This SEO and marketing business is really complex and confusing for me. I find myself getting pulled in different directions as far as which path I should take. Currently I have 3 affiliate websites (all through Amazon.com). I used to dropship and/or resale all of my products, but that got too time-consuming and so I switched techniques about 6 months ago (then all of my sites got deleted about 2 months ago, but that's a different story) and shifted all of my sites to Amazon.com affiliate sites. I made alot more money by dropshipping ($22,000 in sales last year from just my ant farms website), but I am willing to sacrifice for the convenience. But so far, I haven't been able to reach the same rankings and placement level that I was at before I made the switch and I think I have an idea why and I've made changes to compensate for it (Mod_rewrites and all), but I am out of ideas when it comes to mylong-term strategy. Should I just make as many sites as possible and select the top ones and go from there, or should I just concentrate on the ones that I do have until they are all decent/respectable sites? Anyways, for each site that I have now. I also have a blog related to the websites content in a sub-domain. Does that penalize you? So, I really have 3 websites and 3 blogs. I'm also in the process of making a 4th site with nothing but clickbank products and advertisements. I just can't figure out the best path to take in order to make a decent paycheck. Is Amazon.com crap? I find it odd to hear of people making a ton of money just off advertisements. Are pure hoplink/advertisement/blog sites really that lucrative? I need some guidance. I plan to hire a consultant/website marketing company as soon as I get my tax return or unemployment check, but until then I feel lost.
So, if any SEO gurus are interested in a couple of weeks or so, I'll be looking to hire somebody for consultation and some link/marketing work. Good News: I just got back on the first page of Google #10 for my second best keyword, and I'm on page 3 for my number one keyword! Finally. My sites were down for like 27 days and I lost almost all of my ranking and placement. It's taken a month and a half to get it back. Question: If a keyword has about 450,000 searches per month and you are on the first page, how many hits would you expect to get out of that? Just curious?