Now that Google has implemented the Penguin update and sort of torched SEO for lucrative keyword terms, where does that leave the individual webmaster who is trying to make their living online?

If you got torched by Penguin, what is your plan moving forward, if you choose to stay in the game?

Maybe the answer is that it is time to stop treating it like a game.

No matter how much we say “it’s not fair!”, Google does not care about such pleas, and they are not going to do anything to help out the would-be Internet marketer.

If your goal is to game Google for traffic, then you probably have to start asking yourself some hard questions.

I think one of the most important concepts going forward is going to be this:

Does you website have a purpose even in a world without Google?

Because if it doesn’t, then it is not worth much in a world where Google is constantly shaking things up and releasing algorithm updates and constantly throwing a wrench into the works.

In other words, could you build your website–or your business–into something in which any traffic you receive from Google is merely a bonus?

Because I think that is the challenge that we are facing now.

Big brands are probably going to continue their march to the top of the serps. Google wants businesses to buy traffic using Adwords. Some of the changes that they make will inevitably cause some businesses to buy more advertising and PPC ads.

Think about it from Google’s perspective. If someone searches for “electric chainsaw,” which websites do you want at the top of your search results?

Home depot? Stihl? Or do you want some 5 page website called “best chainsaw reviews” that only annoys buyers and serves as an unnecessary stepping stone to the real sites that they want to land on, such as Home Depot?

Now I realize that this is not going to be true for every search. For example, someone might be searching for “post marathon leg massage.” They want information. But my thought is that Google is going to be trending towards the point where they are going to trust websites that have a brand or a business behind them, something more than an online presence. So they are going to have a tendency to, in the long run, rank a brand like “Center for the Healing Arts” above a site like “Best Massage Advice dot net.”

I think Google is going to be looking at certain trust signals going forward that cannot be gamed easily. Site age, being a big brand, and having a real world business that your website is associated with are probably the three biggest ones that I can think of.

Someone recently came to me and wanted to start a website about electric cars. Well, OK, that’s fine. We could do that. But we have to ask ourselves: Are we just going to be a generic website that has generic information about electric cars on it? Are we going to try to break news about electric cars, and give good commentary and insight on the news?

We sort of have to ask ourselves if that is “enough” in a post-Penguin world. Certainly having a generic website about electric cars with relatively generic text articles is NOT enough. That day is long past.

But even if we put some personality into the site, even if we go out there and interview some big players in the industry, mix it up with unique content formats, talk to real people, get some exclusive videos, and even if we break news and give good insight and commentary on that news, is that really going to be enough for Joe Schmo to build a successful online business?

Really?

Think about it. Go to Google and type in “electric cars.” You see stuff like Tesla, Toyota, wikipedia, government sites, and so on.

So maybe you can sneak in there, try to target the long tail, manufacture some links, build some links, whatever….and try to get some rankings and some traction. But for how long? To what end? You are not Toyota or Nissan or Tesla…..you are just some random guy on the web with a generic website, no real brand or business behind it. What would lead us to believe that Google will keep sending such a website free traffic forever? Is that really a valid business model in a post-penguin world?

My thought is that it is NOT. It is not a good strategy for the long term, as Google is sort of done playing the game, they are done rewarding manufactured links, they are leaning toward big brands and actual businesses (not just online only businesses).

So what are the options then, given that person wants to pursue an online strategy?

Let’s brainstorm a few options:

1) Change nothing and plow ahead with SEO – this is what the Penguin update essentially killed and I think it will continue to get worse in the future. Not a good option.

2) Build a real business that can justify itself without your website. Then supplement that business with your website, using both social+search marketing channels.

3) Either consult or sell a relatively expensive product or service with your site, such that you are not depending on the “free traffic + advertising or affiliate sales” model for success.

4) Find a business model that does not depend on search traffic.

Simply building a “quality website” is no longer a viable long term business strategy. It can still be attempted and it may even make money, but I think the risk has become too great for someone to rely on SEO for the bulk of their income. Just ask the owner of AskTheBuilder dot com, once a showcase website for the AdSense. His business has been destroyed even though Google portrayed him as having “quality content.” That no longer matters in a post-Penguin world. Quality content and white-hat link building is no longer a sure recipe of long term success. The game has changed, and in many cases is no longer worth playing. Unless you have a real world business that can profit without a web strategy, it may be wasteful to pursue SEO at all these days…..

Here is my step by step instructions for creating a thousand per month in passive income.

I have already covered much of this material in greater depth, for example my free eBook about how I created my six figure website.

But I want to dive a bit deeper here and try to take a slightly different angle on things.

What follows are the actual steps that I took in getting my website to over $1,000/month in passive earnings:

Picked a topic, started a website

Not much to really be said about this one. I chose a topic, went to Godaddy, and registered a ten dollar domain name. Bought shared hosting. Set up WordPress and started blogging.

This step is not difficult and can be accomplished in an afternoon, for under $100/year.

Simply starting a website earns you nothing, of course, and is actually a liability until you start producing income from it.

I wrote a few articles at this point and I was officially blogging now. At some point I added Google AdSense, making very little, if nothing from it at the time.

Thrashed around a bit, started some other loser websites, kept returning to my original flagship site

Like most who start in Internet marketing, I got lots of different ideas while reading about making money online.

This resulted in the launch of several new websites, all of which would be forgotten about later and basically trashed.

The reason for this is because I came to realize the barrier to entry when it came to making money with blogging. You cannot just start 100 blogs and have them each earn money for you. None of them will earn squat. This is because you spread yourself too thin.

I would go so far as to argue that this will happen if you start just 3 blogs. Still too thin.

But when you first get into Internet marketing, all of these great ideas pop out at you, and you see so many different business models, and so everything looks like a shiny new way to make money. This is commonly referred to as “shiny object syndrome.”

So I went through this phase and started a few duds. No biggie. I quickly saw that the only website that was making even a dollar in income here or there was my original flagship website that I had put most of my effort into.

So, I kept returning to that site.

And over the next 4+ years, I would continue to return to that site, at the expense of all other projects. Nothing else stuck for me, nothing else made money for me.

So my philosophy had become: “Make one website, and put all of your effort into it for the long haul. Never give up on it, never get distracted with other projects.”

Wrote articles, targeted keywords with most of them

So I was writing articles on my website, and I was attempting to target keywords with them.

At first, I did this strictly by brainstorming. Looking back, I still think this is a decent way to blog. If you think of some keywords to type into a search engine, then other people will likely think of those words too at some point. Not a bad way to go about it.

