 Measure results
The best thing you can do is measure your results.
Google Analytics is your best friend.
Install it on all pages of your site you wish to measure. See where your traffic is coming from and focus on building using the data in there.
For example if you have a home and garden site. Participate on forums that deal with home and garden tips. Spend time on these forums giving advice and helping people. This can be a good referral source.
You may find you get alot of traffic from a site that has linked to a post or a product on your site. Upon further investigation you find that the link on their site is buried several pages in, but provides good traffic. If that site runs Google Adsense or similar you may decide to buy "site wide" advertising.
Measuring ROI is all about how much your visitors cost vs how much money you made. Google Analytics integrates with Adwords to help you measure this.
Search Engine Optimisation will cost you in terms of time and money, its not FREE despite the FREE traffic. Yes in the long run it helps but considering you can appear on the first page of Google (in Ireland) for as little as 0.01 cent - 0.05 cent I think it represents excellent value for money. Not to mention that you get listed instantly. You can also use the information gathered from your Pay Per Click (Adwords) to decide what is the best terms to target for your search engine optimisation campaign.
bottom line is measure your results from day 1. |