Need Your Opinions

I have been earning a good living as a professional writer, editor and copywriter for 20 years, so I am not asking this to earn a quick buck. I am all booked up and, yes, I make a fairly decent passive income from Kindle too.

However, I have been totally unsuccessful in creating a Web site that gets consistent traffic from Google, or any search engine.

My Experiment

Over the last year, in my spare time, I have created three Web sites and actually wrote long, quality, original articles on various niches. These are the kind of articles I get paid to write.

On one Web site I posted 15 articles and on another 19 before I quit.

I found that even though they were original and had high quality info on subjects that were popular, I got virtually no traffic.

In fact, on one site, I couldn't get the domain name to rank pass page 5!

I also didn't spend hours spamming forums and buying Facebook likes, or employ any Black Hat techniques. I just put up some good content because I had read here and on Google's blog that is what they want.

You hear many things on this forum, but I have come to the conclusion that quality content alone has little to do with ranking.

While I was spending days writing articles, I saw other sites from outside the United States go to the top five slots of page one with crap, copied content. These sites also offered nothing of quality, yet they were ranked highly.

I am of the opinion that for me, trying to create a site that will draw traffic from Google via quality content is a waste of time. So, I am 99% sure it's time to move on to other things -- like offline marketing -- in the spare time I have between writing assignments.

I'd like your opinions on the subject, if you'd care to give them