Of course, I eventually discovered the idea of keyword research and started using various tools and building lists of keywords that I would then attack by writing new articles.

I never worried much about on-page SEO, other than to get my keyword once in the post and once in the title of the post. That was all the on-site SEO I ever did.

And I had plenty of articles that did not really target keywords at all. Some of them drew in long tail traffic, most of them did not. No biggie. It all went into what would become my big old website.

Gave up for a year, then got interested again

Now here is an interesting tidbit:

Before my site was making any money to really speak of, I got sick of it, and discouraged. I basically quit for a year.

Later, the site showed some signs of life, and I was at a point where I needed a project. So I threw myself back into it, and the extra age that the site had just received allowed it to grow a bit faster. I think this was critical for me, because if I had kept working on it for a full year without seeing much growth, I think I really would have given it all up.

Something to keep in mind. You might just need to walk away from it all for a while, and let the age factor kick in. Old websites tend to do well, even if they have not been updated for a long time. It is easy to forget that.

Saw a trickle of AdSense income, vowed to increase it

So at some point I started to see between one and five bucks per day in regular income.

Annoyingly, some days were still a big fat zero though. Very discouraging.

But suddenly the hook had been set again. Now I was interested again, with dollar signs glazed over my eyes.

If I could earn 3 dollars per day, why could I not scale this up and make 30 dollars per day? Or three hundred?

At the same time, I was stuck in a 40 hour per week day job, and I cannot say that I was loving it none too much. It was work.

So this huge fantasy was born.

It was the fantasy of entrepreneurship.

I wanted my freedom, and I wanted to purchase it with Internet marketing income.

To me, nothing could be neater than this. I wanted very badly to earn my living online.

And the lure of anonymous advertising income was very seductive. It was hardly a business at all, really! You just publish content, and this advertising mysteriously appears on your site, and you get paid! You don’t even have to deal with customers. It is a very enticing business model.

The lifestyle drew me in as well. Complete freedom and mobility? Work from the beach with one hand on your laptop, the other hand with one of those little cocktail drinks in it? Yeah, that was what I was picturing.

Who could resist such a fantasy, when it was clearly within reach?

So I got organized. I got serious about increasing my online income. I vowed to take my earnings up to at least $1,000/month, and subsequently quit my day job. This was my goal, my singular obsession in life.

With as much as I hated my day job at the time, I vowed to make it happen.

Data-mined for new article ideas

So the next thing that I did after I got serious about eventually going full time with Internet marketing was to start mining my data.

Every night, I would look at my Statcounter logs, and see what search queries people had typed in to the search engines to find my site.

I would click on the search to see where in the results my site appeared.

If I was not #1 for the search, I usually took that keyword and turned it into a new article for the site.

This is still a very simple and effective method for expanding your long tail traffic.

It was a simple technique and I did it over and over again. My long tail traffic grew and grew.

Challenged myself with several different link building goals

It came to my attention at some point that my website needed more link juice. Stronger and better links pointing at the site would be critical if I was going to hit my income goal of $1,000/month.

The art of building link juice has changed over time, so some of the goals that I had back then would no longer apply today.

However, several of those strategies that I used back then have well stood the test of time, and are some of the only remaining effective link building strategies today.

They are:

1) Creating amazingly helpful, premium content.
2) Building real relationships within the niche, networking with others, actually having conversations, talking with other webmasters.
3) Seeking out real guest posting opportunities to get strong links.
4) Planning and publishing premium content, then telling your network about it.
5) Agreeing to do interviews for other websites, and hosting them yourself.

At one time or another I did or continued to do all of these strategies, and I still use all of them to some extent today.

There were also many other link building tactics back then that have since fallen by the wayside. They are no longer effective, so I no longer use them. What is listed above still works, and does so extremely well in the long run.

The key takeaway here is this, though:

I had to challenge myself to get the hard links.

Back then, it was especially easy just to use manufactured links in order to rank content. This was the easy path to success, and it still worked back then, to some extent.

But I could also see the value in getting a really strong link, one that was not just manufactured garbage. But these were really hard to get, and you had to open yourself up a bit, put yourself out there, take some risks, talk to some people. It was easier to just hide behind manufactured link building.

The message from Google is getting stronger and stronger every day: manufactured link building is dying.

Time to go get the real links. The hard to get ones.

But therein lies an opportunity for all of us: most people are too lazy to go get the tough links.

Challenged myself with several different premium content goals

Back when I started first building my flagship website, I was reading all sorts of A-list Internet marketing blogs. Of course the mantra was “content is king” and that we should all be like Seth Godin and make remarkable content that sells itself and attracts links like a magnet and so on.

I could not ignore this onslaught of advice, because I could see that a web filling up with spam was not going to be a long term money maker.

Eventually, I realized, the cream would in fact rise to the top.

Good content would be rewarded in the long run. My sense of justice told me that this must be so.

Even though some people were outsourcing 300 word articles for a penny per word and throwing cheap links at them and making big money, I saw that this was probably not going to be sustainable in the long run.

Thus, I challenged myself to create amazing, link worthy content. Just like all the gurus and the A-listers were telling us to do.

For example, I created:

* Huge list posts of 101 things about my topic.
* In depth eBook resource guides.
* Custom infographics, found some data points and then made up graphics, just shooting from the hip to create stuff.
* Reader mailbag content, answering real questions in a post format that I had received via email.

So I did not just say “I am going to create great content.”

Instead, I pushed myself, over and over again, to create great content in various formats.

I experimented. I pushed myself to learn more, to do more, to create new things. Not just boring old text articles over and over again….

Challenged myself to publish articles in higher and higher volumes

When I saw that my website was earning passive income based on advertising, I wanted to grow the amount that it was earning very badly.

I knew that this was basically going to be a two part process:

1) Increase link juice.
2) Increase the size of the website (publish more articles).

Building link juice was ridiculously difficult, but writing and publishing new articles was relatively easy for me.

So, I went nuts with publishing new content.

How nuts did I get?

At one point, I was writing and publishing up to 25 articles per day, writing all of the content myself, and just about killing my back and spine in the process.

Most days I tried to average at least 3 new articles on my money site.

Over the long haul, I find that publishing three articles per day is a solid workflow. If you can publish three articles daily then it will not take too long for you to start seeing substantial traffic increases. Of course this depends on also building up some link juice and authority, but that will likely come over time anyway (especially if you write good stuff).

