For me the obsession with traffic for my sites has been an obsession about making money (or not as the case has been)

Without doubt I wanted to increase traffic to my sites, hoping that increased traffic would result in increased sales/subscriptions! However as you mentioned trying to bring traffic in through the grapevine is hard work! The most I achieved (I think) was about 3,000 visitors in one month – this turned into a large number of 2 sales, I didn’t spend days trying to get traffic, but I still put some serious hours into it, all in all it failed.

I kind of see the web today as a vicious circle of failure for a lot of us.
1. You need traffic in order to monetize your site
2. You need to spend some serious time trying to get your name out there, hoping for traffic to arrive
3. You need to build significant backlinks in order for search engines to give you some love
4. You need to build great content in order to get people coming to your site…

however you also need part 3 in order for search engines to take notice of your site, which in turn requires part 2, because promoting your site should reflect in an increased amount of links pointing back to your site which brings us back to point 1 – needing traffic to monetize your site?

So obviously if you are spending some serious hours promoting your site and trying to achieve great backlinks, what time do you have to write decent content and spend time looking at your stats to identify key areas and improved weaknesses, let alone keyword research?

Good post though – I was then looking to start back with Link Referral, if only to use it to gain some website feedback

Layman’s last blog post..iPhone or Blackberry in 2008