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What would be the best way to get the initial traffic for a blog like that? It's always been a major stumbling block for me.

fowkswe 13y ago
Keep at it. She made 10 posts a day, religiously. These things have a way of snowballing if you give it love and effort. Shameless plug for my information jockey endeavor: http://heritagebros.com http://heritagebros.com.
- molsongolden 13y ago
  Seriously how long should it take to grow a beard like that? I think the longest I've gone is a few months so maybe I just need to man up and let it go for a year.
gnaritas 13y ago
If it has interesting content, people will find it in Google. Getting traffic isn't about SEO, it's about having good content.
- ry0ohki 13y ago
  That's not true at all, as Google as no way of surfacing new content. Write the best, most authoritative article on a topic in the world, and if you simply put it out there without doing marketing (getting others to link to it), no one will ever find it on Google. If it's in the SERP it will be on page 9000. This is the biggest mistake I see startups doing, simply creating content and hoping it surfaces to the top of Google.
  - gnaritas 13y ago
    One article won't get any site ranked, but a site with many good articles will build traffic regardless of SEO. Saying otherwise is selling snake oil.
    - ry0ohki 13y ago
      I think you are mistaking causation with correlation. Google is a machine and does not know what "good articles" are without outside signals.
  - sejje 13y ago
    This is wrong. Basically once you get indexed, the best content will rise to the top. Google is not weighing exclusively on inbound links anymore.
    - ry0ohki 13y ago
      How does Google know it's "The best content"? Because people will link to it, share it on social media etc... How do people find it to do that? By marketing it. Google will not rank you prominently merely on you creating content.
- obstacle1 13y ago
  People only find things "in Google" if Google ranks said things highly. The ranking algorithms are only minimally a function of content quality, as in how highly a human would rank the value of a piece of content. To rank, you need a solid backlink profile and a site structure that plays nice with G's SEO guidelines. So you need to market (build backlinks) to have any chance of driving search traffic. In other words, getting traffic through google is only a function of having good content insofar as good content is easier to market, i.e. convince people to link to.
  - gnaritas 13y ago
    Simply not true. Good content will develop natural backlinks over time, you don't need to create them via marketing. To say that Google can't find a site with first marketing it is simply not true. Now if you're a business, of course you want to market because it's faster than relying on organic growth, but faster doesn't mean sites that don't do SEO and marketing won't get traffic, they just won't get as much traffic as they could have. > So you need to market (build backlinks) to have any chance of driving search traffic. You can start a blog and just load it with good content and the traffic will slowly and steadily build as long as the content is good and new content keeps visitors coming back. You don't need to market it. To say SEO is required is to say that Google is stupid; they are not.
    - obstacle1 13y ago
      Good sir. Please pause and think more deeply about what you are saying. > To say that Google can't find a site with first marketing it is simply not true. I did not say Google couldn't find it. I said Google will not rank it highly, which is true. Backlink profile is a huge part of the ranking algorithm and a page won't rank without good links pointing at least at the domain, if not the exact page. So if you write a bunch of excellent content but don't develop a backlink profile, your site will be indexed on page 10,000 of results or whatever. Yes, people could technically find it. No, they won't find it. Revisit the studies where the top 3 results on the first SERP get 95%+. Hence the need for backlinks in order to drive organic search traffic. That is, marketing. >To say SEO is required is to say that Google is stupid No, that logic does not hold. To say SEO is required is to say that Google has a set of rules [1] it follows to rank pages relative to one another, and that webmasters who want traffic need to build pages/content according to these rules. G doesn't publish its own SEO guidebooks for nothing. I hear your position over and over again from developers who have a zealous disdain for marketing but know little about marketing. You presume that SEO is in itself something bad and evil that only evil bad people have to do, because good products speak for themselves and therefore earn merit. Well, no. Google's algorithms are not sentient, they do not define merit subjectively based on qualitative things as humans do. Merit in Google's eyes is conforming to a certain set of rules. And SEO is basically just following those rules. Google's rules are that pages with more links get ranked more highly. So if you want people to ever find your content through organic search, you must do some word-of-mouth to drive that initial traffic to your content. [1] - http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en/...
halcyondaze 13y ago
Email outreach and social outreach are by far the fastest way to get traffic to a blog like hers.