The reason that I was able to get up to $1,000/month in passive income was strictly due to my push to publish MORE content.

My site had about 200 articles or so on it, and my goal was increase revenue. I think I had between 500 and 1,000 articles on my site when I finally hit my income goal.

Volume matters. A lot.

Do the work if you want to see the income, simple as that.

Ignored outsourcing, except for link building, then later ignored it even for that

Here is another critical point:

A lot of the Internet marketers who I followed in my online journey were big into outsourcing. They would pay other people very small amounts of money in order to write relatively lousy articles for their websites. Thus they could grow their income much faster than if they themselves were handling all of their own writing.

This turned out to be a lucky move on my part, because I largely ignored the idea of outsourcing my content creation. I just never really did it. I count this as lucky, because eventually the Panda updates laid the smack down on all of that garbage content that people had ordered up via outsourcing.

Even after this time, many people were still using outsourced content for link building, and I had done that myself on and off on a relatively small scale (I never invested more than 10 percent of revenue back into outsourced link building).

But even after the notorious Panda updates, I stopped doing this small amount of automated link building as well, and went with a strictly white hat approach of seeking out real world guest posting opportunities, trading a massive piece of quality content to another website in my niche.

So my advice to the aspiring Internet marketer is this:

Avoid outsourcing. Build it yourself and do it right the first time. Don’t sacrifice quality just to ramp up your production. It’s not worth it, and you will get penalized in the end.

Slow and steady wins the race when it comes to quality content online.

By this time, I was at $1,000/month. Ninety days later I hit $2,000/month

Think about this for a moment, and use it as an example to help you stay realistic about your income growth curve.

I worked fairly hard on my website for about three to four years before I finally hit $1,000/month in income.

Less than 90 days later, I hit $2,000/month in income.

Think about that.

The tremendous amount of work that I had done over the past few years that painstakingly pushed my income up over the $1,000/month mark was also enough to push it up over the $2,000/month mark.

Thus, the growth curve for your income will resemble exponential growth.

It will start out VERY slowly.

You may put up AdSense on your website and not get so much as a single click for months at a time. This is a simple function of traffic. You won’t be making much money because you will not have tons and tons of traffic.

Your ability to drive traffic will dictate how much income you can earn, and it is going to take a lot of time and patience to build up substantial amounts of traffic.

Keep this in mind when your website is young and not generating much interest yet. It takes time to hit that exciting growth curve. I would not expect any miracles during the first year, or even the first two years.

Is that depressing? Not to me it’s not! I have no problem waiting a few years for this sort of successful business venture to really take off.

People who want it RIGHT NOW are going to get discouraged and give up.

Don’t quit before the miracle happens. If you follow the ideas that I present on this website, then you will achieve success eventually. It takes time and patience and lots of hard work, but we are talking about building a sustainable income, not just a quick cash grab based on manipulation.

My most helpful, realistic tip: Aim for TEN thousand a month to actually meet your goal

If you really want to earn $1,000/month online, don’t set up your website and your online business to try to reach that specific goal.

Instead, set your goal one order of magnitude higher than that.

Aim for $10,000/month.

Why do this?

Because in doing so, you may actually realize the work ethic needed to reach $1,000/month.

In planning to reach ten thousand per month in income, you insure that you do not aim at too cheap of a market, and that you actually dive into something where there is real money to made.

For example, with my flagship website, I figured at one time that I was averaging about 2 dollars of income per article on my site, per month.

So I had 300 articles and I was earning $600 per month in income.

OK, fine. Let’s run the numbers, and shoot for $10,000/month in income. What would we need to do?

Well, it turns out that we would need to have about five thousand articles on the website.

So I did a week worth of keyword research, and came up with a list of five thousand keywords, which I intended to turn into articles.

Then I start writing and publishing new articles at a rate of about 3 articles per day.

If you do the math on this, I would hit my publishing goal in just over 4 years time.

Not bad for a plan to reach to ten thousand per month in passive income.

Now, did I really want, or need, ten grand per month in passive income?

Heck no! I would have been happy with just a grand per month!

But in aiming high, I helped to insure that I would meet my income goal.

In fact, I more than doubled my income goal (reaching $2,000/month) before I was even half done with my plan.

So that is my best advice for you:

Aim high.

Figure out your income goal, then come up with a plan that would realistically attempt to reach 10 times that income goal.

Then, start working like a madman on your new plan. Even if your numbers are off by a lot, you should still reach your income quite easily this way, provided you do the work.

So really the only question becomes:

Are you willing to do the work?

(Disclaimer: The steps that I took in the past to reach a solid monthly income and a six figure website may not hold true in the future. Google seems to be proving this true with each passing day via things like the recent Penguin update. Apparently creating quality content and guest posting on related authority sites just doesn’t cut it anymore? More is being revealed….)

So I am not one to usually rant and rave about such things, but you cannot help but wonder what levers were flipped over at the Google search headquarters recently.

Their most recent update, known now as the “penguin update,” has sent all sorts of Internet marketers into quite a panic. I suppose this is just more of the usual, but this time it just seems to be…somehow uglier.

Do a quick Google search for “Paypal France” and you are treated to no less than 3 spammy results on the first page for Viagra ads! Unbelievable. This can’t be the kind of quality they are trying to achieve with their search engine, is it?

Of course anyone who lost any rankings and traffic is going to moan and groan and complain that things got worse, not better. This is only natural.

But so many people just keep citing examples like the one above that it is just ridiculous.

My own search traffic for this site you are reading now just took a nose dive as well. Observe:

I am sort of at wit’s end now as to what to tell people to do.

In the recent past, I had great success in building a solid content site and selling it off for a handsome sum. I realize that part of that was luck, but on the other hand, I am not stupid either. I am good at listening to what Google *says* that they want, and I am also very good at watching what ranks well currently.

We can take this a step further and sort of predict what kind of quality Google is going to demand in the future. We can sort of piece this all together and come up with an ideal, website, one that is:

* Full of rock solid information, all based on personal real world experience, not outsourced writing but genuinely useful and insightful content from the expert themselves. If you take a look at the several hundred articles on this website you are reading, you might say that it is all original content and based on real world experience. Not a lot of fluff here. Actually useful content.

* NOT built with manufactured links, but instead has links coming from related websites, much like this high quality and very solid guest post on Problogger.

* Built with truly insightful, unique, and helpful resources, much like the seven free eBooks in the sidebar that you see here on this website, which can all be downloaded with a single click, without so much as an opt-in required.

