This is going to be stream-of-consciousness and unorganized as all hell. A brain dump. I just gotta vent.
I created a website. I finally did it. After months of reading about doing it, and reading about Seach Engine Optimization, I just did it.
Almost six months of adding content, submitting to the Yahoo Directory which cost me $299, submitting to smaller paid directories, writing articles and submitting them to ezinearticles and goarticles and articlecity and so on. I paid an Indian firm to do reciprocal linking for me.
And where am I?
A whopping 30 visitors a day. I refuse to monetize the site until I have more than that. During the link building process, I want to be taken seriously. In all fairness, I perhaps should be praising that amount of visitors. I restructured the site recently to be in compliance with the magic bullet known as “siloing.” Read about it on Charles Heflin’s site: http://www.seo2020.com
I’ve used a blog to create the site, and I’ve used Rapid Niche Websites to make it look like a real site. Why? Because if you blog and ping, you’ll get better search engine traffic. It’s another magic bullet. Read about it on Jeff Walter’s site: http://www.rapidnichewebsites.com
In case you can’t tell, I’m being sarcastic.
Not that I have anything against the above “gurus,” but it seems to me that they all make it seem so much more simple than it is. Siloing and blogging are not magic bullets. I don’t know that there IS a magic bullet.
But I digress. So restructuring left me with a lot of dead links in Google. Also, I’m in a VERY competitive health niche. And it’s “only” been six months. So perhaps 30 a day isn’t that bad.
But you know what? I don’t really care all that much about my site. It’s vaguely interesting to me; it’s not utterly painful to write about. But I just don’t care all that much. The ONLY thing I’ve EVER cared about is making money. In fact, I chose my health niche ONLY because of the high paying Adsense potential.
Is that really a reason to create a site? It’s a health niche, for godssake! I’ll be competing with the NIH! And doctors who do research! And hospitals! I have nothing new to contribute, except what I read on these sites THAT ALREADY EXIST!
I’ve found a few others out there trying to do what I’m trying to do, in the exact same niche. One guy has hundreds upon hundreds of articles submitted to hundreds upon hundreds of article directories. And yet, according to Alexa, which is very very rough admittedly, he’s getting a miniscule amount of traffic.
What the hell am I doing?!
How the heck am I going to get good, authority sites with .edu and .gov domains to link to me? I got all my information from THEM!! Ug!
My articles on ezinearticles aren’t going to boost my rankings unless a reputable site republishes them. BUT I HAVE NOTHING NEW TO SAY in this health niche. I haven’t done any research, and all my articles say are “the symptoms of blah blah blah are this and that.” Nobody’s going to care.
I’ll let it fester for a while. I’ll keep adding an occasional article.
But it irritates me that people like Colin McDougall can get top rankings for, of all things, “credit card applications.” !!!!!!!!! And you read his book, The VEO Report. He basically says just make a good site, and say something controversial, and engage in a little viral marketing; don’t submit too many articles to the article directories; buy a Yahoo submission.
And you pick apart his site. I found a few articles on Digg that were not digged because they were dry financial information. I found him in a few directories. Doesn’t seem like any huge PageRank sites linking to him when I use one of my myriad of research tools. He’s not saying anything controversial. He has two articles in ezinearticles.
BUT HE RANKS ON THE FIRST PAGE FOR THE TERM “credit card applications!!!” He’s getting good Alexa rankings! What the heck is he doing?! An “allinanchor:credit card applications” search brings up his site near the top of google. That means lots of sites are pointing to him with the term “credit card applications” in the link text. HOW?! WHERE?!
Are these people not telling us something in there ebooks?! I mean, if they were cloaking they obviously couldn’t reveal it. Maybe that’s it. Yeah.
I just don’t know. It’s all turning out to be more of a let down than I though it would be.
But that’s bringing me back to my main point: all I care about is making money. Because I’m broke and in debt, I can’t live where I want to, I can’t buy a Sony Reader, I can’t travel. I can’t do anything I truly want to do. Now give me money (that’s what I want), that’s what I want.
