Online Success Story: Charlene Stackpole
http://www.pureskinblog.com
My name is Charlene Stackpole and I started my website approximately 2 years ago. Following the blogs of Lynn Terry and Jackie Lee, led me to training from Kim Roach, and several others.
I set up a wordpress blog, having no internet experience and now have over 400 visitors per day from strictly organic traffic. My website is still a work in progress as I continue to learn more and more marketing and SEO strategies...
1. When did you set up your website?
Fall of 2008
2. What gave you the idea for this particular niche & website?
In my forties and concerned about aging, I happened to find an all natural skin care product that took 10 years off the look of my skin and from there, I began to research all natural skin products. What I found out about everyday skin care and beauty products was shocking. I bought and read every book and magazine about the dangers of chemical ingredients in these products along with researching all natural skin care products.
There are thousands of effective natural beauty products on the market today not sold in stores and nobody knows about them. Another shocker. Natural skin products in most cases, will eliminate major skin issues such as eczema, psoriasis, acne, and repair aging skin. I felt the need to get this information out there to the public. These products change lives and I love to write about them!
3. Did you have any experience with online business prior to creating this website?
No, I did not which led to many online distractions and an overwhelming amount of misinformation.
4. What did you do for work prior to setting up an online business?
I worked as a store manager from the time I was 18 years old and no longer wanted to be a slave to retail hours.
5. How did you initially promote your website, and if different - how do you promote it now?
I have always relied strictly on organic traffic from the search engines using good, quality content both on my site and through article marketing.
6. Is your website profitable? Can you share some basic traffic & profit stats with us?
My site is profitable, making approximately $500 per month with 300-400 visitors a day. Not too bad considering I had no idea what I was doing. I am only affiliated with companies that I stand behind and products that I have used myself.
I can't bring myself to use AdSense on my site because I don't believe in them and find most to be ads for junk. I know that I am leaving money on the table however, I would much rather offer my visitors quality products that they wouldn't find elsewhere.
7. What are your plans for the site going forward?
My site has huge potential as I am learning new information on how to improve it every single day. When I set up my blog, I knew very little about SEO and nothing about backlinks and sales pages, not to mention the most important step, and my next project, setting up an opt-in email campaign so that I may communicate with my readers on a regular basis. I will also work on getting more “targeted visitors.”
8. What ONE piece of advice would you give someone interested in starting their own niche site or blog?
Do not get distracted by subscribing to every internet marketing newsletter thinking that it may be the step that you need. You will get overwhelmed and lose focus on the project at hand. Unfortunately most internet marketing gurus are selling other people’s products and start their sales pitches exactly that way...."are you overwhelmed with information? This is what you need."
The only thing you need is a step by step course on how to set up your blog, how to write for your blog and articles linking back to your blog, and of course small marketing tips from your favorite, sincere, experienced marketers. No automatic posting software, no rehashed articles, just good, unique, quality content that the search engines will love. Offer good information and write, write, write!
Charlene Stackpole
http://www.pureskinblog.com
-Thank you, Charlene and congratulations on your success!
About Lynn Terry
Charlene,
great site you have - i was just wondering if your latest post really is from last september? or am i reading this incorrectly? this is not meant to be mean - i was just wondering - it seems great to me if, after working hard for a while, you can leave your site as it is and still make money from it. great job
Hi Monja,
I am ranking highly for the keyword "best anti aging cream", have built links to my main page for that keyword so I made the 2 articles for that keyword "sticky". Not sure if it helps me or if it doesn't matter. My feed notifies readers of my new posts. I try to post at least once a week so if you scroll down a bit you will see more current dates. What is your opinion?
So what step by step course do you recommend, charlene?
Find a course that shows you step by step how to set up a wordpress blog. The course I used over 2 years ago will obviously be outdated but there are many that you can find on the warrior forum. From there I wrote and submitted articles to ezine articles myself. I new nothing of Seo and nowadays you can learn about on page seo for free on many internet marketing sites such as this one. I spent hundreds on warrior forum promising a new technique and there is nothing that I can't get for free. I get free info from Marketing Assassins, Lynn, Jackie Lee, Kim Roach, and Lisa Parmley of In Line Seo Systems taught me how to set up a blog correctly the second time around.