So these are just my opinions as to what the ideal website would be, but many other Internet marketers AND Google themselves agree with almost all of these concepts, such as:

* Quality content.
* Free resources for your readers.
* White hat link building, via quality and relevant guest posting only on legitimate, “real” websites.

So that was the course that I attempted to follow with this site here (that you are reading now), and it seems to have failed the latest Google test.

I don’t know what to recommend other than this. Less quality content? Don’t create awesome resources and free eBooks? Don’t build white hat links via quality guest posts, but instead go chase after cheap manufactured links? I really don’t know.

I don’t think anyone knows, at this point.

But telling people to just create amazing content and build white hat links, that seems rather foolish at this point.

I still stand by my methods because they actually help people and create a website with real value, even outside of the Google search game. But I am no longer confident that my methods will result in free Google traffic for life, or anything even close to that.

Anyone else got any ideas?

Anyone else get whacked by the penguin?

I recently started digging in and really using a keyword tool called Keyword Strategy.

This is a paid tool that I have personally used to do 3 major things for my online business:

1) Organize my entire online business in one place with keywords and URLs.

3) The tool eliminates the thoughts of “what should I be working on today for my website?”

Experience with other keyword tools

I have used about three or four of the other major keyword tools on the market, including 2 that were paid tools. One of these was SEMrush.

In my opinion, the competing keyword tools on the market really only excel at #1 from the above list, they do not address points number 2 and 3.

To be honest, I can easily use a spreadsheet to organize my websites and my keywords, and I have often done so in the past. Managing new articles and using a spreadsheet to target new keywords was a quick and easy system that I did not really see a need to replace.

The reason that I recommend the Keyword Strategy tool so highly is not so much for the organizational aspect, but because of the 2 other major benefits that this tool gives you: Internal linking and a specific plan of attack to move your business forward.

Excellent keyword discovery

This tool has excellent keyword discovery. The nice thing is that it draws from several different sources, such as your analytics account, in order to keep drip feeding you new keywords all the time.

The process is quick and easy: you simply check the ones you want to import to your project, and simply “blacklist” the ones you don’t like (such as misspelled words, etc.).

After you blacklist a keyword, you never have to see it or deal with it again (unless you choose to revive it, which is painless and easy).

What really sets this apart though is the automation.

I admit that I probably have not used this tool anywhere near its full potential….but I just can’t get over how automated the whole thing is.

You plug your site into the tool and it goes to work, crawling your site, extracting keywords, matching them up to URLs, and so on. You don’t have to life a finger.

You type in a few seed keywords and generate the start of your keyword database in a matter of moments. Within 20 minutes you have a huge list generated and the tool is already working on the back end to match up the keywords to your existing URLs.

Then, each day that you log in and glance at the tool, it has new keyword suggestions for you to glance through and either approve or blacklist. It just takes a moment. So quick and easy, with all of the work happening on the back end. Amazing.

Worth the price of admission alone: the internal linking plugin

Now for the real magic: the internal linking plugin.

So you have this database of keywords that is growing all the time as the tool discovers new keywords for you.

The tool is also matching those keywords up with your site’s URLs on the back end.

What happens next is that the tool will automatically go through your entire site and start creating internal links between your articles. You can specify how many internal links you want in each article, up to a maximum. I generally leave this set at 5 links.

What is truly amazing though is how this tool works. After setting this up, you check back in a day or two and your entire site now has these awesome internal links, based on the keyword tool and the URLs that it has matched up with each keyword.

This is amazing, flawlessly executed, and fully automated. If you had to pay someone to do this manually it would cost a fortune. The SEO benefit that you get for your website from this internal linking structure is really important.

Thus, the internal linking plugin is worth the price of admission alone. You cannot afford not to use this.

I have seen and dealt with other internal linking plugins for WordPress, and they all pale in comparison to this one. None of them are as effective or as automated as this.

For me, this is the game changer. This is why you buy into the Keyword Strategy tool. You have never seen internal linking done like this before. Yes, it is THAT good.

Gives you direction for daily SEO tasks

If you ever sit down at your computer and wonder “what should I be working on today for my website?” then this tool will help you.

Quite simply, it gives you direction for new content creation, based on keyword opportunities.

But in addition to this, it also has an “optimize” tab, which has several suggestions for things which you may need to do. For example, it may alert that you that you need to do more keyword discovery, or if your website is not ranking for certain terms, and so on.

If you frequently do not know what you need to do next for your business, this tool can probably help you.

Just the increase in productivity makes it all worthwhile, especially if it spurs you to take action on a regular basis and create new content for your site.

This is the only tool that I really need to build my business

I have used other tools in the past but they have all fallen by the wayside at this point.

I really only need to do two things to create a successful business online:

1) Create awesome content.
2) Promote it.

I can handle the promotion end of things with quality guest posting. But the internal linking and the keyword database planning are something that both get a huge boost from the Keyword Strategy tool.

This is the only tool I really need to build out my website.

Take it for a 30 day free trial and you will be sold in the first week

If you try this tool for 30 days I can bet that you will be completely sold on it within the first week.

It takes about 20 minutes to get your keyword database started, and once you get the internal linking plugin set up, you are going to be amazed with this thing.

Take the 30 day free trial and get a 10% discount after that.

This is the tool to get though. My bet is that very few who use this will ever cancel. It is just that good, and so easy to use.

The following is a guest post by Lissie of lissowerbutts.com

The common wisdom is that building a quality website is a smart thing to do for a long-term income on the Internet. But what the heck is quality? The short cut is to say writing longer, more in-depth articles will result in a quality website.

I disagree. I think you need to first decide what the purpose of your website is. What the site is designed to do and who its customers are – has a big effect on what the definition of quality is.

For a site to be “quality” it needs to be useful to someone. If you just want to write and don’t care whether anyone reads you or not – stick with your paper journal.

If you want to make some money in this game you need to develop a website which provides something useful to your readers.

For me for a site to be “quality” – a website has to first and foremost be useful.

What Makes A Useful Website?

Let’s look at what is an useful website. There’s a website that I use all the time. Its one of the most useful out there – but it hardly has any words on it – its xe.com – a currency converter.

I have bookmarked a number of sites of photographers, they post a lot photos but some hardly provide any narrative apart from telling me where the photo was taken.

Does that make their sites useless? Or indeed low quality?

Of course not.

