You’re looking at what continues to be my least fruitful muse to date.  It’s called fitlish.com and was intended to teach people new, healthy habits.  There’s a whole slew of reasons why nobody converts on this website but I do have one confession to make.  It actually started as a way to simply help my friends loose weight.  But every attempt to mortise the site has been a tireless uphill battle.  Here why…

The SEO Death Trap

After my first eBook experience (click here to read more) I quickly learned that getting traffic to the offer is of vital importance.  I was such a novice that I didn’t even know about pay per click or any traffic driving methods other than SEO.

Unfortunately, I’m afraid I’m not the only one out there with such a limited perspective.  I’ve since sat down with SEO(s) of fortune 500 companies just to hear them speak about the fear of their companies rankings in the Search Engines.  SEO is literally going around like the plague and I’ve certainly haven’t been immune to the bug.

Shortly after being laid off I decided to monitise my blog.  And thought the way to start was through Amazon Associates and SEO.  I studied SEO like a hawk.  Got my hands on a program (I’m sure many of you may have tried) called the challenge.  I hardly slept until I’d performed the challenge three times in a row each time further refining my website.

What you are looking at is the result of that course.  Did the course work?  Absolutely, I got traffic right away and can get high Google rankings in minutes now but not a single sale, EVER.  And that’s no sales out of tens of thousands of visitors!

Just like a crack addiction I continued chasing more traffic through SEO as I figured that was the answer.  But it’s an empty pursuit really because I had the complete wrong priorities as so many other people have had and that’s precisely the problem with SEO.

SEO Should Be at the Bottom of Your Priority List

Writing web-pages, creating products, launching companies, they’re about helping people.  I get that now and I actually started out with that in mind.

This article stands to go farther than SEO ever will because it’s about you and not some search engine or long tail keyword.  Yes, it’s about your struggles with your musings.  And with some luck it will connect with you.  If I’m really lucky it will even have a SOLUTION to a problem that has literally been haunting your every day.

You see what’s happening is people are so caught up in the frenzy of writing and creating content for search engine rankings that they’ve completely missed the point.  They’ve forgotten about their readers.  They’ve forgotten about YOU.

Search engines don’t read your page, they don’t vote for your product with their wallets (they don’t even have wallets).  Heck they don’t even say thanks for all your hard work.

It took me nearly 2 years of writing at a feverish pace to learn this.  With each article I got more FREE traffic from the search engines which is completely addictive.  But nothing comes without a price, not even FREE traffic.  I spent thousands of hours putting this site together.

Search Engines Don’t Pay the Bills Neither Do Fan Pages, Youtube Channels, etc.

When I went to monetize the site so I could at least pay the server bills it was fruitless.  That’s because I wasn’t connecting with loyal readers, finding followers and creating fans who could ultimately become happy customers who pay my bills.  I was too busy getting search engine rankings.

Here’s a few of my missed priorities when building this site…

1. I didn’t stick to my original target market (weight-loss).  I branched out into healthy footwear which diluted my efforts.
2. My target market was to large to get traction in.  I should have narrowed it down to something more specific that could be tied to existing products selling.  Like Paleo Diet Meal Plans, Raw Food Diet Tips, etc. Kept searching for a narrow niche until I found something that fit.
3. My articles were too short.  Yes too short.  My new outlook is, write enough to get your point across and communicate the solution to your readers problem.  Yes you’re bounce rate may increase.  However, this is a good thing.  You’re filtering out people that aren’t really interested in what you’re doing anyways.
4. I should have been focused on collecting emails and or getting people to comment on my site and driving traffic to my offers.  Instead I spent countless hours growing Facebook Fan Pages, Youtube Channels, and capturing Twitter Followers using traffic from my site!  This was terrible as I was actually building up those other sites and loosing readers on mine.  I see everybody doing this.  No more, now I’ve taken all those links off my website and instead focus on getting traffic from Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube to my site / offers.

Priority Number One

Top priority now in business building and content creation is solving problems.  That is solving my readers problems, and YOUR problems.  And building your website shouldn’t any different.

I’m now looking for faster ways to connect with my audience / intended market.  Here’s a few problem researching methods I’ve been using most recently…

1. Get out and talk to people.  No wait, don’t just not talk to people, but rather listen intently to people!  Give them all the attention in the world.  People will love your for this they’ll love you so much that they’ll tell you their most intimate problems.
2. Search Twitter, Yahoo Answers, forums in your niche.  You’ll see common problems people are having.
3. Next look at popular products on Amazon.  See what’s selling similar to the problems you hear out there.  Look at the reviews and see what people are saying about the products. What are people saying that’s good?  What are they complaining about?
4. If you’ve built up fans, ask them questions as well.

In Closing

People and answering their problems should be your top priority when building your business or creating your website.  NOT SEO.  And if you were lucky enough to get a flood of traffic using SEO to website you built on a whim then there’s a good chance your business will collapse like a stack of cards in at any moment.

That’s because SEO changes CONSTANTLY.  Psychology and the problems people have, have been around for millenia.  Learn how to help people with their problems and you’re set for life.

Helping people with their problems is called being a valuable human being.  And if you choose to build a business then people will vote for whom they find the most valuable in your market with their wallet.  Is this starting to ad up?

It didn’t for me.  For a long time.  Now I’m kicking myself for focusing on the wrong thing for so long.  I’m not sure what I’ll do with my website.  I have a lot of emotion tied up in it.  I think it still has promise but SEO did my business and life more harm than good.  Don’t make the same mistake.