Re-Birth of a Site or Lisa, Why Is Your Page Rank So Crappy ?
*sigh* There is no avoiding the large elephant in the room. How can I give advice and claim to be “an expert” when I have a four year old site, no page rank and next to no backlinks?
Well the short story is …. it is the cobbler’s children that go without shoes!
This is the Long Version..
Long Version:
I claim neglect and perhaps laziness with a touch of denial to boot. I never intended to let my poor site lay to waste.. Its started as 3 page site- mainly registered to get an email address that didn’t end in Gmail and wasn’t sent to my home email address.
I let is sit awhile and promised myself I would work on it as soon as I learned how to use Photoshop and Dreamweaver. That was four years ago. ( I can open Photo shop and make image smaller.. if you need that service see rates page). I then got a job working as link building for a terrific company as well as working doing straight SEO on a few clients. I also had a baby and some personal stuff going on and was stretched to the limit.
At one point I wanted to work 10 hours a week and was working 30.. getting no sleep , cranky. mean, house a disaster… I was making quite a bit of money at that point and then just woke up one day and decided to scale back. The money wasn’t as important as being happy.
I had total burnout and took time to reconnect to my friends and family.. I began to work on my own blogs. My own blog began to make money. Not a lot- but enough that it was fun to play with… I started a few more and then some more. I had 3 or 4 steady SEO clients and that was plenty and my web site really didn’t really matter… I was bit embarrassed by it. I didn’t ( and still don’t! ) have any kind of a logo.. it was outdated. I had written some articles and people - SEO colleagues were visiting this site .. At one point I got REALLY embarrassed and actually put a password on the site so no one could get in…
Gradually I got more and more involved with blogs and blogging professionally, setting up and maintaining blogs for other companies. I felt that if a company had a well optimized site then my time was better spent with blogging than looking for links. I was right. Sites I worked on started to have higher traffic- much higher traffic. There conversion rates went up. The clients were thrilled.
I had by this time set up 7 of my own blogs. I tweaked them … changed them and tested them- I love numbers and any kind analytics. Seeing what works what doesn’t. Some of my blogs have very high traffic and with that much traffic there is more data to ponder. One of the nice things about blogs is that things happen fast- you don’t have to week 3 weeks for a new page on your site to be crawled and indexed. Blog posts can get picked up fast- sometimes in minutes. So I could analyze numbers in front of me and manipulate blog to see what happened when I did X and get almost instant data ( data is like crack to me! ) .
I become obsessed with inching up better returns, higher click through rates and more traffic.
While all this was going on poor Bigfoot Web Marketing site sort of sat there… . I then decided to just make the whole site a blog.. then I didn’t know if I even wanted to do SEO at ALL anymore . I had no interest in posting all the lasted SEO news and trends and avoided my site.
People started finding out I was good at blogging and how they could be worked to the best advantage. I started setting them up with their own blogs. I really liked teaching people how to do it for themselves.
Bulk of my time seemed to be spent telling other show to do it.. where to go to get this.. skyping where to find a plugin how often and what to post, where to find links, how to get other people to come to your site.. and so on.
A Blog Can Empower the Broken
I have done a lot of non-profit work. I work with women who have left bad situations and need to make a fresh start and also with women who can’t work outside the home . I have taught them how to do it for themselves. It has amazed me how intimated by the process they are. How beaten down and helpless they feel. The act of setting up a blog for them and posting about something THEY ARE GOOD AT gives them self esteem. Over and over and over again I see women feel like they have some to offer. They may post about shopping deals or latest online contests or poetry they have written. Writing it down and having some one else read it- want it- searching for the stuff they are writing about is EMPOWERING for a broken person. I believe that any act of creation lifts the spirit and self esteem- whether it be painting a picture, baking a cake, growing a garden or writing a blog. The act of creating something beautiful or useful is a human need.
” How Do You Do a Blog? ”
About two months ago I was working with someone and she asked- “Is this stuff written down somewhere? Like in one place?” I started to think about all the sites I could direct her to. .. about how many times i had repeated there same thing over and over. I also have rule when it comes to blogging- never send some one somewhere else when you can give it to them yourself.
Yes, this was my lightbulb moment.
So my Bigfoot Web Marketing site was re-born. I am not going to master Photoshop this week and I am not going to wait for a logo. I refuse to worry about the embarrassing PR0 and crappy traffic. I will start now.
And I did .
I am using this site mainly as a way to get message out to people who have never heard of SEO or Digg or Twitter or Andy Sullivan or Matt Cutts.
Everybody has to start somewhere. Sometimes twice 
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