"Build it and they will come" is a wonderful line in the movies. Too bad it's usually not quite so easy in real life! True, good web content is occasionallynot alwaysdiscovered surprisingly quickly. More often, it requires a great deal of disciplined work to draw traffic to a web site, no matter how good the content of the site is. And what is a good site and good web content, anyhow? "Good" does not mean a site with a halo! The way I use the word good in this chapter is probably circular: a site, and its content, are good if the site and its content draw traffic (or can draw traffic when suitably promoted). If your site has a great deal of traffic, then the site's traffic is broad . Google itself is a prime example of a broad-traffic site: people use Google to search for myriad different things. But narrow, or focused , traffic can be more useful to advertisers than broad, unfocused traffic. For example, a site discussing complex ophthalmologic conditions might be very successful with targeted advertising even if it draws only a few hundred users a day. Google's traffic becomes more focused, and less broad, when a keyword search is initiated. And all the targeting in the world won't help unless you get some eyeballs. To make money with your web site content it's a necessary (but not sufficient) condition that you have good contenteither broad or targeted at a specific niche. Content can mean information, but it also can mean other thingsfor example, software applications or jokes. From a technical viewpoint, there are some issues about setting up a content web site so you can be flexible about the advertising you publish. Flexibility is good: to make money with advertising you need to do a great deal of tweaking. I'll explain how to set sites up so you can easily modify advertising as you go along without having to rewrite your entire site.
This is a theory we completely agree on. Having a site with many focuses opens up the market for a much broader audience than one niche market.
Yeah I think too many people buy into the build it and they will come. Everyone I know of works very hard.
I think people are always looking for a magical formula that will work, not realizing that websites are just as much work as anything else. Even if you have a killer idea, that doesn't mean that people will flock to your site, unfortunately...
I'm not saying you don't have to work hard. I work 20 hours per day almost. IT also takes money to make money. Those two things are true.
Yeah. It's funny because I have had many clients who started websites thinking that there was some sort of magic-bullet formula for making it a success. What wound up happening on more than one occasion is that they bit off more than they could chew and did not realize that promoting, updating, and managing a popular website is a lot of work. It's a full-time job in many cases for more than one person if the site is that popular! Sites that require that much upkeep must be monetized. One of my theories is that a site must be able to sustain itself, otherwise it's just a hobby.
When I bought my first site in 2003 I knew nothing about running a website. I didn't know about anchor text, seo, etc. I actually hired a "seo firm" to help get traffic. I paid them $x,xxx I figured you get what you pay for, plus they had a money back gurantee, how could I lose? They refused to refund my money and I still had no visitors 6 months later. I decided I would try to learn seo myself. I am still learning something new everday. I only wish I would have found this forum years ago.