I try to use Fridays as a day to manage my business. Well, things have been REALLY hopping around here for the past few months, and I haven’t checked on some of my babies… my now ORPHANED web sites, in apparently a VERY long time. I’m truly embarassed as to the state of disrepair of these web sites. What’s really, really sad is two of these sites used to pull in NICE traffic. Now, they’re mere shadows of their former glory.
I blame blogs.
My blogs in particular… including this one! It’s all their fault really. They’re just so DARNED EASY to manage. I can log in, write a bit and click "publish". VIOLA! I’m in and out in a fraction of the time it takes to upload a big file via FTP.
But it’s not just the ease of posting the content that makes me blog over creating HTML pages. For example, on one HTML site I had created to experiment with affiliate income generation… there were CJ banner ads scattered all over the place. Managing those banner ads was ALWAYS a chore… just from the HTML side. Keeping up on who was still USING CJ as their affiliate manager and who wasn’t was yet another dreaded task. If someone I was signed up with dropped CJ, their links went dead and I got to go searching through the site to find all the instances of that advertiser’s links. Admittedly, that’s just part of playing the affiliate game.
Another part of playing the affiliate game is attracting traffic. Without traffic, you won’t be making any affiliate sales and you won’t get traffic until you get some inbound links. You can do everything right, but if you don’t have some inbound links, well… you’ll be working very hard for a very puny return.
In HTML land, creating those inbound links was virtually impossible! I mean sure, I published articles which helped a little… but I’ve found that if you’re publishing a web site outside the traditional "web developer" network, getting people to hire their webmaster to add a link to your site is difficult for most of us. So difficult that I recently received a $20 bribe if I would link one of my more popular sites to another site!
In blog land, those bribes are called "pay per post". However, in blog land you can generate those inbound links easily (in comparison) by using trackbacks. PLUS you can exchange links with your fellow bloggers, confident in the fact that 7 times out of 10, they’re going to approve your trackback link to their blog. (After all, they like that inbound link as much as you do!)
The moral to the story:
There is no such thing as a set it and forget it web site.
Your Word Press blog based web site makes web maintenance SO much easier for the average business person. You can see incoming links come in as you sign in to your dashboard. You can visit the person’s blog and easily create a link from your next blog post to that nice blogger who linked to you. Sometimes, it’s as easy as saying , "Hey, thanks for linking to my post!"
My experience has been that when I go to check my stats on my ACTIVE blog sites, I’m pleasantly surprised by what I see…. in stark contrast to the sinking feeling I got seeing the triple digit traffic figures for my "forgotten" web sites.
Which is why, when people contact me about creating a web site for them, I let them know that I am PASSIONATE about blogging. I am quick to regale them with my own personal experience and after today, I’ll be able to clearly illustrate how pathetic the traffic numbers are for the "set it and forget it " web site!
