For most websites, the “if you build it, they will come” line from the movie Field of Dreams is not going to cut it for a marketing campaign.  You will need to craft a good message; create some marketing content and expose it to your audience.  Internet marketing has matured in the last decade, but it still has aspects of a strange popularity contest mixed with a logic puzzle.

This guide is a focus on practical steps to getting more traffic and  strategies for how to continually  grow and adapt in the competitive marketplace of the Internet.  Review your site and constantly hone your specific message. Take a look at your site as a whole; what story does it tell?

Currently, Internet marketing is best described by the phrase “popular.”  To get traffic to your website from any of the major sources such as  Google and social media sites like Facebook.com, you need to be popular.  Think back to when you were  in high school where there was a division between the “cool kids” and everyone else.  Google uses specific metrics to rank websites.  Some of them have to do with the keywords and structure of the site, and others have to do with how many links point to a site and the quality and topics of the sites where links originate.  As soon as Google (or the other engines)  starts using ‘metric X’ (for an example)  as a guide for relevancy, then a million marketers are going to try to manipulate the hell out of metric X until it no longer works as well as  it did before. To counter this trend, the search engines have to continually add more and more metrics, or things to measure, to their algorithms; and the marketer must likewise constantly adapt to this constant change.

Building traffic to a website is more like a race, than it is a methodology, because the actual underlying methodology, and the landscape of the Internet itself (the playing field) constantly changes.

Like a chess game, as the other pieces make unexpected moves, your strategy must adjust to counter those moves.

This is the reason why there are not huge, well known, branded, profitable SEO (search engine optimization) companies: because in order for a company to grow larger takes time, and requires that things stay the same long enough for that to happen: large companies cannot adapt to change quickly enough to compete at the lightning pace that things change online.

Frankly, a very high IQ and a passion for topic can help a great deal; but it is still very, very competitive.

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