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Old 01-16-2008, 01:44 PM   #72 (permalink)
AndrewPavelski
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Nice advice Steve

Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Pavlina View Post
I've seen this pattern countless times, going all the way back to my shareware days. Here's the formula:

Great product + no marketing = no income

Your site has an Alexa.com ranking of 1.67 million. So you have virtually no traffic. That's why the site isn't making money. No traffic = no income. It doesn't matter if you add more content if your traffic isn't growing, since no one will be there to see it.

Google shows you have only 4 incoming links to Toptenlisted.com - The Premier Source for Original Top Ten Lists, and all of them appear to be from your own forum postings. That means no one is linking to your site either, so your search engine rankings will be nearly nonexistent. This will hold you back for sure, and it implies you've been using the wrong strategy ever since you began.

It won't do you much good to keep adding content if no one knows about it. Content alone will only grow your traffic once you've established a reasonable baseline... say 100,000 visitors per month. You're currently tossing new content into a void where no one will see it. Given your traffic levels, hitting "Publish" is almost like hitting "Delete."

If I were in your shoes, here's what I'd do. It won't cost you a dime:

1) Curtail your new blog postings to about 3 posts per week: Mon, Weds, and Fri. Set each post to go live between 3-5am. You can post more often, but I'd cap it at 10 hours per week max.

2) Spend 1-2 hours per week doing blog carnival submissions of your best posts at blogcarnival.com. Do that every single week. Every round of submissions will get you some free links and grow your traffic a bit. It's free, so take advantage of it. If you do this consistently, you'll have dozens of new links within a few months.

3) Spend the bulk of your time commenting on other people's blogs and forums in your field, especially the most popular ones, and include your link in your signature. Share some of your article links if you can do so in a way that helps people and doesn't spam.

4) Make sure your blog is pinging pingomatic.com. WordPress does this by default.

5) Don't worry about trying to optimize your ads right now. The income isn't likely to be significant anyway until your Alexa rank is less than 100,000. Forget about adding new income streams, and put your energy into link and traffic building. If you can build the traffic, the income will soon follow.

6) Read (or re-read) How to Make Money From Your Blog.

This will take time, but you should start seeing positive results within 1-3 months. You're in a situation where new content isn't as important as gaining links. Links will give you some traffic, but they'll also boost your search rankings, which means more traffic. Don't worry about posting so much new content, since it's a waste of time given your traffic. Put 80% of your work time into building links to your site. Carnival submissions, blog comments, and forums are great ways to do that.

Once you have a good baseline level of traffic, then writing good content can be enough to keep it growing. But first you must do some marketing work to allow the site to put down roots.

Don't give up. Just adapt to what the numbers are telling you, and continue on with a more appropriate strategy.
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