GardeningInFlorida.com is one of my own sites created 7-years ago to put my self-taught HTML and design skills to use and also keep an online record of the plants that I grew and photographed. It grew into a huge gardening-related content site offering information on many different types of plants, flowers and vegetables etc.

As I became more involved with search engine optimization, GIF became one of my main testing sites utilized to push the search engine guidelines to the limit. This allowed me to test all SEO theories and enable me to learn the methods to gain the most targeted traffic legitimately and never through SPAM.

When I became heavily involved with affiliate marketing I used this site again to test and become a true affiliate publishing site. This gave me incredible insight to what an affiliate publisher wants and needs. What converts to sales and why. This aided much in the creation of affiliate programs for other clients and in the procurement of new affiliates for clients as I was one.

Currently the site is being rebuilt due to a bad hosting situation. It is a full-fledged gardening content site with many active affiliates. The down-time did cause me quite a hit in the traffic department and rebuilding the site and traffic has been quite quick. Currently we get more than 30,000 unique visitors per month with active affiliate commissions. Still used as a test site. All new theories tested through this site before applied to any client projects.

I began the project in December of 2000. The site had just launched and had zero traffic. The first project implemented was true search engine optimization to the site. The site was completely dynamic which meant limited content for the search engines to index. I spent many hours identifying the target search terms through much research and analysis of their product and industry competition. We ended up with more than 200 targeted search terms. Every page of the site itself was optimized for the main key words. 20 additional domains were created utilizing relative brand and verbiage within the domains. These sites/domains were designed to spread out the chosen search terms as you cannot possibly optimize one site to rank well for 200+ search terms at the same time. It is important to know that all sites had a different design so that visitors and search engines could not tell any affiliation to the main ShoeSpot site. Traffic was funneled through these sites to the main site. Some examples are (Please note that this company has since been sold and I don't think any of the domains are live or active anymore as the new owner decided to liquidate the inventory and close down the site/company):

Famous-Brand-Footwear.com
Payless-For-Shoes.com
Kenneth-Cole-Reaction.com
Doc-Martins.com

It took 30 days to begin seeing some tiny bit of search engine activity. Every bit of 90-days to really see the results of my efforts. Within the first 90-days we had gained many top 10 rankings for most of our chosen search terms. This equated more than 25,000 unique user sessions, approximately $20,000 in sales. Monthly reports were generated for the client documenting where we ranked with every target search term within the top 20 major search engines. Site was tweaked, re-optimized and resubmitted every month.

In July of 2001 we began testing some of our most successful search terms with CPC campaigns in Overture, formerly GoTo. Once we established the most cost-effective terms we duplicated in all other CPC-type campaigns as they became available. Research showed that (at that time) GoTo was the only one providing the worthwhile traffic volume. I used tracking URLs so that we could track which terms actually converted to what sales. This enabled me to run the campaign as cost effective as possible. It was simple. If it didn't convert we didn't do it. Many times we could tell why and fix it. Then go back and try the search term again. A good example of this is many clicks but low sales for a particular brand. Because I could track well I could see that the reason the sales were low was due to few styles available for a given brand. We would cut back, but more product and retest, etc. I no longer have 90% of the reports and information at my disposal, but here are the unique visitors July through December 2001:

In October of 2001 I implemented the Affiliate Program. Why an Affiliate Program? COST PER ACTION. For the first time ever in a mess of banner advertising CPC campaigns and many other ways of selling traffic with no promise of visitors or sales was true Affiliate Marketing born. You CAN do this pay per visitor or lead too depending on your business, but I am all about paying ONLY when I make a sale! Research studies showed (at that time) that Affiliate Marketing was averaging 30% of internet sales and sometimes as high as 50%. It took about a month to research, plan, implement the software, and officially roll out the Affiliate Program. We went live late October of 2001. Below is an outline of what I produced through the Affiliate Program alone. Please keep this in mind in this and all projects for ShoeSpot.com that I did not work full time for this company and hours varied. In this case I am noting actual hours per month dedicated solely to the Affiliate Marketing Program thus proving that the success would have been much greater had more hours been spent.

The affiliate program was implemented utilizing AffiliateWiz software which we customized to suit ShoeSpot and the affiliates needs. Tracking tied directly into our system so sales information was live real-time information instead of depending on the software. All returns were handled automatically instead of having to be maintained separately.