I feel like a hypocrite not having any of my sites here for you all to disect and see what I am up to. That is about to change. Although what I am doing isn't 100% aimed at affiliate marketing it is a hobby site and it will be seo as if it was for affiliate marketing.

For those that don't know I am a NASCAR fan and I always wanted a place to talk NASCAR. Thats what one site will be.

Next step is to actually post a few pages of comment. Maybe some pictures that I took at the Las Vegas race.

Set up some categories on the forum. Now when I am setting up the categories I will limit the amount to three maybe 4. Reason being is that if I was to set up a forum and have a million empty categories they place would look empty and no one else will join it.

I am sure you have seen these forums as you surf the internet. Notice how you never join these forums.

Did a little bit more work this morning and before I forget the steps let me make a note here. This is starting to become a step by step thing and thats cool.

So far this morning I changed the header colors so it doesn't look like a default wordpress blog. If you notice I am leaving the upper right part in the logo blank. This will be for my newsletter sign up. I have huge success placing the sign up box here on my other sites.

I changed the color on the main body text from the default grey to black. I can't stand reading grey text and if it was easy to read newspapers would be printed in grey.

Changed the sidebar to one where I can place links to other sites and added a few empty text boxes that will contain my monetization at a later date.

Next to do on the list is add google analitics (hate spelling that word so I dont bother correcting it anymore). This way I can see what post are getting traffic and can post more on that subject. Give the people what they want.

I went over and posted on one of my favorite forums and dropped the link in for people to join the forum. Didn't spam the forum just asked nicely. It is very hard to get a site and a forum going at the same time as you lose focus on things but I opened the can of worms already so its too late.   

Made another two post - fixed meta tags and description.

The site is already in yahoo http://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A0oGklxqWtxHsi8BfjJXNyoA?p=awesomewreckage&y=Search&fr=yfp-t-501&ei=UTF-8

and Google http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1T4GGIC_enUS255US255&q=awesomewreckage.com

Not that I am surprised. The nyfalcon.com forum gets spidered alot due to the fresh quality content.

I have added the RSS feed to my Igoogle page for both the forum and the site. That is my little trick to having the search engines find your site in a hurry. If you don't have a IGoogle page I suggest you get one. It is a personalized search page that you can add widgets and cool stuff to. By adding your rss feed to your homepage you are inviting Google to look at your site.

Of course I am not ranking for ceratin keywords yet but I don't care yet either. My site is not a quality site just yet but it is getting there. It is captivating with the pictures (which are also optimized and tagged). Just hover your mouse over the picture and see the descriptions.

   

Craigslist posting http://newyork.craigslist.org/brk/wan/

Just a few lines looking for fans nothing much.

small screenshot

You guys are all being good I am surprised there is no questions so far. Must all be sitting back reading this stuff, I would prefer to have a question or two actually.

Anyway today I didn't do much because I went into Search Engine Strategies session in New York City. I didn't do much there either except meet an old buddy of mine that asked me to speak at a web convention. I refused politely, since I don't want to do it - Not my passion maybe some other time.

Heard back from two of the blogs that I added comments to and one guy liked the site and added a link to his racing blog. Pagerank 5 so I will take that of course. 

To answer your question: Yes , Yes and Yes

Ok now the first thing that jumped out my me was there was no way to get back to your homepage from that page. Every page on your site needs some easy way for the user to get back to the main page where your main navigation is.

The best thing you can do with your site is build trust. Let the user get to know you and upon that trust sales will come in more often. Think about the sites that you visit and look at their websites about us. Odds are you feel friendly with the site thats why you return to it.

As for what not to say I really can't think of anything at all, unless you have a felony for something:)

I always personalize the page. You are building a relationship with your users. You want them to keep coming back. I was on a blog recently that had a link to one of my sites. It said something like this.

"On examplesite.com there is a lot of useful information and Vinny really knows his stuff when it comes to widgets" Then a link back to my site with one of my main keywords in the anchor text. You can't beat that stuff.

Make yourself into the prince of peas. Explain how you got interested in them, heck even I want to know that.   

Danny the Privacy policy page is not up on the site yet. Probably just a simple copy and paste mistake on my part.

The Bad Behavior thing is much less work. It will be replacing the akimiset on all my sites

Nifty I am blessed with the ability to think like the end user. It is just a lot of little stuff that you can do to make your site more personalized.

I swear by Aweber and yes it is expensive if you think about the price. I think about the service. What made me choose aweber was the fact that they can set up your newsletter to go out automaticly. Let me show you a quick example.

Since Awesome Wreckage is set up on wordpress, aweber grabs my rss feed and places it in a newsletter whenever I post to the site. No work from me except actually posting to a blog. It took me about 20 minutes to set up. Lets talk for a product site for a minute. Lets say your favorite affiliate manager gives you a coupon for 50% off a product that fits your niche. You post that to your blog/site and it arrives in your buyers email in minutes.

Most of the stuff I use aweber for is an actual website where I added the wordpress blog just for the newsletter purpose. Here is the ny falcon website. http://www.nyfalcon.com/ Not much there yet because I have been posting to the blog http://www.nyfalcon.com/blog/ instead. My headlines are the headlines you actually get in the email subject line so I do pretty good on my open rates. If you havent joined the nyfalcon.com newsletter I recomend you do even though I give out the free ebook here on the site also.

(note to self need a privacy policy on the nyfalcon site)

Just wanted to pop in here and say thank you for this thread. I am watching it closely and learning a lot from your process and very appreciative of your sharing it with us.

I am falling a little behind lately, Actually I guess I am doing what most newbies do when they start a new site. I get tired of it, not the site but the subject. Been doing some behind the scenes stuff and I finally got around to joining myspace. 

Now it is way too early for myspace to drive me traffic. I am not looking to join myspace so I can drop my link in so the search engines give me a back link. Thats not the case at all. I want actual people that like Nascar to join the forum. The more the better. It is a slow and steady process although I could get a few thousand Friends in a day or so by sending out a bot (think thats what they call it) I wont do that. This is all about making a quality site that people will use and contribute.

Here is a screen shot as you can see only tom is my friend, that will change quickly. My goal is 100 friends by monday and most will like nascar.

I went to the auto show today and they had some nascar cars in the lobby so I got more pics for my site. Kind of cool they even had the Daytona 500 car.

Anyway I am only up to 30 friends as you will see in the picture below. Its all good I am sure that more will approve me tomorrow when its not a holiday. Now of course when they accept you as a friend you go back and leave a comment with your website so all their friends can see it. 

So my site has just got an influx of traffic for FREE. I don't know about you but I like things free.

Here are some stats for the new site courtesy of Google analytics. Lets take a little look at what it says. First off the top link for awesome is going to be from nyfalcon.com since its all over this forum. Thats all well and good but not what I am shooting for.

Now Mslinks is second which is referals from myspace. They have been using this as their redirect or whatever you want to call it.

Chatboards.ebay is 3rd since I mentioned my forum on the chatboards at ebay in the sports board.

4th is email.secureserver. that is because I have a signature in my email for my site.

Stumbleupon - I guess someone stumbled my site, thats always a good thing to have your site recomended in a social network.

Youtube - I didn't write about youtube yet and how to get people from that site on to yours. That will be next post.

Boston herald - looks like they picked up some stuff from the site and replublished it witha link back to the site.

Cool car photos - looks like they linked to me since I have cool car photos.


Now its way to early to be looking at this, but as you can see it is never too early to be getting traffic from referer sources.