So my definition of a useful site is quite simply: a site that fulfils a need. Most websites can be categorized as either:

- purely functional: google.com for searches, timeanddate.com for timezone information

- entertainment: let’s face it a lot of people surf the Internet to be distracted, from life or from work. That’s why sites like The Oatmeal have very few words, and awful lot of Facebook Likes

- information: the Internet is today’s encyclopedia – if you want to know how to make money with no work you search don’t you?

Functional Sites

My examples above mentioned sites which actually do something – not just provide words or other media on a page. I’d also classify as functional a lot of what I call “brochure style” sites for off-line businesses. A roofer might have a functional site to promote his local business, or a cafe might have to get the word out about their great coffee. Now its not a bad idea for these types of sites to give me some information: a new gutter guard maybe, or where to park for my favourite cafe. But at the end of the day I am pretty much looking for a phone number or an address, I don’t want to read 2000 words on how to make a great cup of coffee, I want to order one!

Entertainment Sites

Here shareability and likeability is key, not words. Sites which share cute baby falling down videos and funny pet antics do very well with the time-wasting crowd. As do clever comics. Entertainment needs to be just that – easy, entertaining – something that can be enjoyed in 30 seconds or maybe less. Something you can have a laugh at and share with your mates of Facebook before the boss notices.

Informational Sites

Information sites are the ones that I know most about because they are what I build, and I think for many of you reading this, you’ll be in the same boat.

I want to examine four factors which I think make informational sites quality, I think a quality informational site should be:

- Findable
- Navigatable
- Comprehensive
- Have an Editorial voice

Lets look at them in order. First off I am not a fan of the “build it and they will come” school of blogging, because as the many dead blogs which litter the Internet demonstrate, they won’t.

To be of any use to anyone a site has to be discoverable. You can find sites via organic search or via social media, but frankly I believe for any information site to be viable it requires a strong basis of SEO.

I consider that Informational Sites, in particular, need to be built on keyword research. There are dozens and dozens of sites which could be useful, but aren’t. That’s because the owner’s are so clueless about SEO that there is little to no hope that the person who is actually searching for the information on the topic will find it.

This doesn’t mean that you have to keyword stuff every post and write in a dry, academic style. It does me that you do need to have some idea of possible keywords, include some of those keywords in post titles and urls.

Once you have more than 10 or so pages you need a bit of site organization. Categories are useful, or tags fulfill a similar function – but basically you need your readers to be able to find the content they are looking for, and to read on to a few more pages. How you do this will depend on your niche but I do like to use relevant categories as prominent navigation, plus a related post plugin or manually inserted internal links. Unsurprisingly, doing this will probably help your site’s on-page SEO as well. I often include a search option to, though I think a well categorised site will mean that fewer readers will use it.

Comprehensive Content

Next your site needs to be a reasonable size. Information sites need to be more than five pages! How much more? That’s impossible to say, but I’d guess that few sites of less than about 50 pages of content have much to offer the information searcher.

That is not to say you should have multiple articles with titles like Cheap Green Widgets, Green Widgets Cheap, Online Green Widget Cheap, Cheap Green Widgets Online and Cheap Widgets, Green and Online! We know that Google has deliberately slapped down sites that did exactly that in their 2011 Panda updates. Instead what I’m saying is that you could talk about how you use Green Widgets in your home and how you found a great deal on green widgets with articles which make people actually want to read more than one of them! Tip – easy way to know – look at your analytics – and concentrate on increasing your page views per a user.

Being comprehensive on a topic isn’t about word count. I can write a 2000-word post on quality websites, for example, that may be some people’s definition of comprehensive. Or I can publish 200 words which are really, really useful. For example I could add an update to a travel site which corrected incorrect or outdated visa information which was published in the guide books. I might only need 200 words to do so – is that quality? Yes it is, particularly if I’m the first to break the news that you now only get 15 days visa free entry to Thailand at land borders?

In both cases the articles are as long as they need to be to convey the information. And the information should be worth the space you are giving it on your site. What do I mean by that? Well to be I don’t include articles unless they are:

Useful to people other than me. This cuts out purely navel-gazing self-reflective monologues, thank goodness.

The information is unusual – it doesn’t have to unique – but it has to be relatively unknown. Or at least presented in a unique way. Some topics have just been done to death, for the sake of your reading public – try to be a bit different!

Editorial Voice

Lastly – and maybe I should have put this first, because I consider it critical – I think there should be distinct editorial voice. What the heck do I mean by that? Consider this – if you think about a magazine or newspaper you read regularly – even though obviously many writers contribute to it, the articles all sound like they “belong” to that particularly publication, and not another one. Its done by having something called a “house style”, which specifies how their journalists write their articles not just in terms of grammar, but in terms of style as well.

If you are developing your own site, I strongly believe that you need to develop your own style as well. Why? Because its essentially what makes your site unique, and different from every other site on the Internet, it makes it valuable, and, to be utterly practical, it means that you will always pass a manual examination by Google quality raters!

How the heck do you do that? Frankly, I don’t know! My best advice is just to keep writing, write naturally, don’t try to write with a specific tone. Eventually your “voice” will come out. I know what my style is and you’ll discover your own style too – if you are not too scared to be yourself.

Example of Quality

Finally I thought I’d finish with an example. I see many people quite scared to start developing a quality site – worried they will do something wrong. Trust me, you can recover from doing almost everything wrong, including the most basic things like not spell checking! Here’s the example that proves the point.

Three years ago I wrote an article criticizing a well known piece of site-building software. At the time I published that article:
- it was about 600 words long;
- it was riddled with factual errors;
- it was full of typos and grammatical errors, because I didn’t realise that my browser’s spellcheck had stopped working, and I am pretty dyslexic if its late at night.

I wrote the article because I saw something odd. I couldn’t find any negative reviews about this particular system. Not one. I found lots, and lots of reviews, and each and every one weren’t just positive, they were positively glowing.

Yeah, I was pretty new to affiliate marketing at the time! So I did some quick research. I posted a quick review and labeled it a “scam”. I used the term “scam” because I did know that when people are reviewing a product prior to purchase they will search for both XYZ review and XYZ scam to see if they can find any negatives.

I published the article and went to bed. I don’t live in the same timezone as the US. The next morning I woke up to pandemonium. This was the old days, 2009, before social media had really taken off. Commenting was where it was at. My little blog had never got more than a handful of comments per a post, double figures was exceptional. Which was hardly surprising for a blog which had never got 100 visitors in a day.

My site had dozens of comments queued (I had moderation set to not allow publication without my approval), and more emails via my contact form asking why I wasn’t publishing comments.

