Starting From Nothing
Posted by Andy Williamson on April 09, 2007
Filed Under Planning Your Business
For anyone about to enter into the World of on-line publishing assuming that they don’t have a huge budget and the ability to buy into an already well established publication there’s only one option - starting from nothing and that’s hard, but nonetheless it’s something that we all have to do.
Take us for example - we run three primary publications all established with loads of content and here we go starting all over again with So Called Gurus. Do we love starting new publications? Well yes and no: ‘Yes’ because we have a clear vision of where we’re going and when we plan to be there, and ‘no’ because we know just how much work is involved in getting there.
So how do you keep going when you start from nothing?
The first thing to do is to make your expectations reasonable, unless you strike a very sweet spot in on-line publishing you’ll probably get very little traffic to your site in your first year. There are many reasons for this, the major search engines and especially Google don’t always go a great deal on new sites, they prefer to monitor you for a while before gracing their listings with many of your articles and posts. Google have created a reputation and trust based algorithm and humans tend to employ a similar mechanism. If you’re telling the World that you’re the expert in your field but no one else is backing you up it’s hard work, yet with work and time when other sites and experts in your field start to discuss your contribution and link to your publication you will enjoy the huge double benefit of both search engine and human approval.
Actually this is why we would never recommend going to great lengths trying to get artificial favour from the search engines using imaginative SEO practices, while knowledge of practical SEO is valuable, tricking the engines will nearly always end in tears, it’s far better to take the long road to listing success on the major engines.
Don’t ever expect year one to be the year you go big time, it should be a tentative year where you establish honest and long term relationships with peers in your industry. Remember the people who can really help you with publicity, promotion and credibility have probably been in the business for some time and get approached by lots of writers eager to win their favour - take a softly softly approach, consider what you can do to help them, maybe through research or provision of well written content, even the biggest publications out there will be grateful if you hand them compelling content that is perfect for their publication.
‘Give and ye shall receive’ is possibly more true on-line than anywhere else in business, does anyone think that Goggle would have been a tenth of the size it is now had it decided to charge for its search listing services?
So in summary, consider year one to be your critical foundation year where you move from nothing and no one on-line, to someone with a voice: build a solid and robust reputation based foundation that won’t come back to bite your backside a few years latter. You may be starting from nothing but remember you’re building something that will carry you and your family quite probably for the rest of your working life!
