and affordable websites built on the WordPress platform also maintenance support and SEO Google thinks your site is about WordPress and SEO that's that's a big problem some real problems just go to - to your WordPress dashboard and just go to Settings General and you can change their site title you can change your site tagline it's all there mm-hmm there really are a lot of things that have gone right on this website when I read through the the articles yeah we have problems with the formatting yes we don't like all the reviews etc but the writing itself looks great it's good it's explaining it's helpful information and you're looking for you've done what the vast majority of people will never do everybody says I'm starting my website I'm gonna do this and then two weeks later they're watching Survivor again and they're not writing content on the website of somebody who's worked at it for two years and has written 80 posts on there this is a tremendous time commitment so I'm glad to see somebody who's working and doing things there is a lot done right on this website the niche itself I'm totally happy with there's a lot of stuff done well but the this is the 90% that has made it so that all that effort never quite Crested and the level of helpfulness that it needed to get to to be able to rank on Google it just needed a little bit of things fixed and it's fixable this website should by no means be abandoned if I owned this website first of all probably new WordPress theme I would do monetize everything and then I'm gonna go through every single article and I'm gonna work on the headlines for each one I'm gonna add length to a lot of them most of these posts are a thousand twelve hundred words long not a whole lot of that pillar post not a whole lot of the staple post these are fixable things and he's done the hard work but those are the things that have held him back in a big way they're also some of the 10% so let's talk about this is this is kinda the design stuff logo whatever I don't have a problem with the logo I have a little bit of a problem with the placement as you as you guys can see yeah you've got this word logo right the name of the title the website Preppers unlimited which is apparently not the title of the website but anyway you've got it appearing at the top where it should be but it's supposed to be in line with that ad which I don't like that there's an ad there we talked about this already probably just gonna get rid of that I'll do that later worry about monetization later but because the width of that that title is so wide it's it's too wide to fit with the ad next to it and so it's got them off-center gaps up on the next line so now you've got all this white space it doesn't look good I also noticed that you have a logo down below why don't you have the logo up above and just keep it small enough to keep it narrow enough that it fits with the ad yeah that it's on that big white space there just so you weird awkward white spaces on the layout yeah yep and as we scroll down next we see another ad that's this one's chopped off it just it just doesn't look real pretty and a magazine style theme is totally fine I have no problem with a magazine style theme but they are generally harder to format and so I might just recommend going to an easier to format theme especially since this is somebody obviously who's not that super great with the design part of it she's got a really easy theme to do something like a I'm like a divvy right now I get a div Ian just the stock divvy straight out of the gate looks pretty darn good yep very easy to get set or X theme is great it very easy to get that one set up and making it look nice go with the ethos is the one that we usually like yeah and I think it would look really good for a prepper type website anyway I think you could do some really good stuff with it you've got all the social icons up down here I hope you're not spending a whole lot of time trying to cultivate a Facebook audience yeah taste our Facebook page and Julie tit yep Facebook is not does not play nicely with bloggers they don't send traffic to us they've made so many changes to hurt bloggers and so why in the world are we supporting them right oh yeah just get out of Facebook they are not sending traffic dump Facebook keep your YouTube channel I think that's fantast to Pinterest and interest again you don't really have to build up a big following on Pinterest you're gonna have some boards and and those will cultivate followers and stuff and I think that's fine you can go ahead and have an icon to send people to your to your Pinterest board that's that's the bulk of our review here yep again if you want a review of your own website generally we recommend just sign up for project 24 at income school comm slash project 24 and we're gonna walk you step by step by step through setting up your website so you can avoid these but if you have an existing website and you're frustrated with the progress or you just need another set of eyes on a site maybe if it's a successful site I would think that we could add some value to add to that then go to income school calm and click on private coaching it's not for everybody because it is very expensive but if you do fit in that category it's something to definitely check out