This is part 7 of a ‘watch me build a site’ series of posts. Part 6 | Part 5| Part 4 | Part 3 | Part 2 | Part1

Building a site is, in many ways, the easy part. If you’re not aware of SEO or online marketing, you’re not gonna get traffic. At the end of the day, without traffic, 99% of sites will die as their owners will lose interest.

You’ve seen me piece together a site bit by bit. It’s no great secret. There is no magic software i use or buttons i press to do it for me. It just involves some basic knowledge, a bit of skill and above all else, patience and committment to the cause.

photo credit: Joe Penniston

The fun part for me is seeing whether a site works or doesn’t. Some sites and ideas, no matter how great you think they are, just won’t work. Maybe they require massive investment, maybe they just need promotion, maybe you’re the only person on the planet that likes the site…. you’ll never know. So if you’re not confident in your ideas, they’re all going to die on you – one by one. They key is to stick with your gut and get those ideas up and running – let the people and stats judge your ideas – don’t let yourself judge them as you’ll most likely be your own harshest critic.

It’s tough, but the best way to build a site or finish a project, i find, is to just do it. At all costs. If it means working 24/7 – so be it…. if it means spending weeks learning about html or SEO or wordpress – so be it. If you have that attitude, your projects will get finished and once they’re live and up online, you’re much more likely to carry out a little work on them every now and then.

Classic example is hotelsrevealed.com – i buried it and forgot about it for a week or more after i’d completed it. Today, i log in to google analytics and see it’s received 140 unique visits in just over a week. 62% from google – people searching for things the site contains.

Because i know a thing or two about SEO, i’m pretty confident i can own this niche online. Having done some quick calculations… theoretically, i can increase that traffic at least 100 fold by adding 100 more articles.

So i could be looking at 30k+ unique visits per month which would dwarf any of my existing sites in terms of traffic so i reckon this is a site worth working on and getting more involved in… and i’ll adjust my work accordingly and do some more testing to see if it will be worth my while long term.

But it’s looking good and i’m delighted it’s already getting organic traffic as it proves you can pick a niche, build an average site and start pulling in traffic. No magic formula. Just common sense and a bit of confidence in your idea.

p.s. If you want some feedback on your ideas, why not submit them to iwantideas.com – i love it when i can start self-referencing like this