I disagree. I think the work to traffic ratio is appalling. You can spend hours talking with the community getting trickles of traffic.

You need publicity. You need to appear visibly on a site with decent traffic and then you’ve gotta have amazing content when people get to your site. Think UberAffiliate. He paid to be on John Chow because he knew it would kick start his blog no end.

And does the adsense arbitrage spam get more traffic than you do with all your interacting? And as to those sites looking to make a quick buck, some of those dudes have invested a lot of time in complex site-building scripts with markoved content and n-gram frequency checking etc. To me that says they’re pretty well thought out and not quick buck grabbing projects.

Do you want to be a respectable blogger as well? Do people give a damn? I doubt it. They’re looking for content. If you’ve got content they’ll stay, if you don’t they won’t. People are looking for information not a respectable blogger.

Great response you definitely have given a compelling argument, and yes it is a lot of work, and the traffic may not be instant, as to where advertising on a blog like John’s would definitely give you a great kick start

But a trickle, come on, you must be joking right? Utilizing community systems like MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, and the numerous bookmarking sites, Entrecard, commenting on popular blogs, all of these things produce steady traffic, lasting traffic. Not to mention back links.

As far as content brother you are correct to keep the vistors you have to have content they find interesting, not necessarily informative, hell I find lots of stuff interesting but not informative consider the post I linked to on uberaffiliate.com regarding the video of Mr. Chow he posted, and guess what I got a link for that. I might even be where you found me at. Is it possible, maybe or maybe not, but it is merely an example.

And you’re a very wrong in thinking that the people have invested a lot of time in building sites with markov’d content and such. Why? Well firstly lets take rssg when looking at the core of that script it is ridiculously simple, then you have the modified version you can find at syndk8 for which I have been a long time member, further more you have the variations of them including MyGen and YACG, all of which I have made my own modified versions of in couple of hours, template creation with these are even more simple. That work is done on the backs of other talented programmers. What does however take a lot of time is the parasite hosting account signups and/or investing the money on the dedicated servers with multiple static IP’s from different networks in order to appear even more unique and prevent a mass sandboxing. It is easy to go from 60k a month to zero over night utilizing such schemes and Adsense.

In closing you have perpetuated a change in my blog. Simply this is a blog that is intended to highlight “schwag” or free promotional products like, free ebooks/reports, or free services like that of MyBlogLog, that I think will help people make more money online even if its an extra fifty bucks a month. So I think I will make sure to pin the about page or a welcome post at the top. Just so things are clear. Thanks for dropping the line I appreciate it.

Ok man that was a pretty awesome reply. I concede I’m probably wrong on quite a few fronts. It’s just I know someone who runs a brick and mortar business, and whenever they get a piece in the paper, boom instant flood of customers. And I’ve seen similar time and time again online.

I guess I need to open my mind to other methods of traffic generation although I’ve tried that get involved with the community thing and it’s really hard to keep it up for more than a couple of days.