So if that’s the key, then shouldn’t I refocus my efforts? Shouldn’t I dump the idea of creating a content site? Should I try a different, more directly capitalistic approach?
Jennifer said
Hey Tim! This is Jenn from This Affiliate Marketing Path – thanks for showing me your blog – it’s great!
And yes, I’m pretty sure there are things that Colin didn’t mention in his book… at least according to the rumor mill… so I wouldn’t worry much about that scenario.
One thing I have learned is that you can learn a lot more from reading genuine forum posts and blog posts than you can from many actual gurus – like that if you have a page with a competitive term, Google will sandbox you appropriately, and the more competitive, the worse it is. That’s why I’m going for less competitive terms now – we’ll see how that works out though….
I’m in the same boat as you, too, while I enjoy making a good site, I have debt, I want to travel, I want to be home to enjoy my family and my hobbies, etc. So I’ll be in this game for a while. Let’s hope we can learn something from all of our experiences and make it work
mkulp said
Hi Jenn.
Welcome to my blog. It’s mostly just going to be for me to keep on track and keep my thoughts straight.
You know, I’ve heard in a lot of places that a Yahoo directory submission will cancel the sandbox effect. I don’t know. My health site is a very competitive term and I submitted to the Yahoo directory and never had a problem with any sandbox.
But with some luck, that’ll all be in the past if I can get this Adwords/Clickbank thing to work. I have my doubts. Maybe I shouldn’t.
Then again, Google’s been known to “slap” even Adwords people, so I guess they will remain a force of stress throughout our lives.
Jenn said
I’ve heard that about the Yahoo! directory too – but never had enough nerve to shell out the $300 and try it out – perhaps I should…
mark said
I would guess you should quit worrying what colin and other people are doing and start doing your own thing.
And if your broke and in debt why are you giving them your money? Is their sales copy that good?
The search engines will tell you exactly what works and what doesn’t, why pay others? You can’t get better feedback than entering a site and a keyword in this tool and working to move it up in ranking:
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords/
If these people aren’t doing much by your understanding to rank for “credit this or that” why not duplicate every single thing they’ve done instead of complaining about it? Follow what they do, not what they say (or sell).
And yahoo directory is also free: http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html
“I created a website.” Just one? Talk about all your eggs in one basket (I made the same mistake)
Just a “stream-of-consciousness” comments, nice to meet ya and good luck
mkulp said
Mark,
Yeah, it’s a lot of complaining I know. Just beginner’s doubts. The way I feel is probably skewed on this blog. Just a few self doubts as I experiment.
But you’re confusing Yahoo SEARCH with Yahoo DIRECTORY. The directory indeed costs $300 a year, and it’s suggested by some that it helps to break the sandbox.
Dunno about all that, but I did it.
mark said
It was the last link:
http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/dir/suggest/suggest-01.html
I’ve got a site in the Yahoo directory without paying a dime.
(granted it took 10 months for the approval, but it cost me 0)
mkulp said
What the… ?!
Nobody every told me about that!!!
Charles Heflin said
I just want to add that siloing is not a magic bullet and I have never promoted it as such. Siloing is a logical website architecture that allows the SE robots to understand the theme of your site and the pages within it.
Building a site for high rankings takes work… More for some markets less for others. Siloing is simply a way to keep your content organized for both humans and robots.
There is no “magic” in this.
Charles
mkulp said
Hi Charles,
Yeah, you know, reading that back it doesn’t sound quite like the thought that was in my head at the time.
Just a combination of my new and temporary cynicism, along with my new move into the realm of product creation and sales. Away, away, from large content sites, Adsense, and affiliate marketing. Into the world of MAKING something and then SELLING it.
I know, I’ll still have to do SEO to some extent no doubt. And for that, I have no doubt I’ll turn back to the likes of you and Russell; some of the better teachers out there.
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