Wordpress Review Site, Blog, Hybrid? Where Do I Go From Here?

So, as a beginning web-site designer (or less affectionately, "a mere blogger") I have an endless list of questions but I will try to include a few that hopefully get me going in the right direction. First, I'll state my initial goals/setup/intentions for my site as succinctly as I can: I have created a WordPress site that I hope to build into a monetized product review site. The site is currently structured with a main "home" page (which currently includes all posts) and two subdomains, each of which focuses on a completely separate subject/product market (one is music products while the other is book reviews). I'm not sure if this setup is the best way to go, but I like to think that using subdomains will allow me to organize/separate content better than simply using a "categories" menu at the top. Maybe I can post to the main site chronologically and "filter" posts out to the subdomains as I progress with content creation? My wish is to monetize by joining affiliate networks (to link to products/books being reviewed), as well as utilizing PPC ad networks (e.g. clickbank). Hopefully you're still with me at this point.

One of my more general questions is: Am I doing this in the right order?
As of now, I have quite a small amount of content as I have been trying to learn about a lot of the technical aspects involved (e.g. Creating a top menu that has tabs (Home, Books, Music, Privacy Policy) that go directly to subdomain pages, tracking) and making sure the site is structured so it operates the way I would like it to. It has taken quite some time but I believe that Google Analytics is now set up so the traffic I wish I had is properly tracked. That leads to a few more questions, one general and one more specific:
1) How do I get traffic to my site?
2) Will it take some time before my site gets indexed by google (therefore coming up in search results)? Or, is there something more I can do (I have been reading up on and trying to implement SEO) to increase my search presence?

I have many more questions but I will leave it at this for now. Please, if you have some advice about my questions, or anything you think may help me, I am all ears over here. Remember, I am relatively new to this so some of the "obvious" answers may not be so obvious to me. Thank You in advance.

 

Which country are you in? In the USA, you have to explicitly put a disclaimer on pages with reviews where you can make money off the product you are reviewing. If you are not in the USA, this is irrelevant.

I disagree with using sub domains in this manner. You really have no reason to use sub domains in this situation which would be better suited to using categories and having the category appear in the URL like this:

yoursite.tld/music/some-article-title
yoursite.tld/books/some-book-title

Or something similar. Then you can run custom PHP code based on the category if you need to. Also, search engines view sub domains as separate websites and you do not want to split any incoming link juice between separate domain names. (At least that used to be true. Regardless, using sub domains like this is not wise.)

Any way you can, and it is not easy. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it and getting rich.

Just having a site does not mean Google will rank you where anyone will find you. The further you go off the first page, the less traffic you will get. And yes, it will take some time. A few weeks at least, if all goes well. Never, if things do not go well.

I believe the old method of trying to get incoming links to your site still applies.

We were all newbies once. Most people around here will not bite your head off.

 

I will certainly work on adjusting the setup so posts will be organized by category rather than by subdomain. I want to make sure I do everything to ensure maximum traffic and search engine presence and I didn't realize that creating subdomains would hinder this. That will certainly make content management easier as I won't have to jump around between subdomains to change wordpress settings. I hope this will also make tracking more efficient and manageable as I've currently got separate Google Analytics tracking codes for each domain and it seemed to take forever to get it all coordinated so each code corresponded to the correct domain, sumome settings, etc. etc. Haha. Not that all that work was in vain. It's a learning process for me, after all. One question before I go changing anything, though. Will setting up with categories rather than subdomains still allow me to create content only in those categories that won't show up on the main page? I guess I'm asking, will I still be able to create a static "home" page if I care to take that route at some point with posts separated categorically?

P.S.: I'm not familiar with custom PHP coding (I will look it up) but if it will help to structure my page properly I would like to know more about it. Cross that bridge when I come to it, though, I guess.

P.P.S: My current budget is as little as I can get away with spending . I have, of course, spent some for a domain & hosting as I do see the value of not having "___.blogspot.com" attached to my site. In short, I would like to get setup (read "have some income being generated by affiliate links or ads") before thinking about investing too heavily in other resources. I know, I know. Don't we all?