fowkswe 13y ago

Keep at it. She made 10 posts a day, religiously. These things have a way of snowballing if you give it love and effort. Shameless plug for my information jockey endeavor: http://heritagebros.com http://heritagebros.com.

molsongolden 13y ago
Seriously how long should it take to grow a beard like that? I think the longest I've gone is a few months so maybe I just need to man up and let it go for a year.

gnaritas 13y ago

If it has interesting content, people will find it in Google. Getting traffic isn't about SEO, it's about having good content.

ry0ohki 13y ago
That's not true at all, as Google as no way of surfacing new content. Write the best, most authoritative article on a topic in the world, and if you simply put it out there without doing marketing (getting others to link to it), no one will ever find it on Google. If it's in the SERP it will be on page 9000. This is the biggest mistake I see startups doing, simply creating content and hoping it surfaces to the top of Google.
- gnaritas 13y ago
  One article won't get any site ranked, but a site with many good articles will build traffic regardless of SEO. Saying otherwise is selling snake oil.
  - ry0ohki 13y ago
    I think you are mistaking causation with correlation. Google is a machine and does not know what "good articles" are without outside signals.
- sejje 13y ago
  This is wrong. Basically once you get indexed, the best content will rise to the top. Google is not weighing exclusively on inbound links anymore.
  - ry0ohki 13y ago
    How does Google know it's "The best content"? Because people will link to it, share it on social media etc... How do people find it to do that? By marketing it. Google will not rank you prominently merely on you creating content.
obstacle1 13y ago
People only find things "in Google" if Google ranks said things highly. The ranking algorithms are only minimally a function of content quality, as in how highly a human would rank the value of a piece of content. To rank, you need a solid backlink profile and a site structure that plays nice with G's SEO guidelines. So you need to market (build backlinks) to have any chance of driving search traffic. In other words, getting traffic through google is only a function of having good content insofar as good content is easier to market, i.e. convince people to link to.
- gnaritas 13y ago
  Simply not true. Good content will develop natural backlinks over time, you don't need to create them via marketing. To say that Google can't find a site with first marketing it is simply not true. Now if you're a business, of course you want to market because it's faster than relying on organic growth, but faster doesn't mean sites that don't do SEO and marketing won't get traffic, they just won't get as much traffic as they could have. > So you need to market (build backlinks) to have any chance of driving search traffic. You can start a blog and just load it with good content and the traffic will slowly and steadily build as long as the content is good and new content keeps visitors coming back. You don't need to market it. To say SEO is required is to say that Google is stupid; they are not.
  - obstacle1 13y ago
    Good sir. Please pause and think more deeply about what you are saying. > To say that Google can't find a site with first marketing it is simply not true. I did not say Google couldn't find it. I said Google will not rank it highly, which is true. Backlink profile is a huge part of the ranking algorithm and a page won't rank without good links pointing at least at the domain, if not the exact page. So if you write a bunch of excellent content but don't develop a backlink profile, your site will be indexed on page 10,000 of results or whatever. Yes, people could technically find it. No, they won't find it. Revisit the studies where the top 3 results on the first SERP get 95%+. Hence the need for backlinks in order to drive organic search traffic. That is, marketing. >To say SEO is required is to say that Google is stupid No, that logic does not hold. To say SEO is required is to say that Google has a set of rules [1] it follows to rank pages relative to one another, and that webmasters who want traffic need to build pages/content according to these rules. G doesn't publish its own SEO guidebooks for nothing. I hear your position over and over again from developers who have a zealous disdain for marketing but know little about marketing. You presume that SEO is in itself something bad and evil that only evil bad people have to do, because good products speak for themselves and therefore earn merit. Well, no. Google's algorithms are not sentient, they do not define merit subjectively based on qualitative things as humans do. Merit in Google's eyes is conforming to a certain set of rules. And SEO is basically just following those rules. Google's rules are that pages with more links get ranked more highly. So if you want people to ever find your content through organic search, you must do some word-of-mouth to drive that initial traffic to your content. [1] - http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en/...

halcyondaze 13y ago

Email outreach and social outreach are by far the fastest way to get traffic to a blog like hers.