A new Go Karts Store after Website Success Story
The biggest reason my Treadmill-World.com website went from $0 to over $100K per month was from having the #1 Organic Ranking on Google (not pay per click / sponsored result). It was a #1 ranking for "treadmills" that lead to many other category and product page rankings across all major search engines. The volume was 2000+ unique visitors per day and the site was receiving more than half of the traffic from Google.
I started applying all of the SEO strategies that I knew. And continued learning from the same program that was costing me $800.00 per month -- StomperNet. I paid $800.000 per month for 3 months and I can tell you that is was well worth it!
Anyway, not knowing if I was going to be in this for the long haul, I did not want to spend a lot on site design. Plus... like I said, I was paying $800.00 per month for an SEO program.
I set up the site with an $8.96 Yahoo Starter and quickly realized the Java script navigation was going to be difficult for search engines to crawl past. This would make it difficult to get a top ranking! So I customized an HTML navigation bar ( a little help the HTML queen too - MOM :). And I customized the site using Site Builder tools.
Next, I landed a contract with a manufacturer as an authorized seller for treadmills and related exercise equipment, and started building pages fast (for every product)! I did keyword research for every single page and made unique title tags for every single page. So eventually every page would have a shot at ranking high in the search engines.
Next, I started writing articles and linking back to my site with the main keyword - treadmills and other main keywords. I also was linking back to the website pages with keywords from the titles on the website. After a month or so I started to see some rankings in MSN and Yahoo. A month or two after that, I noticed my main keyword treadmills was bouncing on and off page 1 of Yahoo & MSN. I started to have sales coming in and the business started to get very exciting!
I continued to work the site and began outsourcing more as money flowed into my account. I paid for as many quality directories as I could (Yahoo, Go Guides, etc). I never did get in Googles DMOZ directory. Argh! I also followed the information that the $800.00 per month program layed out.
I checked the competition on page 1 of Google everyday and tried to implement everything they were doing and more. Although my domain was bought in October of 2006 my site did not go live until March 2006. In October of 2007, I was sitting at #1 on Google for the keyword "treadmills". It was kind of funny to see Sears, Walmart, Dicks Sporting Goods and even my manufacturer below my little treadmill site with the hyphen. lol
The site was eventually sold after a strong 12 month history of earnings for 3x's yearly earnings plus 1 year of residuals. The owner couldn't be more pleased and continues to grow organic searches. The site is typically 3,4 or 5 on Google for treadmills and is #1 on Yahoo & Bing as I write this. Since the sale of treadmill-world, I have been focused on many new business ventures including the social network Wooxie, a tax lien fund, business consulting, dozens of ad pulling mini sites, product development for StomperNet, and a new ecommerce store for go karts and other off-road vehicles.
Check out the new go kart store and the go karts for sale and let me know what you think! http://www.mygokarts.com