If You Build It They Won’t Come

By August 30th, 2007 Leave a response Business, The Net

Remember that movie Field of Dreams where the voice said, “If you build it, they will come.” While that may make dead baseball players appear in a corn field, it doesn’t work online. Millions of people every week try to “build it” because they think that is all it takes to make money online. They build the site and add content to it everyday and wonder how come they’re not coming?

The reason most bloggers fail to make money from blogging is because they’re bloggers and not marketers. What separates John Chow dot Com from the no traffic blog isn’t so much the content. There are tons of small blogs that can write better content than me. However, the best content in the world won’t do you any good if you can’t get people to read it. Building it is not enough. You need to learn how to market it.

Nothing Happens Without Traffic

Without traffic, a site makes nothing. This is a numbers game. I know that for every 1000 readers, I am going to get a certain percentage of people clicking on an ad. You can build 1000 websites but if no one visits, it’s going to be really hard to make any money.

In my post asking Are You Getting Maximum Dollar For Your Ad Space, I wrote that it’s not the traffic that is important, it’s what you do with the traffic. That is completely true. However, before you can do anything with the traffic, you must first get the traffic. How do you do that? I’ve cover many marketing methods to drive traffic to a new blog. For those who don’t look at the archives, the following posts should help you out.

Remember, if you build it, they won’t come. Successful blogging is 10% blogging and 90% marketing. Learning how to generate a buzz will get you a lot further than learning how to write a better blog post.