For over two years, the top referrer for ESL go has been Google. No longer. This month both Yahoo and MSN are sending me more traffic than Google. Normally this would be a bad sign because losing Google traffic usually means less traffic over all.
Not this month. Traffic has never been higher with about 1400 uniques on an average day. The big difference seems to be my ranking for the keyword ESL. Google has dropped me to number 50. I had been in the 20-30 range for a while. Yahoo has me at #7. MSN has me at #7 also.
As an expert on ESL, I'm confident saying that Yahoo gives people in my profession the best results, MSN is second, and Google is not doing so well with this keyword.
So I really want more traffic for my travel blog but I don't have the inclination to do my own link building. I posted a message on sitepoint that I'd pay 3.00/reciprocal link and had 3 responses in 2 days.
One to the people who responded has a lot of experience doing SEO and link building so I'm giving him the job. For me this si great. All the other link building services I've found want substantially more than 3.00/link...
I spend my time developing content, which I enjoy much more than link building . My site still gets its links.
When I built my first site I started studying SEO and decided that it would be smart to build a number of sites and link them to mine. I soon had over 12 sites and not enoguh time to develop each one properly. Now I'm trying to decide which to sell and in what order because if I ahd spent all my time on one site and really developed it, I'd be rich.
The other thing I've tried is hiring people to manage sites for me. So far this hasn't worked out too well. I bought ozband.net and hired the previous owner to manage it. When the PHP Nuke got hacked he promised to fix it. A few hacks later and the site still wasn't updated. My hosting was suspended and I sold the site at a loss. The original owner bought it from the person I sold it to by the way.
What I've learned from my experience is to concnetrate on building a couple of great sites. I say a couple because if the revenue from one dries up (say a shift in search engine algorithms or something causes a huge loss of traffic) your revenue is not completely gone.
http://www.seo-search-engine-ranking.com/ad_network_222.php