I appear to have struck a nerve. The commentators weren’t very happy. In fact there were quite incensed that I had criticized the software, and were demanding that I remove the offending article immediately. They were also suggesting I’d be sued for such an article. They were the less extreme ones, some of the others were really quite ugly. One of the commentators included the owner of the software, I guy I’d not previously heard of, Ken Evoy.

Now I knew why there were no dissenting reviews of the product. Because they had all been censored by the company’s own “hit squad” who were organized to descent on any crticial post on blogs or forums, and who were trained to deploy incredibly long (some of the comments I got were longer than the original post), well written, grammatical correct, counter-arguments. However I had supporters too and between the two groups the comments on that page eventually pushed the word count over 100,000.

Why? Well, the article fulfilled a need.

Now in 2012, over three years since I published that original article, I still get people commenting on the topic on my site. I still get updates about what is happening within that business. And I still have people contacting me and thanking me for making a difference.

….For providing them information which could not be found anywhere else on the Internet.

So even though my original review was flawed, and the comments ranged from aggressive, to abusive, to downright rude……It was useful. If fulfilled a need. It was quality.

Now over the years I admit I have gone back and corrected the original poor spelling and grammar. But I’ve left the factual errors as struck through and amended.

The article is my definition of quality information, not that it was well-written, or even particularly long. But because it filled a niche that was empty. It provided useful information by opening up a very big debate in the comments (I’ve subsequently paged the comments to help the page’s loading speed).

Would it have been better if the article had been well-written to start with? Yes, for my ego. Maybe, in terms of getting quite as much response out of the software’s supporters. The point was that the Internet was lacking a genuine review of the Site Build It! (TM) software and I provided one. Although that site has been reported to Google as spam many times over the years, as an organised attack to get removed from the search results, its never been deindexed or devalued by Google. Why? Because anyone who reads it – can see that it was written by a genuine person expressing their point of view.

Interested in seeing the article? Here it is: Site Build It Scam.

The purpose of this website is to help you on a journey to financial independence and economic freedom.

My hope for you is that you can build a powerful asset online, one that generates a solid income for you, so that you can reclaim your time freedom and start living the life that you really want to live.

I want to help you on this journey in any way that I can, because the experience that it has given to me has been so amazing and positive.

Here is the twist, however: The money comes later, after you have done the work. Hence, when I say “make money with no work,” I am talking about a year or two down the road, when you can prop your feet up and enjoy the fruits of your labor.

This is how successful business works–you build an asset that produces income, and at some point, you can remove yourself from the equation and still enjoy the income. Is it truly passive and forever permanent income? Probably not–but it beats a day job as far as trading hours for dollars.

My methods seek to build passive income through a single authority website on the Internet. My goal is for you to build one website, and make it successful enough to provide you with your own economic freedom. This is the core of my long term strategy.

The idea of frugality enters the picture because it will allow you to purchase your freedom so much sooner. If you can knock your living expenses down a few hundred per month then you can “retire” based on passive earnings that much sooner.

I put “retire” in quotes because I still enjoy building online businesses even though my passive earnings are already substantial. I believe that once you achieve this level of success with building businesses that you will want to continue with it as well. Warren Buffet doesn’t just sit around all day, ya know!

Thus, the main themes of this site are:

Passive income: How to work hard once and get paid for it over and over again.
Sustainable business practices: Building a valuable destination website that does not get nuked in the search engine updates.
Frugality: Lowering your monthly expenses so that you are less dependent on a day job and can live from passive income streams.
Building authority with quality backlinks: Get your website ranking and earning income while protecting it from penalties.
Creating killer on-site content: The foundation of your business should be original and insightful content that is really helpful.
Long term marketing strategy: Take it slow and build up a quality asset over a long time frame. Build a sustainable business.

Learning these things and putting them into practice will help you with:

Income: Have passive income in your life that does not depend on a day job.
Career: Become an Internet marketing maven who is not dependent on a traditional corporate day job.
Stress: Answer to no one, build your own wealth, live frugally and enjoy the relaxation and freedom of financial independence.
Finances: Become financially independent, stop worrying about money, cut expenses and create passive income streams.
Happiness: Based on all of these changes, become happier with more time freedom and less stressful demands on your life.

Where to begin?

There is a lot of information to soak up here but I want to give you the 60 second summary first:

Build a single website and put your heart and soul into it. Work hard on the site for the next one to three years and create tons of premium resources for your target audience–stuff that actually helps them to solve a problem they might be having. Focus on building your brand and building up traffic. Monetize the site simply or sell out for a gigantic sum and turn the money into passive investment income.

Your success comes from building a genuine resource for people and giving them the best possible solution on the Internet. Turning traffic into passive income is relatively simple compared to actually building up the traffic streams. Focus on building brand, creating killer content, helping your audience, and getting a few premium links to your site. Over time this will evolve into a serious business that generates real income.

All of these concepts are broken down much further and fully explained in free eBooks on this website:

1. Building a six figure website – Learn exactly how I was able to create a six figure website from scratch, what steps I took to get there, and how I was able to make a full time income along the way from my marketing efforts.

2. The journey to economic freedom – Learn how I found financial independence through building an authority website and reducing expenses.

3. Creating resources – Learn how to create valuable resources that your target audience can download and share with each other. This is brand building in action.

4. Ninjanomics – Learn about an holistic approach to life that combines frugality with passive income streams for the ultimate in time freedom and stress free living.

5. Long term marketing strategy – Learn how to create a powerful authority website over time by taking the long view of things and using a content based strategy.

6. Killer content – Learn how to create amazing content for your website that will become the foundation of your success.

7. Building link juice – Learn how to build premium links and avoid search engine penalties. Slow, effective, methodical link building from “real” websites only. It takes time and it takes effort, but it works.

Who is Patrick Meninga (aka SkinnyNinja)?

While working a 40 hour per week day job, Patrick started a simple website and built it up over a few years, eventually selling it off for $200,000.

He currently helps other people to achieve passive income online, and currently has a few active students who are still quite early in their journey:

- Making over $500/month in passive income in the addiction/recovery niche. Works on three websites part time, publishing about one article each day.

- Making over $200/month in passive income in the travel niche. They work on one website on a very limited basis, publishing only one or two articles per week.

Patrick continues to build online businesses while enjoying passive investment income. You can learn more about Patrick here on the About page.

Got questions?

Email me and we’ll chat a bit. I would love to help you in any way that I can.

Usually I respond to all email within 24 hours.

Or, leave a comment below if you think your question might benefit others.

