Question to all of you with websites..

I'm not sure if I'm posting this in the right topic, but my question is directed to all of you out there with ecommerce or sales related websites (in other words, make your income off your website).

My question is: Do any of you make a living off your website and are NOT in the top 20 rankings of search engines, NOT doing blogs, NOT doing pay per clicks and NOT on ebay or amazon etc.? In other words, your traffic might be coming from paid banner or text ads you have placed on other related websites that possibly are at the top of major search engines, magazines, etc. and have brought you alot of trafic?

Nope can't say I do. There are sites we sell on such as Ebay but as for sites the search engines(mainly google) are our biggest referrers. I find banner ads perform the lowest of any advertising method, atleast for what I do. PPC is the only alt method of advertising I would use.

In general, my answer to your question would be "NO".

However, I know of a number of affiliate programs that get that level of sales simply by offering good commissions and run a very trustworthy service. They have recruited TopSERPs webmasters to promote their programs.

ppc is the way to get visitors on the website but still the massive traffic can be attained by optimizing your website. i mean organic results. Optimisation will help to increase your site’s position on the major search engines, which will enable you to become more visible to your target audience. So don’t just focus on the easy way to get results, work to get them because in the long run you’ll save money and attract more visitors.

I've made a lot of money that way with adult traffic and I still do quite well, but nowadays I get a lot more SE & bookmarker traffic than anything else.

Oh, believe me I'm not trying the easy way out. I've spent 2 years optimizing both my websites, getting quality links etc. and have not got much of anywhere on SEO. One of my 2 year old site's home page disappeared from top 100 rankings about 2 months ago and has not returned since. I've done every possible thing to help it and no such luck. I believe it will never return. The same thing happened to my husband's website homepage about the same time. Yet all the pages within his site still rank well. I have no idea why this has happened, but it's out of my control. My other website is only a year old and is not even in the top 100 for moderately competitive keywords, and most of my competitors have sites over 5 years old...so it looks fairly bleek there, and pay per clicks are just too much cost per click for my keywords.

However, the reason I asked this question in the first place is that both my sites are on a wedding related website that ranks in the top searches for things I am selling and I have text ads on it as well as my own page they created for me and it seems to be bringing me a fair amount of business. Not enough money that one could quit their day job, but certainly enough for a married housewife. I just wondered if my field just happens to be one of those special cases or if anyone else had some luck with advertisements bringing customers. I know if I ever made it into the top 10 for any of my keywords, it could mean the difference of making a fair amount of income to making alot of money, but I've just given up hope of that happening any time soon or possibly ever.....

Have you regionalized your site?

Yeah but still you need a way to get that product/tool/whatever out there for webmasters to start affiliating with it. I said banner ads don't work. I should clarify that. Banner ad networks don't work. Banner ads overall have died a great death, but if placed on related sites they can do well. Especially if it is webmaster related and it has something on the banner that makes the webmaster think there is great earning potential there. I click banners once in a while when they are targeted to the site but NEVER click a ad network banner where the ads are bashing bush, 'should we pull our troops out' etc.

I'm not sure what you mean by regionalized. I am targeting customers nationwide. Mostly around the USA and Canada. I occasionally get overseas customers.

I am by no means an expert with your niche but it seems to me people searching for wedding stuff may attempt to keep it local. You still optimize for the phrases you currently do but say you live in Tampa, Florida you should own that search ie "wedding widgets tampa" or "clearwater, fl wedding stuff". In a very competitive market such as yours maybe localizing it will help your positioning.

The wedding industry is one of those that can still benefit from good old print media I would guess.
Without diverging from the original question I will just throw that out there.

I dont know of any shopping sites and I have not made any which are successful without the types of advertising you mention.

Well written articles in your field or press releases can bring a lot of traffic (and quality links, which it sounds like you need). You have a targetted industry and if you can write some articles I think that they may rank well themselves in Search Engines and bring traffic to your site that way.

Take a look at SDEO Chat's own Gary The Scuba Guy's thread on linking 101. There are lots of good tips, not just for link building but content development as well

Link Building 101

Actually I have wrote articles on my website that are probably a few months old, plus have submitted articles to article sites about 2 weeks ago which have backlinks to my sites. I have tried numerous times to contact .edu sites that have my competitors links on their sites and sites that have my competitors links listed on their home page, but none seem to want to add me. Both my sites show over 1500 links on yahoo link command, but I guess they still aren't quality links. I could sit here day after day and pull my hair out trying to find good links, but all it seems to do is put me under a great deal of stress. At this point all I can do is just sit and hope I move up naturally even though my site is only a year old....as there is probably no hope for the older site since it has not returned to searches after 2 months. It is not banned or penalized.

That sounds like a discouraging situation. However dont lose hope. It sounds like you are doing everything the right way and that will prove beneficial in the long run if you give it (even more) time.

Have you thought about hiring a professional SEO who can bear the stress of ranking for you?
Maybe you can share the URL and we can take a peek at the site and see of we notice anything that you may have overlooked?

And not to beat my preverbial dead horse but it seems to me when your talking weddings its the women doing most of the planning and purchasing. Weddings being one of the most personal things a women does I'd think they would like to keep it close to home so they can nit-pick the crap out of it. I did a check on "weddings memphis" just to look and a lot of people are using the city name in the search. My 24th wedding anniversary is this Monday and I still remember how involved my wife was in every detail - I on the otherhand just wanted to get on with it!