What am I doing wrong?

I'm a complete noob at internet/affiliate marketing. I got interested in it while learning a bunch about rss/xml feeds, and decided to use a domain I had layng around to test it all out. My affiliate site is www.fmbridal.com. Its hosted with whypark.com, and that's where all the articles come from. The additional pages (jewelry, books, etc.) are custom pages, and I've added wedding related affiliate programs using the javascript "store" from feedshare.com. I've been building links with the directory submission software from digixmas.com, and I recently started doing link exchanges with wedding related sites through linkmarket.net. It's been a few months now, and I've made exactly $0.00 from my affiliate programs, and the amount I've made from Adsense ($0.29 last month) isn't even going to cover the domain name renewal.

SEO-wise, Google reports 14 links in my sitemaps panel, and 2 with the link: command. Yahoo shows 292 IBLs. The site is PR2. It has about 997 pages indexed, but about 987 of them are in the supplemental index. I know I need more quality inbound links to get more pages out of the supplemental index, but what else should I be doing? Should I be buying ppc ads? traffic?? IBLs from quality sites??? Or is it my choice of affiliate programs (kinda limited by the domain)? I know there has to be more to this because the amount of work I've put in is worth way more than $0.29.

 

I think your adsense placement needs improving and 468X60 adsense blocks have less clicks because people are more likely to ignore them.

 

In firefox your site has a broken design. The content section is not centered in the page, it is to the left.

Just a heads up.

As far as promotion, you need to do some keyword research and optimize. Use Overture stats, check # of results for keywords in Google, and check allintitle: numbers for those potential keywords.

Your title just says FM Bridal.

I would suggest:
-Fix design problem first.
-Directory submissions- vary your title. Check solicitations thread here at DP and submit to several each day.
-Post on related forums. (bridal/wedding and general women's forums).

I wouldn't do PPC. I just got started with an affiliate site. First experience ever in this and I had 3 sales for ~$100 in my first month.

1 sale came from PPC (But didn't profit much because my PPC cost was about the same).
2 came through posts on related forums.

I am focusing on seo and free marketing methods mainly. I also purchase permanent directory placements when there are good deals in the Directory Solicitation section. I suggest you do the same.

Personally, I could put Adsense on my site to make some money, but:
1) If I am going to send a visitor away to make money, I might as well send them off to a site where I can make serious money ($27 to $90).
2) Adsense would change my site's asthetics.

You really also want to know about the topic you are targeting. If you don't know about it, it will be much harder.

Also, I would suggest that you DO NOT just put up any article on bridal/wedding stuff. Suppose you put up these free articles and the bottom of the article is to another resource or to someone's ebook. How does that help you? Sure you get free content, but if YOUR visitor reads the article and goes to the link at the bottom, are they likely going to come back to your site? Think about that. (If the author's site sucks or somehow isn't related, then they will probably come back to your site! hint hint- so it should be ok to put that article on your site!)

Be wary of where you are sending your visitors through the free articles.

And write some articles yourself! You can buy some quality articles from members here on DP.

 

I didn't think to check that template with ff...doh! Good catch.

The articles on the site are all placed by whypark. I have very little control over what gets shown there. All the articles are selected based on the keywords for my site. If I picked "sports medicine" as a keyword, I'd get sports medicine related articles. I can't specify which sports medicine related articles I want though. It's an all or nothing kinda deal.

I do lots of directory submissions using the Digixmas software, and I suppose it averages out to about 10 directories per day. I doubt all of them are SEO friendly, but it only takes about 5 minutes to do so I'm pretty happy with it.

I should write some articles, but I'm in the process of rewriting Article Distributor. And since I hate manually submitting articles, I've been holding off on articles until its done. I'm still a long ways away from finishing it though, so maybe I should write one or two and just submit it with Article Distributor.

Hmph. It sounds like I'm doing everything right (except for the posting in wedding related forums...I should do some of that), I just need some more time.

Thanks for the advice guys.