The Secret to Successful Blogging or Marketing.

7

stop Old Dog

I’ve been in the business of making money on the internet for about 10 years now. I started in the dating site niche back in 1997 back when the internet was still young and growing. I wasn’t making any money at the time, but I was running a dating site specific for people with a certain medical condition. I would receive emails with an ad and then I would post it by hand myself and people would then be accessible for dating.

At this stage of the game I didn’t know much about SEO, or traffic or html for that matter but I was doing it. I was also the first and only dating site for this genre of people, so I obviously stood out in the searches. I continued to be a stand out and then I noticed something, there were other dating sites in my niche but they were charging money. I got a little angry, then got over being angry and started to charge money too. This is when I started my marketing career on the internet.

“New” Old Trick

In my years of being in this niche I have had a very nice steady flow of income from this dating site even though there are bigger and better corporate entities around. I come up on the 1st page of Google, within the first 5 results for most if not all of the search terms for my specific niche. So how is it that, even though I am still pretty much the oldest site in this niche; I am not making more money than I am currently?

I decided to go to Compete.com and look up my traffic stats as opposed to that of my competition.  I typed in my URL and I had about 250-ish uniques, per month. Ok, not bad I guess considering a lot of traffic is repeat people coming back to check their mail, profiles and see what new profiles are on the site, Ok so it’s a little low but it’s not bad. Right? I then punched in the URL for my competition and my jaw hit the floor. My competition was getting 250, 000 uniques per month, 100,000 times more than I was getting.

The Secret

It hit me square upside the head, Traffic. I didn’t have the traffic. I had gotten so desensitized to the Basics of Traffic, that I forgot to continue with the basics. I hear it all the time, everyday, all day long about “generate traffic”, “marketing”, “more traffic…”, and so on that I had gotten completely desensitized to the fact that I still needed to generate traffic coming to my site.

Even though I am still in the top search engine results, I was not getting the traffic I needed or wanted to make more money. The secret to making money in ANY niche, market or blog, is TRAFFIC. If you have none, you have no money. Period. Sure people search the net for things, but they don’t always search for everything. So what I needed to do was return to the basics of traffic generation.

Forum posting, comment posting, link directories, link trades and talking anywhere and everywhere about my site. I needed to do this so people know it exists and see it, instead of having to go hunt for it. In effect I needed to get it to the point that whenever someone turned around, my URL was in their face. How did I find where to put my URL? I’ll tell you grasshopper.

And the truth shall set you  free…

If you go to Google and type in “link: domainurl.com” and hit enter. The domainurl.com is the URL of a competitors site that you might want to know where they have back links coming from. Once you know this, you can go to each of those results and see if there’s a place that you too can post your link and get some back link traffic and page rank. This is one of the EASIEST ways to find good places to put back links. Do this with several sites that you know of and you will have enough places to begin re-marketing your site. This is how I started to get my traffic to go up again, hopefully eventually as much as my competitor in the near future.

Have a great holiday weekend,

Larry


 

Traffic

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Comments

7 Responses to “The Secret to Successful Blogging or Marketing.”
  1. I’m shocked that you received only a 100,000th of the traffic your competitors received while ranking in the top 5 of the results. That just doesn’t sound right.

    Personally, I haven’t touched link exchanges in over 3 years. I learned that fresh, targeted content was my key to rankings. However, for people who do perform link exchanges, your tip is spot on.

    SEO is one of my favorite topics to discuss, so I was eager to read your post. Welcome to Yaro’s blogtraffic group!

    • Larry says:

      Well, what I have found in the niche dating I am in, is that sites die off,(as do people) and links are continually disappearing. I am not sure why but I did a back link search on my site, and I had way less than I used to have. and yes, I too am suprised that my site doesn’t get the traffic it does, which is why I started marketing it again.
      Thanks for the response. 🙂

  2. Like Keller, I was wondering about that traffic difference too. I’ve been under the impressions that the difference between the 1st and 2nd in search results is something like 250%-350%, so the number 1 would get about 3 times the traffic the second one is.

    Difference between the 1st and 5th is somewhere between 5-10 times more traffic for the number 1. With 100000 times, I’m guessing people we really tricker happy for the number one on that niche 🙂

    • Larry says:

      Hey thanks for pointing that out, which makes sense, so now the marketing to raise the page rank is going to hopefully bring it back up the ladder, closer to the competition and raise the traffic levels up again.
      🙂

  3. I agree with Keller and Antti, the huge disparity between your site and your competitor’s doesn’t make a lot of sense… there must have been something very unique or attractive to visitors to the top site.

    I’ve stumbled and tweeted your article and welcome to Yaro’s group!

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