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?
