Google Advertising Tools

Chapter 1. Build It and They Will Come: Creating Popular Web Sites

“Build it and they will come” is a wonderful line in the movies. Too bad it’s usually not quite so easy in real life! True, good web content is occasionally—not always—discovered surprisingly quickly. More often, it requires a great deal of disciplined work to draw traffic to a web site, no matter how good the content of the site is.

And what is a good site and good web content, anyhow? “Good” does not mean a site with a halo! The way I use the word good in this chapter is probably circular: a site, and its content, are good if the site and its content draw traffic (or can draw traffic when suitably promoted).

If your site has a great deal of traffic, then the site’s traffic is broad . Google itself is a prime example of a broad-traffic site: people use Google to search for myriad different things. But narrow, or focused , traffic can be more useful to advertisers than broad, unfocused traffic. For example, a site discussing complex ophthalmologic conditions might be very successful with targeted advertising even if it draws only a few hundred users a day. Google’s traffic becomes more focused, and less broad, when a keyword search is initiated. And all the targeting in the world won’t help unless you get some eyeballs.

To make money with your web site content it’s a necessary (but not sufficient) condition that you have good content—either broad or targeted at a specific niche. Content can mean information, but it ...