Part of the guide: MLM Reviews: The Honest Index
(This is part two of the SEO Chronicles, click here for part one)
However, when your site does get submitted for manual review, there will be no warnings. It’ll happen, and if you don’t pass the inspection, you’ll get a penalty almost instantly. Manual reviewers are looking mainly at site quality. They actually read your content and decide if it’s worthy of the rankings it has obtained.
Another reason for getting reviewed is if you suddenly start getting thousands of links for no apparent reason. All this adds up to one obvious solution: write great content and lots of it. Even if it means writing the content yourself, do it. Most article writing/content creation services suck.
You know, the ones that offer content articles for $2-$5. What I want to do is change your way of thinking when it comes to content creation and promotion. How much value do you think a $3 or even $5 article could have?
The people offering such cheap content don’t go out of their way to make the content informative or even correct. They are lazy and do the least research possible. From now on, you need to start looking at SEO as PAID marketing.
Newsflash: no traffic is free. Free traffic is a total myth. All free traffic is time-consuming; it’s a fact. This is exactly why you want to automate and outsource as much of the manual work as possible, while at the same time making sure your automation appears completely natural.
Content is not all equal. Nobody knows a lot about everything. Which is why you should pay someone to create your content. Don’t attempt to write articles about something you know nothing about.
As soon as I changed my perspective about SEO, my results skyrocketed. You need to do SEO the same way you do pay-per-click or Facebook marketing. Look at it as an investment. Don’t be afraid of spending $10-$30 per article. It might cost you $15 for an article and another $15 to promote it.
If that page makes just $0.25/day, you’ll have your money back within 120 days or 4 months. After that, it’s all profit, better than any other conventional investment. As a rule of thumb, I try to pay $10 per article. Paying that kind of money per article means getting people who know their stuff and thoroughly do their research.
400-500 word articles no longer cut it. If you want to build amazing authority sites that are immune to Google’s monstrous updates, go for 800+ words. The only sites of mine that have never been hit by an update are the ones where the pages are all 800+ words, written in excellent English, and are super informative. Oh, and have minimum optimization.
When you build your sites, you should be thinking, “How can I make this even cooler, more interesting, and fun to interact with?”
Have that exact thought with every page you publish, and you’ll do well. I know it’s either a lot more money or time-consuming, but you want to build a business that lasts, right? Also – a word of advice…
Stop screwing around in niches with limited monetization options. Most SEOs build sites in whatever niches seem profitable. I don’t care how many searches the keywords are getting or how weak the SEO competition is. If you can only monetize via advertising or one option, forget it.
Build sites of value where you can build a community, blog daily, and actually sell stuff to customers who are happy to pay for it.
A few years ago, I realized something profound. Once I had this realization, it changed my whole perspective on Internet Marketing.
A business is only a real business if it has 3 core components:
- Products
- Customers
- A way to get paid!
Marketers have been screwing around with “ways to get paid” by taking advantage of technology and loopholes for years now. If your business doesn’t involve products and customers, it’s probably not going to last.
The last thing I want to add to this chronicle is that you should never solely rely on SEO. SEO is a single traffic source. It’s a great way to generate traffic, promote your sites, and build an online business, but it is volatile like anything else.
Always be doing SEO, but diversification is the number one rule when it comes to traffic generation.
You were never meant to do this alone
Reading this changes nothing. Doing it with people who show up changes everything. That is the whole difference between the people who transform and the people who keep starting over.
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Lisa Thompson
This post really hit home for me! I’ve been struggling with SEO for a while now, and this perspective on content creation and investing in high-quality articles is exactly what I needed. Thank you for sharing these insights!
Michael Johnson
I’m having a hard time believing that SEO can be as simple as focusing on quality content. Isn’t there more to it, like backlinks and technical optimization? Can you provide more evidence or examples of this working in practice?
Sarah Lopez
Great post! I was wondering, when you mentioned outsourcing content, how do you ensure the content is truly valuable? What metrics or criteria do you use when selecting writers or services to work with?
Edward Peters
While I agree that content is important, I think you’re oversimplifying the SEO process. There are so many other factors at play like user experience and site speed that can also make or break your rankings. Just my two cents.
Karen Wilson
Hey, David! It’s been a while since I last read your blog, but I’m really impressed with how you’ve continued to provide such valuable content. Let’s catch up soon—maybe over coffee?
James Anderson
What a great read! This post reminds me of when I first started out in SEO. I remember facing similar challenges with content creation, and it wasn’t until I invested in proper content that I saw real results. Your post really brought me back to those early days—thanks!
Emily Richards
One tool that I found extremely helpful for content promotion is Buffer. It helps automate social media posts, which in turn drives traffic to my site. I highly recommend it to anyone looking to boost their content’s reach.
David White
I just wanted to say thank you! This post has taught me a lot about looking at SEO as an investment rather than just a free traffic source. It’s a total mindset shift for me, and I’m eager to start applying these strategies to my own projects.
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Four months is closer to 122 days than 120. Small thing, but the real question is whether every $10 article converts the same, which the maths just assumes.
Sorry if this is a silly question, but the post says a business needs products, customers, and a way to get paid, and I keep wondering which one I’m actually missing, because some days it feels like none of them and other days it feels like maybe one.
Bonnie, try listing the three separately on paper instead of asking which one is missing. Most people building something new have a product and even early customers, but haven’t built a repeatable way to get paid yet, and that’s a systems problem, not a worth problem. What would the simplest version of that third piece look like for you right now?
Writing your own content, outsourcing it properly, and diversifying traffic on top is three jobs, not one strategy.
I spent six years building a team on exactly this model before I left it in 2022. The paid-content-as-investment framing is honestly right, cheap articles are a false economy, and 800+ words did hold up better against updates in my experience too. Where it falls apart is the diversification line at the end, tucked in almost as an afterthought. Nearly everyone I watched build only on SEO, including me for a long stretch, ended up rebuilding from scratch when a single algorithm shift wiped a site out overnight. The content advice here is sound. The bit about never relying on one traffic source is the part people skip, and it’s the part that actually matters most.
Samir, the bit about never relying on one source hits close to home. I’d probably spend three weeks agonising over which $10 writer to hire and never actually ship the site the article’s about, which sort of proves your point better than mine.
‘Making automation appear completely natural’ is doing so much work in that sentence. I automated my outsourced article briefs into a template last year and it still took a human eye to catch the two writers who were clearly spinning.