Newbies experience with FSB

[fenland]

I just thought I'd give a brief rundown of my findings thus far.

Complete newbie to domaining/affiliate stuff, but have been updating our Companies wordpress website for nigh on two years so not a complete novice with respect to internet marketing stuff.

Anyhow, for my first venture into affiliates I thought I'd have a go with FSB to save me the aggro of ECU or the like.

Got a reasonable EMD (albeit hyphenated) in the .co.uk extension. Google shows 6000 local exacts

Purchased my FSB licence and got a member on here to do a site design and write 4 x 500 word articles.

Popped the site up and have done nothing with it since then (about 2 months ago). Site ranks on about Pg 5 of google for the exact match- but strangely enough not the sites homepage. On page 1 of bing.

Site has been making sales almost daily. 1st Month £38, first 12 days of this month its done £18.

Overall fairly pleased with it for my first site, and one which appears to need little upkeep.

I'm now considering adding a wordpress blog on the back of it to add some fresh content.

Not really sure why I posted, but thought I'd share....

 

[viceroy]

Good going, it's nice to hear of some success with FSB- was going to give it a try but never got round to it!

 

[belovedAunt]

Nice going, mine are still in the doldrums earnings-wise. I will go back and add a page or two more content at the weekend...

 

[max99x]

for the number of visitors im getting the conv rate is very low with FSB .. considering getting rid of it

 

[boxerdog]

I've stopped building stores and putting any effort in to existing ones, from my experience I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, but that's just my opinion.

 

[CatchDrop]

Thanks for posting!

Are those figures your earnings or the Takings?

What products does the store sell?

Matt

 

[fenland]

Some intetesting stuff here.

Being a noob i wasnt sure what a decent conversipn rate was. The site gets about 70-100 uv's/day. From this i reckon 5-15 people click through to amazon. So far this month i have had about (till yesterday) 55 clicks to amazon and 14 sales.

I have had days with >80 uv's and 20 odd clicks to amazon and zero conversion.

the figures i quoted were my earnings and not the value of the amazon sales.

The site sells a produc used in the garden

 

[CatchDrop]

Sounds like you are doing quite well so far.

Was it a fresh reg / aged / fresh catch ? Maybe you're benefitting from an indexed page from a prev. website?

Amazon must be a good place to buy that product.

In Comparison

I've got a fairly dissapointing hyphenated .co :-S product domain with amazon store

Launched Nov/Dec

3,300 Views
150 Adsense Clicks = £36
90 Amazon Clicks = 6 Sales = $23

- I had a look on amazon and I would probably not buy anything from what was available either, bit of a poor offering.

 

[max99x]

Is it easy to add adsense onto fsb?

Sounds like you are doing quite well so far.

Was it a fresh reg / aged / fresh catch ? Maybe you're benefitting from an indexed page from a prev. website?

Amazon must be a good place to buy that product.

In Comparison

I've got a fairly dissapointing hyphenated .co :-S product domain with amazon store

Launched Nov/Dec

3,300 Views
150 Adsense Clicks = £36
90 Amazon Clicks = 6 Sales = $23

- I had a look on amazon and I would probably not buy anything from what was available either, bit of a poor offering.

 

[seanc]

Is it easy to add adsense onto fsb?

Very easy.

Content | Add Sidebox | Free HTML

 

[rodeboy]

FSB sites

I've got several sites on FSB now, some doing quite well, others less so.

Put out ModelHelicopter 10 days ago, and it got hits almost straightaway.

60 UV's since launch date, which I think is quite good in only 10 days.

2 checkouts, but no sales yet. Conversions still a bit of an issue, in general.

Who knows what the future holds for the site, but that's the story so far.

Chris

 

[Ashton]

Made a couple of sites with FSB, they both have earned about £20 each in 3 months. Maybe if I put more effort into them they would do better.

I am willing to give it another try when the new templates are in - apparently the code on them is cleaner.

I dont think the code is particularly good and I think it has a way to go... With his revenue I would have hired a proper team and rebuilt it to the level it could be, with proper clean code, templates, blog engine, easy to customise for other coders... etc..

 

[philiporchard]

FSB has been a disaster for me... Site isn't ranking and only 1 click last month... not even a single click this month...

Crazy

 

[Ashton]

Since fresh installs are a bit broke for me, I decided to try doing it with wordpress, sort of.

http://beautytunics.co.uk/

Just have to write more blog posts. I feel this is a much more sustainable way of running a small niche store (like beauty tunics). I can write all the content I like without any problem and add value to the users.

