I've been trying to go white hat and being really safe about my promotion efforts. It works but it takes so much effort on my part and the return on investment is slow. 8 hours a day working on guest posts, PR announcements, hunting down high PR forums. Is this typical or am I just really inefficient?
Hey there, I would say that this is pretty typical. I have a few sites that I SEO using white hat techniques. I outsource everything so I don't really feel the impact of the workload that it requires, but it is indeed significant. If you're going to go white hat, I highly suggest that you outsource all your menial tasks, otherwise you're just going to get caught up doing the activities that don't make any money. In my humble opinion, safe and educated link building is going to give you way more return for both your time and money investment. My average time to first page using white hat is about 5 months, while its about 1 month using link building. The latter takes much less effort, and I can get 5 sites up in the same amount of time. Plus, in the event that I did bad keyword research and my site would never rank, I get to find out in a couple of weeks, rather than months. Just to add, grey hat link building (what I use most of the time), is much more consistent. It works 100% of the time if the keyword research is good. Whereas white hat depends on too many outside sources, like, finding the right promotion channels -or- genuine social excitement over the product being sold. Want to be totally sure? Create a unique content sister site of your money site. Run white-hat on one and run grey-hat link building on the other. I think many members of this forum would appreciate the case study. PM me if you want and I'll help you set them up. Hope this helps. Regards, Diggity
The stats that Diggity has provided (5 months cf 1 month) are very useful!! Promotion is extremely time-consuming. I think once you find some unique and relatively fast promotion ideas, it's a good idea to record these so that you remember to do them as soon as your post has been published. For example, I like sharing a link to my latest post on BizSugar. It takes only a few minutes and it gets knowledge of your content out there where others can see it and subsequently vote on it. Some promotion ideas are almost too time-consuming to be worthwhile. So as soon as you hear of those that can be executed quickly, it pays to add them to your post-publication to do list. Glenys
Thanks. This is a good idea. I'll get started on this. Might pm you for some help. Thanks for the offer