I'm so lost.

[Mandalay]

Ok... I need some guidance.

• I picked a topic for my first website. (Food)
• I bought a domain name and a shared hosting account for a year.
• I bought a premium theme.
• I started writing articles every day and posting them.
• It's been about a week and nothing's really... happened?
• I found someone on Fiver to help me set up analytic and I don't think I'm getting any visitors.

This is discouraging because I have been working so hard. I feel like giving up but I just need reassurance that things will pick up. I guess you don't know that without seeing my site.

So my real question is....

What's next?!?!?!?!

Do I just keep adding new articles and people will start to find my site?

How can I promote a website about cooking and food? It's about healthy and fresh food mostly but some treats too. I don't understand "SEO" yet and it sounds like its just asking for trouble so I want to avoid it as much as I can. Is that a good idea?

Honestly I just hope someone can take this information and help me make sense of it all because I don't know what to do next. Im willing to work hard but I can't afford to pay a coach or a mentor but maybe the community can help. Thanks so much.....

 

[Devil Anse]

Mandalay, welcome to the forum! Let me try to help you fix your expectations.

You aren't going to get traffic from search engines right off the bat. You have to get indexed and then your domain has to become powerful enough that it outranks other sites. That takes time. And links. And you don't want to manipulate those with spam probably just yet, as a newb. I'm assuming you don't want to "lose" your project to some google filter just yet.

Consider how you can get traffic to your site using social networks for now. You can be on Twitter, Facebook, and ESPECIALLY Pinterest for your niche. Interact, become a personality that people get to know. You can also leave blog comments on all of the other food and cooking blogs and get known, then ask to be able to do a guest post, and allow them to do guest posts on your site. NOW you're getting good links!

You'll find traffic coming from all over the social and other blogs, but if you track it, you'll see the search engines will start sending some your way too.

The biggest myth is "If you build it they will come." Nope. They don't even know it's there! You've got to promote it first.

 

[BANG]

To elaborate a bit more on what Devil Anse said, here are some quick pointers for some of the major social networks...

Pinterest: Create a handful of boards.. maybe one with "food porn" (you can find it on reddit, it's not what it sounds like!), one with some great recipes, whatever... fill them in with a good dozen or so pins to each board, basically just make your account active + interesting. Now, it's time to follow people. Some of them will follow you back, some won't. If you follow other people that have boards all about cooking and food, it's more likely they'll follow you back plus these are the people you want in your audience since you'll enjoy what you're doing. Repin their stuff, favorite it, follow them, leave some genuine comments... You don't want to spend all day on this, but just USE Pinterest as it's genuinely meant to be used and you'll gather up a nice little following for yourself so that when you do start pinning stuff from your website, you'll have a little built-in audience.

Twitter: Very similar.... follow people in your niche, retweet their stuff, participate in conversations and people will start to follow you and follow you back. Twitter is much better for networking with other bloggers and site owners than it is for actually trying to get traffic (As a general rule of thumb, in my own experience. YES, you'll get traffic from Twitter, but it will be from the people who already follow you and know you and are into your work... imo.)

Facebook: You'll need to build up a fanpage to get any traction out of Facebook, and it's frankly borderline not worth it anymore. You can try an advertising campaign, pick an image that's VERY eye catching, keep your copy simple and quick like "Do you love great food? Like this page!" and target it towards people who speak English is less-developed countries around the world. The reason for this is because "likes" from these countries are a lot cheaper.. you should be able to get likes for a penny or so with a little testing. So, rather than spending $10-$20 on a few thousand fake likes, you can get real ones. This isn't necessarily the audience that advertisers on your site will be looking for, but their "Likes" and "Shares" count just the same and will help improve your social signals and you can pepper in some North American fans down the road as your site grows and you start to see if it's worth it or not.

Hopefully this is some advice that will be actionable for you to start getting some of that sweet social traffic that Devil Anse was talking about, while you wait for the search engines to start to show you love.

 

[ColdHardCash87]

More tips to add to the above...

Pinterest: Find giant shared boards that you can petition to join. You can get so much traffic and followers from those to help build your own army of boards.

Facebook: Consider approaching big Pages and paying them to promote your posts to their fans. Not just posting them, but also promoting them with the paid bump. You can bypass some of the hurdles of Facebook's every-tightening edge rank algo and piggy back off of that Page's trust to their communities.