WebFusion - 7:43 pm on Nov 10, 2005 (gmt 0)

If what you are doing isn't working change your approach. Goes along the line of "never fall in love with your business - it is just a tool - use it until it no longer serves it's purpose then find a new/better that will"

I think that's mroe relvant than ever now. While I still think one of the best approaches in the long term is Brett's "26 steps", in the short term, there is a TON of things people can do to increase traffic to legit sites (note: by legit, I mean sites that actually contain unique content/products, as opposed to datafeed generated affiliate sites and/or scraper sites). heck, one press release alone about a product that we've carried since day one on our site brought in over 10000 visitors in 24 hours and generated 133 sales. I should also note that press release cost us all of $75 to have a freelancer write of us (yet brought in over $4k in profit).

How many webmasters have gone the route of actually offering unique content to other quality sites in their niche simply for the courtesy of a link back. We actually have a contract with a few freelancers to create 5-10 new articles a week for OTHER sites in our genre, simply to build one-way links back to ours. It's a win-win, and generates both targeted traffic AND slowly builds our free traffic (which again, is just a bonus).

There are more ways to build traffic than the most obvious. Think outside the box. While this Christmas may be a bust, by this time next year, you could be in the position to give google the finger in their stocking ;-)