Well, I don't normally bring threads back from the dead (5 months has passed), but I'd like to comment on some of the discussion going on here. Also, Thank You Steve! That post was a revelation for me, and completely applies to me at this point in time. Just priceless info.
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MadHyeNa
PS: Invest your time more productively. Don't spend meaningless hours working on your site if there is little or no gain at all. Better read a few SEO articles, apply those, and expect the results. Spend your time on valuable activities. Do the marketing. Advertise. Optimize. Reap the results.
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It's true, SEO is important, but one should remain balanced.
This is interesting. That comment written about 5 months ago, right? Well 5 days ago (weird coincidence), James published this little gem:
How To Break Free from the SEO Wannabe Mindset He asks himself some great questions about how he feels about SEO, and basically summarizes what he learned from this thread (mostly from Steve's fantastic advice) Great article, James! I really enjoyed it.
Jim, I also noticed that SmallTownBigShot currently has an
Alexa rating of 431,777! Congratulations on your progress.
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What I've seen time and time again is a pattern like this:
320 Hits
400 Hits
800 Hits
825 Hits
5,099,388 Hits
It's like all of a sudden it's BAM! a crapload of traffic just shows up and then it grows linear/exponential from there... What I'm interested in looking for is why this happens. What CAUSES these QUANTUM LEAPS in traffic. Study Steve's traffic, study JohnChow.com and you'll see what I mean.
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I think we see growth patterns like this because you're seeing many trends (which could be represented in waves) as overlapping. One wave is steadily climbing as more links come in, and another we could call a "hit wave." If just one article gets popular on StumbleUpon, that wave peaks and add to the smaller wave. Except it's not always easy to see the difference between these two types of waves in your statistics.
Although Nightdiamond seems to be quite gung-ho about newsletters, I have to wonder why Steve only choses to send out about 2 newsletters per year. Why restrict your content to be accessible only by newsletter? Wouldn't putting your content up on a blog and then using contextual advertising make you more revenue in the long run? Isn't the best way to use email by allowing your visitors to subscribe to your RSS via email if they so choose?
Thoughts.
I'm learning so much, and it's saving me a lot of wasted effort.
Thank you all, and Thank You Steve!
