This is a guest post by Ryan Rivera, who is an anxiety treatment writer that has built a website for those suffering from anxiety, which can be found at www.calmclinic.com.
When I decided to start a website on anxiety, I did it because it was a personal passion. I dealt with anxiety for decades, and overcoming my anxiety led me to want to write about anxiety for others. Interestingly, I realized that anxiety itself plays a role in marketing as well.
Even though my goal with the site wasn’t necessarily to make money, I did want it to become popular quickly. My hope was that I would see nearly instant success, because I knew that the topic I was writing about was important.
But the more I learned about SEO and online marketing, the more I realized how little I knew. I started to learn more about it, and I realized that my own anxieties over creating a successful site were causing me to make poor decisions about how I marketed the website to others.
Fast vs. Slow Online Marketing Methods
There are two ways to market your website. There’s the fast play method – this is essentially mass marketing your site using article marketing, adwords, and paid advertising methods. Then there is the slow play way – adding as much content as possible, getting your name out there, using press releases and other marketing methods, and SEO optimizing the site to rank highly in search engines for the long haul.
In the beginning, I chose the fast play. I was too consumed with analytics, and every day when I saw my website wasn’t getting hits I started to get nervous about the website’s success, and whether it was the right decision. So I found any method I could to increase site hits and visibility.
I spent thousands of dollars on various advertising methods, trying to get as many visitors as I could. In a way it was successful. I got a lot of hits in a short amount of time. I also lost nearly all of my investment. Analytics data on my website was causing me a great deal of stress over the site’s future, and I was obsessing over visitor data rather than quality of visitors or long term success.
Fast Play Is Right For Some People
For some companies, this may be advantageous – especially if there is a high conversion rate and a new product that can profit in the market, and if you’re an online only business where not making money now could cause financial issues in the future. Advertising is useful when you want to profit right away on the advertising, or if you have a product but not the resources to compete in SEO ranks right away.
But it wasn’t right for me – and that’s why I realized that more companies and individuals need to use the slow play – especially if the company has other forms of revenue they can tap into while they work on their long term success. Assuming limited resources, the best way for a company can become a permanent force in the marketplace is to use slower, but more effective, search engine strategies that improve page rank and increase the potential for long term sales (such as adding content).
You can always do both, but eventually you’re going to strain your marketing budget. If you are a company that can wait for success, the long term, slow play strategies are more beneficial.
Controlling Your Analytics Anxiety
I may not have started my website to make a tremendous profit, but I did start my website to get hits, and I realized that analytics was causing me to experience a profound amount of anxiety. My goal wasn’t to create some immediate hits generating monster at the expense of my time and budget. My goal was to create a website that would be positioned for long term hits – hits that would continue without future advertising or spending. Smart decision making is the key to long term success in the SEO world, and the only way to make smart decisions is to make sure you understand your actual goals, and are focused on the strategy (fast play/slow play) that makes sense for your website.
Post from: eWritings - Online Public Relations
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