A Write-Only Post

 For the past several months, I've been reading about blogging and even doing some of it on my other site. It's taken up quite a bit of my free time. The payoff has been very small. One bit of advice I read is to spend a few hours on each entry. You won't get any traffic by slopping something together. Not anymore. I'm sure that's true.

However, the converse doesn't necessarily hold, either. It's possible to spend several hours on each entry, and still get next-to-zero traffic. This is obvious. Of course it can happen. Especially when you don't market what you've written. When you have no marketing campaign, you're left waiting on "organic search engine" traffic. That's very difficult to achieve without backlinks. Backlinks are everything. It's extremely difficult to get them, however. Of course it is...

It's not, however, impossible to get them. They can be got through some hard work. Essentially, you have to build up a profile somewhere online, and then use that to direct some initial traffic to your site. The catch is that the profile had better be relevant to whatever your blog/site is about. Otherwise the little traffic you do manage to get probably won't be happy it visited your site. This is obvious, right?

That's sort of the surprising result of reading various "SEO"-related articles across the internet. They basically tell you some fairly obvious "facts", typically wrapped in a list format. Now I've just rambled. This entry is breaking all the SEO rules.

Here's a rule I will follow. Let's create a list!

Three Surprising SEO Techniques That Work (Really)

1. Use parentheses! They work, they (really) work! People love them. At least I do, and that's enough research for this entry.
2. Create a list. Readers can't get enough of them. When it comes to lists, the longer the better. This list is waaay too short. It will never attract any readers. But what about you? You're reading this, aren't you? No, you're not. That's because the list is too short, so it won't create any excitement, so nobody will ever read this (and that's a fact!).
3. Support your claims with real research. Don't just quote your own gut feelings. They're terrible. Your guts aren't great at writing compelling strings of words. They're simply too busy extracting life-sustaining nutrition from whatever you've eaten lately.
4. Mention niche diets, like "Paleo Intermittent Fasting Carb Loading" diets. They'll be sure to attract readers interested in losing fat and gaining muscle -- i.e. everyone.

The last entry in the list was just a little extra -- a gift for those of you who managed to make it past the first three items. You're welcome!