 

[expertc]

To be honest I don't trust "dedicated shop scripts" anymore. Well, I have experience with DF Studio and AOM (the latest is probably the best Amazon-only script engine imho) but it only takes G a little while to get the "footprint" into it's database and presto - 50 down penalty for thin aff.

As a WP fan I can tell, WP has been the best aff platform for me so far and ShopperPress one of the best "scripts" around. Extremely customizable, I can make any site to look like not a shopperpress site at all.

What I think is: dedicated scripts require no (or almost no) effort and the result is usually the same. ShopperPress does require an effort and some coding knowledge, but it pays back. And yes, it' much cheaper

P.S. All sites in my sig are shopperpress.

 

[fenland]

Well it appears I my have spoken too soon...

Site has virtually disappeared from the rankings overnight

Only thing I have done in the last week was to add a wordpress blog on the back to add some fresh content (cant imagine it was that..????).

Last night was on pg 4 of google for key phrase...today not even on the top 15 pages.

Average around 60-60 UV/day, thus far today the grand sum of 1

 

[expertc]

...but it only takes G a little while to get the "footprint" into it's database and presto - 50 down penalty for thin aff...

It happened to ALL dedicated scripts, BANS was first Even if you put a content it is still considered a "thin affiliate" due to a script. So G penalizes even good sites...

 

[belovedAunt]

I've got a few FSB sites that do OK considering they have no offsite SEO done on them. They only average about £10 a month each in sales, but I found that they settled OK in the SERPs after 3-4 months. Having previosly said that I wasn't going to build any more, I probably will do so if I find the right product.

I think it is possible to mask the fact that it's a FSB script site to some extent (not using standard templates, spin descriptions, change Privacy Policy etc etc so the ALL the content is unique).

I don't know how it would work, but it would be interesting to see if scripts like FSB could develop some kind of pricing model whereby it rewards builders of good quality sites, and makes the lazier ones pay more. After all, it's the people who bung up loads of generic FSB sites (with little unique content) that are risking the SEO viability of the entire script in the long-run?

 

[MikeJDS]

I've got a few FSB sites that do OK considering they have no offsite SEO done on them. They only average about £10 a month each in sales, but I found that they settled OK in the SERPs after 3-4 months. Having previosly said that I wasn't going to build any more, I probably will do so if I find the right product.

I think it is possible to mask the fact that it's a FSB script site to some extent (not using standard templates, spin descriptions, change Privacy Policy etc etc so the ALL the content is unique).

I don't know how it would work, but it would be interesting to see if scripts like FSB could develop some kind of pricing model whereby it rewards builders of good quality sites, and makes the lazier ones pay more. After all, it's the people who bung up loads of generic FSB sites (with little unique content) that are risking the SEO viability of the entire script in the long-run?

I'm also at the 3-4 month stage with my FSB sites and would agree with most of the above.
However my sites have never really settled in the SERPs but the traffic has been quite good throughout.
I was quite lucky in that I made my investment back early and FSB has been worthwhile to me - up to a point.
My main FSB site has tailed off in the last month or so, the others the same really. I continued to add more content etc. but I think Googles finally got my sites for dupe content because of the descriptions. (I've been using the spinner)

I've decided not to plan any more FSB sites but haven't yet given up on the ones I do have.. They have been profitable and I'm sure with a bit more effort I can bring them back to at least where they were.
But there are easier options out there to acheive this.

Main headaches with FSB in my opinion are:
1. The product descriptions.
2. The site structure
3. (as post above) The marketing model.

Having said that I still like FSB - ... It is what it is!
No suprises really, just lack of effort in the right areas on my part I'm sure.

Lets see whats around the corner....

Best wishes
Mike

 

[rodeboy]

Fsb

I've just updated all my sites to v2.6.2 without any issues - thought it might be helpful to share, to provide re-assurance, as I know it can be a nervous process!

To update on my Model Helicopter site - a further week on, it's made it to page 3 of Google for the phrase 'Model Helicopter' from where it got 20 UV's yesterday. In the past two days FSB checkout reports six checkouts, but Amazon reports no sales. This continues to be the big issue for me, as too many customers get lost en route from FSB to Amazon. Any tips?

As I said before, who knows what the future holds for the site.

On a separate note, as a test, last week I converted one of my WP sites, that was using Amazon's aStore for products, to FSB, and where it was getting 1 or 2 hits a day before, it's now getting 10. Not massive I know, but on the basis of 'the more customers through the door, the better chance of a sale' I guess it's a step forward.

Chris