If website traffic was cake, SEO would be like the cherry on the cake. Not the cake itself.
The “cake” is traffic that you can control, that you can turn on and off at will, that you can get started quickly, and that you can keep testing until you have a process that at least breaks even.
If instead you choose to use small, highly targeted paid ad campaigns and you can at least break even, then, at that point you know you have an offer that the market gives two hoots about.
After that you can either add more products to your ecosystem, selling them without the cost of acquiring that customer, or you can look at your data and fine tune your process until you hit profit.
Only a handful of sites – Facebook, Google, and Youtube, have that kind of traffic volume that you can rely on day after day.
That’s not to say that you can forget about getting that lovely “free” traffic.
The crucial step of positioning yourself within your market always includes creating great content, blogs, social posts, video, podcasts and even simple software tools.
This definitely creates authority, links and traffic, and helps you rank better in Google.
But it’s not the first thing you need to nail.
Just like putting icing on before your cake is ready, will leave you with an unappetising mess, getting these steps in the wrong order will leave your business in the same sticky screw-up.
To find out what steps to take, and when, take a look at my latest video on the components of The MAPPED Method, then see how you score.