Congratulations on your great online success story, you have done really good effort to achieve your target.
You have a great site and a huge potential for traffic growth and monetization in your market (everyone wants nice skin, right?). Although I've only created one e-book for sale to date, I think you have the knowledge and blog traffic to successfully create some great e-books on natural skin care. I think this could be a great way to monetize your site and work well with any subscribership you build.
Your excellent content will presell well because you clearly know what you're talking about.
This is a great site charlene. It's also a pretty niche with huge readers. I suggest you focus on delivering quality information and your reputation would grow like the speed of inflation.
I really like your use of pictures on the blog! It's vibrant and clean at the same time.
Another great example of success, and a great advice at the end, focus being the one thing every new blogger lacks.
You're on the right track, Charlene, keep up the good work!
I'm with Monja where she asked if your last post was Sept.
FYI, if I land on a site where it appears the posts are dated, I quickly leave. I just assume the info is not up to date and owner of site has lost interest.
If you think it's important, I believe you can change your WP settings.. maybe even eliminate the dates altogether.
I think you have done SEO of your site properly and wrote quality contents.Finally welcomed the relative traffic.
You have encouraged me to move forward in online business.From your this post I can guess that if you can get a targeted traffic of 1000 per day your income can be more than double.
I too am inspired by this post. I believe it is all about choosing that right niche. I have several blogs/sites and while I have had some of them for several years, I have not done enough. My best one only gets about 200-300 visitors a day but makes only about $50 on average a month due to not very many options for making money other than adsense and a few affiliate promotions that do well(but don't generate much in commissions). You have made me rethink some things.
I have just started this new site and am hoping that I will have better success. Having a great back link strategy(thanks to a friend I now have), and a solid plan in mind that you CONSISTENTLY work on, you can get where you want to be. I would like to see if I could get 2000 visitors a day and make $2500 a month. Do you think that is possible?
thanks for the help!
Melanie,
One of the secrets to making as much as I do on my blog, is finding an expensive product with a great commission. One of the companies advertised on my blog pays 50% commission and an average sale is over $200. The sales page must be good also so that it has a high conversion rate. I hear of people setting up hundreds of sites with adsense and it makes no sense to me. The skin care niche is extremely competitive and I still manage to make money. I have however chosen a niche that is slightly less competitive the second time around.
Charlene, Thank you for sharing your story. Nice choice for a niche. I always preach about carefully choosing your niche and I see you have a winner here, since everyone has skin and many people care about how they look.
You've been at this blogging game for two years and have 300 to 400 visitors per day. I don't know how much time you invest in your blog every day or what secret tips you know and are incorporating, but you could easily increase your daily traffic to several thousand within the next few months.
A friend of mine earns $25,000 plus per month from an average of 150,000 monthly visitors and he reached that point within six months. The exciting news in all of this is that new tools have made the traffic building job much easier than my friend had it.
If you want, I would be happy to pass his secrets along to you as a favor from a fellow blogger. Just use the contact link on my site and we can figure out a way to connect.
Thanks for the post Lynn! I appreciate the work you're doing.
Sure Dave, you can pass the info along however I don't believe in much of the linking that has been promoted in the past year and links from link farms or links from monthly subscription sites are not something I am interested in right now. Most of them are junk and it is embarrassing to even have a link pointing to my blog on some of those sites. You are right, I could definitely have more visitors if I had more time to write!
Love reading stories like this. Gives us newbies that are trying to make money in Internet Marketing and blogging that it CAN BE DONE. I have only been doing this seriously for a few months now, but reading all of these wonderful stories of ordinary people making money talking about things they love is really giving me motivation to keep going!
Really great article. It will really help budding website developers like us to look forward. I started my own website about six month back and i am looking for tips from people like you. Thanks a lot for sharing.
Thanks Charlene. I clicked over to your pureskinblog and it looks like it has a lot of great information. My new product site is in the same anti-aging skin market, so I'm hoping it will take off.