Big CJ commission stuck; more SEO philosophy

by Sapphire (September 16, 2006)

My big commission at CJ has locked, which means I should receive it later this month. This is pretty thrilling, of course, but I know I can’t rely on sales like this to make my goal of earning enough to make a living at this stuff. Or at least, I can’t rely on my current strategies, which are permanently a little behind the search engines every time.

I’ve been reading and thinking, and mostly getting back to marketing basics in my head lately. Sometimes you can game the engines; sometimes it blows up in your face. And sometimes you can do things that aren’t sneaky or manipulative, and still fall afoul of a filter the engines have put in place to stop all the SE-gamers from playing them. But if you’re not actively gaming the engines, you can generally bet that you’ll clear whatever filter you’ve tripped soon enough, and all will be well again. There are no guarantees, of course, but what else are you going to do?

I mean, there’s a major street where I live, and it’s been under major construction - practically shut down - for almost two years. All the shops along that street have valiantly struggled to make it, but more than a few have gone. I hope to better locations, but unfortunately I know it’s possible some just went out of business. No matter what you do in business, things can go wrong. You have to accept that, and not let it stop you.

My new theory is: you just have to build good sites, marketing them in ways you would market them if search engines didn’t exist, and let the rest happen on its own. To this end, my new plan is:

• Build sites I care about, like, would visit on my own. Stick to tight niches, because “everything but the kitchen sink” sites will be competing with WikiPedia, Amazon, and other giants.
• Get the word out to sites that share relevant traffic. I’m concerned that some legitimate marketing strategies could sometimes fall afoul of filters (say that three times fast), but I’m not sure I can be bothered to worry. Should I avoid a potentially traffic-building, perfectly ethical strategy for no reason other than that Google might have a filter against it thanks to the shenanigans of search engine optimizers?
• Keep the site cool.

Really, that’s what’s gotten the B-2 Bomber out there. For a while, I obsessed on daily posting, tagging entries, and other strategies that I thought the SE’s liked. Then I decided to forget all that, and told my team of authors to just post when they really had something to say. And that’s when the site made a nice leap in traffic.

I never know what the SE’s want. They’re supposed to look for what visitors want. I do know what visitors want. That’s what I need to focus on.

Posted in Affiliate Marketing
Subscribe to the feed or email updates