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Oct 5, 2009 by Paul WhiteEveryone has heard this saying. Slow and Stead wins the race. It doesn't matter if it applies to running a marathon, or stock investing. The point is to take your time, and do it right. The same principal also applies to online publishers who are trying to maximize their advertising revenue. You need quality traffic to make money as an publisher. To get quality traffic you have to earn it. This takes time, and patience. Its a combination of interesting content that people actually want to read, and optimizing your content for the best possible impression on search engine crawlers, then waiting for your content to mature.
There is a reason quality content ranks so highly on search engines. Its because so few people are creating it. Everyone want a million dollar website, but nobody wants to sit on their computer all day, developing the right content to attract visitors. They want to buy traffic, or pay someone to do the SEO for them. Its as if they really believe the late night informercials are going to turn them into a millionaire.
Just like small businesses, most websites never make it off the ground. This is part of the success of businesses like Godaddy. Millions of people get a crazy idea for a website, so they buy the domain, then never do anything with it. Some people will actually setup a hosting account. Try to build their own website, then get fustrated when they realize its not exactly something you can learn over night.
If you are serious about building a new website, or growing an existing website, here is my advice
1 Stop relying on others
Its not uncommon to find in any office setting multiple chiefs, but only a few indians doing actual work. In some companies there are no indians. The Chiefs out source the work to other companies. This might work in some industries, but not with websites. If you want to be the best, never stop learning. Take it upon yourself to have a full understanding of how your website works, and how you can make it better. If you rely on others for your website to be great, is it really YOUR website?
2 Set realistic expectations
Assuming that your website will hit critical mass in 5 years is a pipe dream. I have found that claims like these are often made by people who have never ran a website before. They just know what they have heard in the Press, and think they can do it. Set some realistic goals, then put into practice some realistic strategies for getting there. Publishing a website with the "Build it and they will come" business model is doomed for failure. It takes time, and continual tweaking to make it happen.
3. Study other sites to learn what works.
From an SEO stance, its important you understand why other sites rank high. Look at their source code, and observe what keywords they are focusing on. What do they link to? What is their keyword density. How many words are on the page. Do they allow follow on external links? If you wanted to improve another person's design, wouldn't it help if you had their blue prints? View Source or even better get the firebug plus for firefox. One site I highly recommend everyone study is any page from Wikipedia.
4. There are no shortcuts in SEO
Paid traffic, Link farms, SEO firms, and spamming, will only cost you money, and hurt your company's reputation. If you want to increase your SEO, learn how it works, and do it the right way.
Evidence that it works
For over 3 years now I have had a blog. I would post to it a few times each month. Its main source of revenue was google adsense. For the first two years it would make 10-50 cents / day. Then this year I started to see more traffic, especially on my older blog entries. Now My Blog is making $5 - $7 / day. After reviewing my blog within the Google webmaster tools, I was able to see that some of my blog entries were getting links from various other sites, that seemed to like my content. These links cause certain blog entries to rank very high on search. If your content is actually interesting, then its just a matter of time.
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