- Adwords - pay per click
- Yahoo ads - pay per click
- SEO - optimized pages
- SEO - targeted websites + optimized pages
- SEO - optimized blog posts
- Content creation - not optimized
All these strategies worked to a certain extend for a while.
The adwords era lasted for about 3 years I think.
It was extremely successful in the early stages
SEO pages was successful as well for a while - right now it's not longer the case - I haven't focused on my optimized pages for a while because the core elements now are external factors.
With hundreds of possible optimized pages to market - hundred of keywords - It's just too time consuming and there isn't an easy to use strategy that will create a break through.
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Same story with optimized websites.
At their peak, these websites were bringing alltogether a few hundreds visitors/month.
That's after months of effort and publishing hundred of optimized pages.
In that case the strategy just paid for hosting price. I estimate that all this effort resulted in maybe 10 sales/year max.
Not much! - that's like less than 1% of the total sales volume coming from the pages on the website.
Sure, it did create some buzz and backlinks but simply maintaining the websites, updating, paying for hosting and domain names was a lot for insignificant results.
So, I dropped these sites and redirect now all my efforts to my site.
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Optimized blog posts
That's a solid strategy that did work well 2 years ago.
I managed to boost traffic significantly.
The reason i did not follow up is because the blogging services I was using could have labelled my actions as search engine spam - I got some warning signs from wordpress for instance.
his is still an option I can consider in the future...
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Just to make it clear, I didn't engage in these traffic building tactics lightly.
At the peak of my Adwords campaigns, I had 80 campaigns running, advertising more than 10 different products on my side with close to 100000 keyphrases.
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same story with SEO pages - I created around 1000 optimized pages to draw traffic
Same again with targeted websites - I got 12 targeted domain names - created 50-200 optimized pages per domain.
In theory, these strategies should work and I was already imagining the flow of traffic landing on these pages.
Practically, the results were only a small fraction of what they could have been.
I was expecting results 100x higher.
By the way, i did my research and implemented all the SEO elements in the pages are built.
The in site elements were fine - what was missing in that case were the offsite elements with tons of links pointing to my thousands of optimized pages.
Building credibility with backlings for a few pages can work if you have 5 or 10 pages you want to promote.
Doing that for thousands of pages is close to impossible because the process has to look organic to search engines. In practicality I think it's very easy for search engines to recognize when these backlinks are not the result of an organic process, in other terms they are a promotional campaign.
search engines will naturally penalize that because they are at war with people trying to manipulate search results.
Of course they are.
SEO is not outlaw of course but search engines simply don't want you to be able to manipulate results for you to score high.
There is a small window there of course and SEO strategies can still be successful of course.
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what about creating rich content and hoping for the best?
Well, doing that on the site is not the best way to go...
For instance, I have now 4000 pages of content on the site - that respresents 1000 page views/day - 1 page is viewed 0.25 times/day on average
I have 400 videos on youtube with 1800 video views/day - 1 video is viewed on average 4.5 times.
That's like 18x more views for the content I put on youtube compared to the one on my site.
same story for MP3s on my Itunes channels.
They are accessed as well much more than web pages.
So, the answer is yes!
Right now, simply creating video content is an effective way to gain exposure.
If I compare all the SEO strategies with my video creation and positing strategies, video worked WAY better than all these strategies.
On top of that, this quality content gives credibility and ads value to the net.
Creating a video is rewarding and fun.
Trying to implement SEO strategies is interesting as well, but it tends to clutter the net and my activity.
Creating 100 videos over a period of 3 months is the equivalent to launching a new Blogging SEO campaign for instance.
The key questions are:
- Where do I want to put my energy?
- What's the most exciting and rewarding action?
- What ads the most value to my audience?
- How do I contribute best to the well being and progress on this planet?