4 replies to this topic

[iamlost]

A man walked into a SERP with a blog under his arm and a bag full of keywords on his shoulder.

Now there is an opening sentence.

And it leads into the best basic fundamental website traffic building article I've read in a long while. Nothing new. But. All nicely packaged:
How to Get Traffic to Your Website for Free by Michael Martinez, SEO Theory, 22-February-2012.
for the new web entrepreneur. ...who, unfortunately, will still probably be lured off down the path of rainbows and unicorns...

First, Create a Content Plan
...
Why You Need To Throttle Your Publishing Rate
...
You Need An RSS Feed
...
You Need A Metrics Platform
...
You Need To Tune In To Peoples’ Conversations
...
Set A Standing Goal: 1 Reader Per Article
...
Define a Query Space
...
Track Your Top Performing Pages
...

Simple, right? But I bet many of you will be surprised at the advice under some or all of those headings...

And then he wraps up with a dose of reality check.

You won’t find any better tutor for how to get traffic to your Website for free than your own Website. You can browse SEO blogs all day long and spend your days, weekends, and life trying to get links or you can just focus on creating a Website and giving it some visibility in social media and search indexes. You don’t need a LOT of visibility — just need SOME. The more you publish, the more steady and reliable you are, the more time you take to learn from your Website itself about what works and what doesn’t, the faster and sooner you’ll see that free traffic coming in.

You may want things to happen faster than that, but if that’s the case then you have to be willing to spend some money. Hire a professional SEO team, invest in advertising — but don’t sit there and whine because you think you’re entitled to free traffic without doing something for yourself.

The process for getting traffic to your Website for free is simple but it doesn’t work overnight. The people who can bring in free traffic quickly have been practicing this for a long time.

Odds that Michael's first point "First, Create a Content Plan" is the one most will neglect...?
"Plan? We don't need no stinkin' plan!"
Yes. Yes, you do.

Rant !

Free is perhaps the most abused, most misused word in the English language. DIY is never ever free. One's time has real value and one's effort has real costs. One should always appropriately account for them. Mine, at least, do not equal free. Yours, well...

Edited by iamlost, 22 February 2012 - 12:42 PM.

[glyn]

Oh no....I kind of feel this document misses a very important point. It's very systematic in its breakdown of the components are needed to generate free traffic but it doesn't seem to give any importance to the importance of what you are writing about, and that simply writing articles will mean you gets lots of traffic. You will certainly pickup traffic (this by definition of having more pages out there) but I'd first be looking for gaps in whatever content market I was attempting to go after, then where people are hiding, then execute the strategy, which would surely include some of the points in this post. Still I don't wanna come across as an arrogant ****, but critiques are helpful no?

[iamlost]

I quite agree with you, glyn. However, even when writing a thesis or a book there are limitations in what is covered, a matter of time, space, and purpose. Given that Michael is writing a blog post and not something more extensive I think he set reasonable boundaries and scope; as I exclaimed: a primer. Is there more to it than what he wrote in that one piece? Of course. And if others are, as you, willing to extend/expand the requirements this thread could be an invaluable resource.

[glyn]

that is certainly fair comment!

[Michael_Martinez]

I'm not happy with the article as it turned out (but thank you for linking to it). It's intended for people who don't know how to do all this stuff and who just want to "do it and get it done". So I was trying to NOT overthink it. But I'll have to take another stab at the topic somewhere down the road.