 

Yes, you will be able to create a static front page. No blog posts will appear on the static front page anyway. Blog posts only appear on the page you designate as the "blog" when you setup a static front page. And even then, if you wanted to keep certain categories off the blog page, you could write a few lines of PHP/Wordpress code to do that.

Categories only apply to blog posts, not to pages. So keep that in mind. You can work around this in a number of different ways.

Also keep in mind that the forum at Wordpress.org can be helpful when asking for very specific stuff. You can find answers about Wordpress here, and a lot of places. But sometimes when you need information, the creator is the best source.

https://codex.wordpress.org/Main_Page
https://wordpress.org/support/

That is a good strategy. The information you will learn will be worth much more than the domain registration and hosting expenses you incur. Worst case scenario: you have a fun hobby. Best case: you make some money and enjoy doing it. Either way, if you enjoy doing it, it will be worthwhile.

 

Does this mean that I can now go ahead and get rid of those subdomains? As well as separate tracking codes/accounts/etc. that are set up for each? I read somewhere about duplicate content stuff not being exactly loved by google.

 

Yeah, you can get rid of that stuff. But before you do, you are doing:

* A static front page;
* A blog with mainly two categories.

That is about it? What will the URL of your blog be? You can do it like this:

yoursite.tld/category/post-title

Or
yoursite.tld/blog/category/post-title

Which do you prefer?

 

I would prefer the format mysite.tld/category/post-title. And as for the content of the blog, I have stuck to two categories (music and books) right now just because I know I can put up some good content for those two categories. My hope is to be able to expand into other categories.
Essentially, my end goal is to create a monetized site where I can post product reviews with affiliate links. Is this a realistic goal? Is this an effective way, so far, to accomplish that?

Aside: Are there other ways I should plan to monetize?

 

Niche marketing is what it's all about. If your passions are "music" and "books" find sub-genres in each of those categories and develop sites around those areas of interest. You'll do much better following this strategy, as opposed to building a general site with no focus.

 

Thanks, dcristo. It seems like I'm hearing "You might be spreading yourself (and your site) a little to thin," in different ways quite a bit lately, and that advice won't go unheeded. As of now, my mental plan says I'm going for "music" and "books" whereas my actual content (so far) says that I'm going for "violin & learning to play violin" and "self-help books." What I'm hearing from you is that, rather than expand, I may do well (in terms of traffic and ultimately, affiliate conversions?) to focus more selectively on the subject of my content. Am I understanding you correctly?

 

Yeah. Although personally I would stay away from self-help books, that's a very crowded niche. By building a niche site, it's much easier being a big fish in a small pond rather than a small fish in a big pond. And once you develop the skills building your first niche site that gets traffic and converts, simply rinse and repeat with other niche sites.

 

In your Wordpress admin panel, go to
Settings -> Permalinks
Select Custom Structure, and then enter this into the box:
/%category%/%postname%

And that should make your blog posts yoursite.tld/category/post-title.

As for pages, you can create hierarchy of pages to sort of simulate a structure. When you choose to Add New Page, you can select a parent page if you want to make the page you are now creating a child of the parent. Then the URL structure of the pages will be yoursite.tld/parent-page/child-page and you can have multiple children under one parent to simulate categories/hierarchy.

If you are in the USA and you provide endorsements of products and receive compensation from sales of those products, you must explicitly disclose that on your web page.

As for the sub genres, I think it will be harder to be successful with multiple small niche sites than one larger site. Music and books are both leisure time activities so in that way they are related. The more decent content you give search engines to match search requests to, the more visitors you are likely to get.

 

Thank you Billzo, you're a genius. Changing my permalinks structure to /%category%/%postname%/ has got it to look like it did before (e.g. mysite.net/books/certain-post-name) without losing what I was losing before with subdomains. #Winning

 

In a simple word;

• Write quality content
• Participate in blog community
• Do not loose patience
• Learn and correct yourself
• Ask question in DigitalPoint

Traffic will eventually flow.