Get the free eCourse, no hard sales pitch

Any problems or questions, please contact me via email at patrick.meninga@gmail.com

I will do whatever I can to help you….

There are a number of reasons that you should create a website that matters.

Let’s examine them all:

1) The alternative is to create spam - content that people do not really want or care about. The required effort to create either is about the same. So why bother creating worthless content?

2) Shelf life – your website’s days are numbered if your audience does not care about it. The search engines are not going to keep sending free traffic to a website that people dislike. You have to build a winner in order to enjoy long term success on the web.

3) Who will do your marketing and promotion? If your build a website that people care about, then your audience will do the heavy lifting for you when it comes to promotion. If your website is worthless, then it will be up to you to build links to your site and make it popular, without any outside help. Talk about an uphill struggle. Manufactured links have recently taken a punishing hit in the search engines, so this “old school method” has become far less effective over time. Time to build link-worthy content instead.

4) Personal satisfaction - You can have a bunch of spam sites or you can have a site that people care about. One of them will make you feel good inside.

5) Income/revenue – The earning potential of worthless websites is decreasing steadily over time. Popular sites are naturally rewarded because they have real value.

6) Community – If you build a site that matters this will naturally allow a community to form around your ideas, which has lots of benefit to your site–namely sustainability, legitimacy, and an increase in income potential.

7) Helping others – if your build a site that matters then by definition you are helping people. Nice.

8) Sustainability – Spam dies. Valuable websites thrive. Create something value and it will continue to produce for you for a long period of time.

9) Brand - If you create something valuable then a brand will form as people start to care about your message.

10) Message – If you have unique ideas about your topic the way to spread them far and wide is to create a successful platform. This is how you spread your message and affect the world.

It almost does not even matter why you started a website to begin with–ultimately your goal is to create something that matters, something of significance, something that people care about.

The alternative to this is almost always going to be less success, less interest, less traffic, and the eventual death of your website.

If you are trying to earn income from your site then you definitely want to create a site that matters to people.

The same is true if you are just trying to spread your ideas or carry a message to the world.

Regardless of your blogging goals you want to have more traffic, you want a sticky website, you want people to share your stuff with the world, and you want to build real authority.

There are a couple of key points in creating websites that really matter, and we are going to thoroughly explore all of them:

* Websites that matter solve problems for the target audience. They offer real solutions and provide valuable information. They may even provide a quality of information that other websites charge money for. So they offer a huge value to the audience in the form of problem solving.

* These websites tend to be extremely helpful. Typically the author will answer reader questions, sometimes in a “reader mailbag” type of article. There are usually other ways to get help on the website as well, such as in a free discussion forum.

* A website that matters has original ideas and fresh insight into a common problem. It is not just a rehash of generic information that is available elsewhere on the web. Instead the information is original and unique based on the personal experience of the site author.

* The website should also empower the audience in some way, and give them resources and tools to help them to solve their problems. Free downloads and a discussion forum are two examples that can serve to empower a website audience.

* Most websites of this caliber eventually create a community within them, usually in the form of a forum or discussion area.

So our goal is to create a website that is a real destination, one that really reaches out to people and makes them want to share the site with others, bookmark the site, use the site to help solve their own problems, and so on. We want to create a resource, a real destination.

If you want to build a six figure website then you need a long term Internet marketing strategy.

Any marketing strategy should really consist of the following three things:

1) A long term vision for your website – what kind of content you have on your site, how your audience interacts with that content, which websites link to you, etc.
2) What your marketing strategy actually consists of – what tasks must be accomplished in order to achieve and realize your online goals.
3) A daily work routine – that can move you consistently closer to your ultimate vision for the website.

So really, you can break this marketing strategy down like this:

1) A vision of success.
2) The processes that will achieve that success.
3) A daily routine to carry out those processes.

If you connect the dots here, what you are doing is creating a vision of a successful website, and then working out a daily routine that can help you to achieve that vision.

This is what a good strategy does. It defines the vision or the desired outcome, but then it also has to give you a road map for what your daily activities need to be in order to get you there.

Theory is nice, but action is better.

What does your marketing strategy prompt you to do each day? Does your strategy move you closer to your goals on a regular basis?

Even a long term strategy for success needs to have concrete action steps that you can take every day.

My story of success

I personally used this long term marketing strategy over a period of four years.

At the time, I was not positive that the strategy would pan out for me. There were certainly quicker and easier ways to make money in the short run. Looking back, many of those quicker and easier ways have all fallen by the wayside as the web has shifted and changed. The search engines are a lot pickier these days, so your long term strategy for success had better be focused on quality.

And this is exactly what my vision of success was based on: quality resources. I wanted to build the best possible website in my particular niche, and in fact, I wanted it to be the hands down BEST website in my niche.

I am not sure if I actually achieved that, because my niche was fairly large. But striving for that particular goal was very helpful, and is essentially what boosted my site to the level of six figures.

You could aim much, much lower and still probably make some money online. My question is: “Why bother with that though? Why not just build the best possible website that you can, and sleep easier?”

A good marketing strategy is one that:

* Aims to build a long term asset and resource from your website, not just a generic group of general articles.
* Aims to get long term organic links based on quality and in-depth content (aka, “resources”).
* Aims to be primarily a content-based strategy that focuses on creating amazing free resources for your audience in order to build your brand.

This was the same long term strategy that I developed with my flagship website, allowing it to become extremely successful over a four year period, and eventually sell for six figures.

Download the free eBook on long term marketing strategy right here.

Now let’s tie it all together.

You have a long term vision of success.

You know what you want your website to be like, what sort of content you want on the site, and how you want to have lots of strong incoming links, and so on.

It is time to make it all happen.

The way to make this vision become a reality is by following a daily routine.

You must plot out the tasks that will create the vision, then you must work on those tasks on a regular basis.

The power of having a daily quota

Most people vastly underestimate the importance of having a daily quota.

They like to procrastinate, or play around on the Internet, rather than doing the work.

Or, they imagine that they are still being productive when they are reading about Internet marketing.

If you subscribe to lots of Internet marketing blogs, stop reading them so much. They are wasting your time. They might make you feel smarter and more productive for having read them, but are you getting any work done? Is your monthly income rising from your website?

My daily quota is generally three solid articles each day. These articles are not just little 400 word pieces of fluff, either. They are generally 800 to 1,200 words long and are chock full of value for the reader. They are part of a long term vision for my website, and I feel like I am building up an asset when I write and publish them.

