Yesterday I got a notice about an infringement of an intellectual property notice from Hostgator. The problem is that my website’s URL has a brand name in it. I have decided to comply and just shut the site down. But before I do that I thought I would share the website and tell BHW about it. Hopefully you will get something out of this.
NOTICE: the website will go down on May 14 11PM-12AM Pacific Time.
WEBSITE: http://hellokittyroad.com/
(I also took a snapshot on Wayback machine: http://web.archive.org/web/*/hellokittyroad.com)
SITE SETUP:
I used Gazette theme by Woothemes and WPZonBuilder plugin to set up the website. I must say the plugin is awesome. Whatever you see on the website: star-ratings, pictures, prices, “more info” and “add to cart” buttons, shopping cart, customer review etc., all done by WPZonBuilder, I didn’t have to mess with code or HTML or whatever else to make it look pretty.
I chose all products manually, created unique titles and added unique 30-80 word description to each one. I have added description to my “category” pages to make them rank better but interestingly enough, before I did that, the pages still ranked without any description. I added “BLOG” section just to make a website a little bulkier but as you can see on the website I gave up after only 3 articles LOL.
To make the navigation easier I posted all products as “posts” and appointed them into appropriate categories. To make my URLs look cleaner, I used “WP No Category Base - WPML compatible” plugin to remove “/category” from category permalinks. I see some people wonder if you can rank “category” pages and the answer is absolute YES. Type in “hello kitty steering wheel cover” or “hello kitty car seat covers” and you will see my category pages ranking on the 1st page of Google.com.
To make the website faster I used 3 plugins - "WP Super Cache" - for caching, "WP Smush" - for reducing size of pictures, "WP-Optimize" - to keep my database clean. Through .htaccess file I also compressed text, html, javascript, css, xml. And finally I used SpriteMe to optimize few additional things. The speed significantly went up and so are my conversions.
SOCIAL MEDIA: I set up all social media accounts just to make my website look more legit. By no means had I tried to get traffic through these social media but I think it helped me to get better rankings and made my site look more legit. It's really not that hard to set these up. It took me only $20 and about 5 hours of work to do all these.
Facebook: I didn’t create a page but I just put “like” button in the widget area. To start I bought 50 likes for the home page from Fiverr, the rest of likes on the home page, inner pages and product pages are all natural.
Twitter: I created an account and bought 1500 followers from Fiverr. The I used “Tweet Deck” to run daily updates for 1 month. I was going to continue doing it but got lazy... oh well...
Pinterest: The same thing as above – created an account, bought 150 followers from Fiverr and created few boards. Additional followers, likes and re-pins are all natural.
Google+: The reason for this was just to make things a little more personal. I just wanted people to see that there is a real person behind the website (it’s not me in the pic btw lol). To get followers I bought a gig from Fiverr where the person shared me in his circle. Initially I got about 100-150 followers from him sharing my profile in his circles. I made a post about how to get more followers in Google+ awhile ago on Warrior Forum (PLEASE DON’T BE MAD AT ME!!). Here is the link: http://www.warriorforum.com/social-m...hen-month.html (Sorry X10000000 times lol). All shares and likes on my posts are natural.
To finish things off and to prove to people that I’m crazy into Hello Kitty (I’m actually not haha), I joined a group on Ning called Hello Kitty Junkies.
SEO: I haven’t used any crazy ninja techniques or anything here. Although my SEO strategy was very simple, the website has survived all major updates and is ranking number 3 for main keyword “hello kitty car accessories” (on Google.com as of May 13, 2015) For the most of its life the site ranked number 2 for main keyword “hello kitty car accessories”.
Here is basically what I used for “basic” backlinks:
web 2.0s - simple 1 pagers (ex.kittygarage.weebly.com)
article directories
document sharing sites - (ex. scribd.com/doc/158799352/Tips-On-How-To-Take-Care-Of-Your-Car-From-The-Kitty
slideshow sharing sites - (ex. slideboom.com/presentations/845882/How-To-Get-Your-Car-Tires-Shine)
video sharing sites - (ex. youtube.com/watch?v=PCMYVC_Xnmw)
relevant comments - (ex. megaprojects.co.ke/articles/212/is-volvos-electric-road-the-way-of-the-future/#.UhZA_j8fnIU)
high PR profiles - (ex. profiles.wordpress.org/kukumber/)
press release (ex. prbuzz.com/business-entrepreneur/252925-official-launch-of-hellokittyroad-com-website.html)
Over time I made about 200 of these links all together using 2 spun articles (readable, spun on sentence and word levels).
I only used high quality sites and never used software like GSA as my tier 1. I have built 5-10 of these every few days. All of these links were made in the 4th quarter of 2013. I used Autofill Magic Firefox plugin to help me automate the process.
Most of the links were pointed to the homepage - I say about 80% and the rest to inner pages. I used social bookmarks and a handful of web 2.0s to link to the inner pages.
Now onto “advanced” linking, actually it’s not advanced at all!
Paid directories – Yep, you are reading this right... The thing is that I only used high quality directories. In this case I used 2: somuch.com and businessseek.biz.
Guest posts – I used sponsoredreviews.com to get some “guest post” links. I know it's not advised to use services like these because of recent Google crackdown on networks and such. Nevertheless I managed to get few links from okay websites. The most importantly is that these links were from automotive websites.
Fiverr gigs – Yes you can actually find decent gigs on Fiverr if you look a little harder. For example, I got a “guest post” on a website with MOZ DA24, Majestic TF18/CF20, automotive niche.
Network links – I got 10 network links from BHW seller. Too bad I can’t find the guy anymore because the links were actually from website with really decent metrics.
Organic backlinks – well, I only got 1 from buzzle.com... I gotta say thou, it does feel good to get natural backlinks.
TRAFFIC AND EARNINGS:
Last year the website made me around $800 which is not that great. My best month was about $130. My average conversions were 2-3%, I think mainly because of my lame product descriptions and low quality products. It was very hard to find good quality products for this store on Amazon. Every single month I had to change 10-20 products because the products would disappear from Amazon or people would leave negative feedbacks.
To be honest I slacked off at the end of last year and for about last 3 month and didn’t update any “dead” products so earnings were really low.
I think the website had a potential of making about $300/month and up to $500/month with some additional backlinking and about 5 hours of work to update all “dead” products each month.
I was kind of all over the place but hopefully you learn something from my experience.
Here is a quick recap:
Don't use brand names in your main domain name. Although I had my website ranking under the official Hello Kitty website for over a year, I finally got my notice
I didn't use too much content on the website
I ranked category pages the same way as I would rank my "posts" or "pages"
I feel that social media channels helped to make the website look more legitimate and helped rankings (just my opinion here)
It's not expensive or hard to create fake social media channels and make them look real for your websites
You can still rank using spun articles
Creating few link per day is better than all at once
Only use high quality websites when creating your tier 1 whether you do it manually of using a software
Paid directories are okay - only if you use high quality ones
Link your website to other related websites - I feel that 1 of the reasons for getting better rankings and not getting penalized was the fact that many of my links came from niche related websites and not just some general crappy network
Create quality website and people will build links for you (just 1 link in my case but oh well....)
Don't get lazy!
I know I missed things cuz I'm just tired of writing so much lol, so if you have any questions don't hesitate to ask! :D