It is one thing to have a web site, a place to base yourself on the internet. It is another thing entirely to ever entertain visitors. Getting people to your site, generating traffic as they call it, is a science, not an artform. There are people who make a fortune figuring out new ways to get the search engines to rank your site high enough you actually get some traffic and then, hopefully, some clicks on your ads or purchases of your eBooks.

One of the proven ways to generate this traffic is through backlinks. These backlinks are best if created through content, or articles, you write and other people post on their blogs and sites. While there are programs that will write articles for you, these are mostly rubbish collections of public domain text, freely available and found and collated at random by the program. They might have fooled the search bots years ago but no more. They never fooled human readers as they were too out of context from one stolen paragraph to the next.

If you write your own articles there are programs that will make multiple versions, or spin the original. These should be sufficiently unique to fool the programs looking for duplicate articles, and ranking you down accordingly. Then there are programs that will register you as a member of a thousand forums and let you post to them, all automatically. Of course sometimes they do some housekeeping and detect your profile is bogus and out you go.

You can post articles to article directories where other people can freely use your article so long as they include the ‘resource box’ with the backlink to your site. Many don’t honour the agreed format and your work is used for free with no backlink to add linkjuice to your SERP rankings.

The bottom line is you need a network of sites, all interlinked and referring to each other, filled with great content. In short, a lot of hard work. Maybe one day you can rake in the big bucks for a few hours work poolside with the laptop but to get there takes a lot of hard work, effort and investment in time and money. There are no shortcuts in life worth having or that last very long and the internet is no different to any other market place or venue. It’s just a little bigger, faster and scarier.

Originally published on http://perrygamsby.info 23/22/2010

I have just received the latest two books I have published, ‘Desert Creek’ version 3 and ‘The Cool Side Of The Pillow’ version 5. I am getting better as ‘Desert Creek’ 3 has a great font and spacing and I am very proud of it. “Cool Side’ though still has lines at the bottom of pages between section breaks and I can’t get rid of them. I have reset the formatting, cleared the formatting, manually tried to erase them and so on, all to no avail. Whatever was I thinking when I put them in so many years ago?

Still, it is all part of the learning curve, although mine is more like a vertical line! I am learning about book sizes, gutters, header and footer amounts and all sorts of pagination stuff. Once I get the publishing of the book sorted, then I really need to tackle the toughest part of the business… marketing. Selling the book is the hardest part of the process. Writing it is the most pleasurable and even formatting, editing, proofing and printing has its upside. Selling it, well that will be a new curve entirely.