Three articles per day.

Quality articles.

If you are serious about your Internet marketing goals, I would suggest AT LEAST two articles per day as a quota.

If you make excuses about how you do not have time to publish 2 or 3 articles each and every day, then you are probably not serious enough or do not want passive income badly enough yet. Anyone can prioritize and squeeze out the time to create a few articles each day.

Consider the math: If you publish 3 articles every day, that is over a thousand new articles each year. Within two or three years that could very easily produce a six figure website, provided you also have two additional elements: A lucrative topic, and plenty of guest posts and link juice.

So you need a daily quota if you want to succeed. Long term consistency is key. Publish your articles every single day, and it will lead to residual income.

A task list that will lead to a six figure website some day

Your daily task list will vary a bit depending on where you are at in your Internet marketing journey.

While starting, your main goal is to go register a domain and get WordPress up and running on your new website. You need a single website and you need to be able to publish articles on it. Of course you will need to purchase cheap shared hosting as well. This should not be too difficult, as hosting support will walk you through the whole process while holding your hand over the phone. Seriously, it is super easy.

After you are up and running you will have two basic modes you might be in at any given time. Honestly it does not much matter as far as what or when you shift into either of these two modes. One mode we might label as “content production” and the other mode we might label as “promotion.”

Content production mode

This is where you write and publish articles on your website every day. In the very long run, this will probably be about 90 percent of all of your Internet marketing effort. This is where most of the work happens.

Content production should always be part of a larger vision for your website. You should never just publish a generic or general article. Every article that you create should be part of something much bigger–a resource that your audience will find extremely useful.

It is fairly simple to plan out one of these resources for your audience and then create them methodically, one article at a time. After you have published all of the articles for your resource you are creating, you can go back and compile them all into a downloadable eBook.

Thus, when you create new content for your website, you are also creating these resources, these assets on the side. You are always building towards something greater, something more than just a generic article.

Your daily task list while in content production mode will generally consist of publishing two or three articles per day. It might also consist of planning out your next resource (or free eBook), and listing out about ten chapters, which will become your next ten articles on your website. This planning process is generally fairly quick and easy once you start doing it.

Promotion mode

At some point while you are working on your website and have been putting up lots of great content for a while, you may notice that your traffic is still lacking. When you notice this (and IF you actually have lots of great content on your site) then it is time to shift into promotion mode.

I have already thoroughly detailed what promotion mode consists of, but here is the daily task breakdown:

1) Create a large list of websites that you want to try to get a backlink from.
2) Plan and write a killer guest post, one that is flexible enough to be used on multiple websites.
3) Pitch that guest post to websites on your list until you find a home for it.
4) Do this in high volume, with an eventual goal of getting 50 guest posts published.

My experience is that guest posting is powerful enough to create a six figure business as your sole method of promotion. The key is that you have to do it in high volume, and you have to do it on related websites.

After you land a few successful guest posts, I would shift back into “content production mode” and start putting up more great content on your own site, and creating awesome resources for your audience.

Things move slowly on the web when it comes to building search engine traffic. It takes time for all of this new content and the guest post links to kick in and create a serious change.

Be patient and stick primarily to the “content production mode.”

Realize too that some day, you will no longer have to worry about the “promotion mode” at all. It will be done with, and your site will be successful, and you will have a large audience and regular traffic coming in, and the only thing you will have to worry about is putting up new killer content.

In the long run, your only strategy will be a content strategy.

Part of your long term marketing strategy is to thoroughly examine your niche online, get to know all of your competitors and what they have to offer, and then make a plan to systematically beat each and every website that you compete with.

I did this with my flagship website by examining my competition first. Many of the competing websites had a free eBook that people could download. Some of them had a discussion forum. Some of them did reader mailbag stuff and gave out specific personal advice to people. Some of them had custom infographics. Some of them had video content to go along with text articles.

But none of them had all of that stuff, and none of them had more than one free eBook.

So my long term plan was to simply beat them all.

This was accomplished over a period of maybe two years.

I kept plugging away at it until I had designed–what I thought to be–the best website in my niche.

So I started this effort by publishing a free eBook. This was to be a “how to guide” for my audience, one of great depth and detail, and something that was a genuinely useful resource.

I completed this free eBook, and eventually started on another one.

In the end I would publish about ten of these free resources, and I never charged money for any of them. I gave them away for free in order to build my brand. Some of my competitors had eBooks on their websites, but some of them would charge for them, while others would require an opt-in to a mailing list. I simply gave mine away as a free and instant download.

Then I tried my hand at creating some infographics. I am no graphic artist but I made some interesting things, and I continued to experiment with the process. All told, I made about six of these custom infographics, and added them in to my most popular articles so that lots of people would see them.

At some point I realized that all of the daily comments that my website was getting might be better channeled into a discussion forum. So I added a nice vBulletin forum, and a community was born. While it has a relatively small user base, it is an extremely active group, adding thousands of words of new content every single day. The forum remains active to this day, and is a very helpful resource for anyone who might want extra help or guidance.

Now this particular website I have been speaking about is in the health niche–your niche may be different.

In order to make the best possible website in your niche, you are going to have to get a feel for what your competitors are offering, and then simply offer more. Offer more resources, offer more help to your audience, and do it all for cheaper (or for free).

This is meant to be a very long term process, spanning at least a year or two. You might even budget three or four years to accomplish this particular goal. Having the best website in some niches is going to take a lot more work than others. It all depends on how competitive the niche is and how good your competitor’s sites are.

Having the best possible website in your niche has some other bonuses as well:

1) You are more likely to attract organic links in the long run.
2) Any links that you create via guest posting are legitimized because your site is so good. Therefore you are not asking people to link to a lousy site.
3) Viral marketing and word-of-mouth sharing will rise slowly over time as you become established as the market leader in your niche.
4) Direct advertisers will eventually seek you out and monetization will become easier/more lucrative.
5) Landing additional guest posts will become easier and brand building will be easier as well.
6) People will seek you out and offer guest posts, which you can use to add free new content to your site if you like.

There are other benefits to having the best possible website in your niche as well, that go beyond what I’ve listed here. Basically, there are just more opportunities and more positive feedback loops occurring that help to make your website even more successful than it already is.

Success breeds success.

Keep improving your website until it is the best in its class on the web. This should be your long term vision for the site. “Good enough” means that you run a constant risk of search engine penalties, because they are constantly moving the bar as far as quality goes. So your long term vision has to be one of continuous improvement, until your site is best in its class.