I'm having a tough time with how much effort I need to continually put into my sites to keep them ranking well and how much is over kill. I run 7 sites right now (all via organic SEO traffic not PPC), I make ok revenue off of them, but I'd like to expand to more sites. What I'm having a hard time with is do I need to be continually updating the sites with new content (they're static sites not blogs), if so how often should I be doing this? Right now I've been trying to add one new piece of content to the sites ever week or two. Also what about promotion? Do you guys continue to submit new articles to article directories every week for the life of the site, and actively post to social sites like Squidoo, hubpages etc.? As well as other link building activities like 3 way exchanges etc. blog reviews etc. Or do you do a bunch up front to get the site ranked and then just minimal effort into link building as the site matures? I'm having issues letting go of the tasks I tend to do weekly for my sites, thinking that I need to submit an article to ezine articles every week, or add a new blog post somewhere with a link back every week. All this mundane work keeps me tied into working on only these 7 sites and no spare time left to work on new sites? Thoughts from those of you who are running multiple sites and keeping your rankings?
I think most people probably put in the most effort at the beginning of their link building campaign. As rankings are achieved, many people slow down their efforts. If you are having problems managing the work load for 7 websites, I recommend you do not expand until you get that resolved. I originally started with 6 websites and I quickly expanded to about 15. Now most of my websites get neglected and I can only find time to focus on a few websites at a time. You might not need to keep doing weekly promotion. Eventually your rankings should stabilize and you can do less marketing. If you are still fighting to keep rankings, continued promotion may be your only choice. You probably don't need to keep adding new content, but it can help. Have you considered hiring freelance employees to help you with some of your workload? Sites like elance.com and rentacoder.com are great places to find freelancers to help with any kind of work. These people could help you write articles, submit blogpost comments, create squidoo pages, etc. If you invest some of your income back into services like this, you can free up your own time and expand your network to earn more money.
Vansterdam, Thanks for your reply. I appreciate you taking the time. I see some rankings come and go, how ever most of my sites are pretty competitive and I have shyed away from some aggressive link building which I'm moving into now. (i.e. paid links, blog reviews etc.) Ramping up my outsourcing is more or less what I've arrived at as an answer these past couple of days. I have a system when I first launch a site, and I have 3-4K revenues a month so there's no reason I can't pour money into growing my business. I want to start adding a new site to the mix each month, and I did the grow to fast thing already and have probably about 15 sites of which only 7 are getting the attention, but I do want to grow a bigger portfolio in the markets I'm in. The exact questions I was trying to get answered are: 1.) Does continued article marketing each week make a difference? Or could I just do it on a month maybe? 2.) If I post to a network of blogs a few times does it really help if I continually post to that blog network each month with varied anchor text in different articles? 3.) Should I keep posting new content every week? (you already answered your opinion on that) Thanks again for taking the time.
1) Continued article marketing can help a site dominate long term. So if you have time and resources, it would be a good idea to keep this up as much as possible. Since this is one of the best promotion techniques, try not to cut back on this too much. With more websites you will have an even greater need for articles. 2) Your first post on a blog will help the most. Every post after that helps a little less. Google likes links from lots of sites as opposed to lots of links from a few sites. It is good that you would be varying the anchor text though. I would only come back to a blog if it were an especially good one...either very relevant, good rankings or provides direct traffic. Lower quality blogs may only be worth a post or two and then move on. 3) If you have the resources to add new content, you should do this. You would be adding more keywords to target and adding more internal links to your other pages. This would also keep the search engine spiders back at your website on a frequent basis.
Wish it got easier as it went hah? Well here is my 2 cents. With article marketing I like to start a very rigorous campaign. Over time you can lessen the amount of articles and still keep the traffic coming in as well as back link power, but I would try to schedule out when and how often you are to a.)write articles and b.)add new content to your sites. When you make a routine out of this it really helps you to stay on top of things and not become overwhelmed. Often you can write an article on your site and then do a re-write for one of the article directories. But I agree that you should try to conquer the sites you have NOW before you get more. Otherwise you will feel like you can never dig out of all that work and your quality of work will suffer. But like I said.. just my 2 cents.
I think you should look at outsourcing all of the SEO work and concentrate on business development alone
This has been sort of where my heads at the last couple of days. Start looking at outsourcing -article writing/writing for submissions -link building then I handle new site development, managing the outsourced work, and new content for sites (as I like to keep tabs on what's being added so I can tailor my offers). All good points though I appreciate everyone who has chimed in on this. surfin4dough I know it makes sense to get all my money sites right now up to a level where I can feel comfortable with them. Some basic errors I made in the beginning don't loan these sites to easily become authority sites, how ever they could be good feeder or link building sites for future authority sites in the niches their in. Thanks again so far for all the comments.
This has been sort of where my heads at the last couple of days. Start looking at outsourcing -article writing/writing for submissions -link building then I handle new site development, managing the outsourced work, and new content for sites (as I like to keep tabs on what's being added so I can tailor my offers). All good points though I appreciate everyone who has chimed in on this. surfin4dough I know it makes sense to get all my money sites right now up to a level where I can feel comfortable with them. Some basic errors I made in the beginning don't loan these sites to easily become authority sites, how ever they could be good feeder or link building sites for future authority sites in the niches their in. Thanks again so far for all the comments.