Introduction - Here's what works for me

Hi everyone, my name is Fraser and I run a very successful news website - it gets about 3 million pageviews a month, 55,000 RSS subscribers, and about 1.5 million inbound links according to Google Webmaster tools. It's my full time job and allows me to employ a team of about 10 full and part time writers.

I just wanted to introduce myself and share the methods which have worked for me.

I started the blog back in 1999 and was just getting by on social traffic for about 6 years. I had slowly and steadily raised the traffic through various methods of online marketing, and I was able to work on my site fulltime (just barely).

I had my Aha moment back in 2008 when I wrote an article to answer a question my daughter posed to me. Instead of the standard news articles that caused a burst of traffic, this was an article that answered a timeless question. I got an initial burst of traffic, and but it didn't drop off. Instead, it was getting a few hundred visitors every day (it still does). Furthermore, it was bringing in steady Adsense revenue every month.

I tried a different article and had the same result - a boost of traffic that didn't go away. The trick was that these articles were based on the queries that people were searching for, and my site was able to rank well in the search engines for them, right off the bat.

I've found that I typically earn between $2-3 in Adsense revenue from my articles. This formula has continued to hold even as I've added more than 4,000 articles to my site. These earn incremental ongoing revenue, without any further investment from me.

Here's what has worked for me:
- pick a niche that you're passionate about. It helps sustain you though the times when you really don't feel like working. You might be surprised how profitable some of these niches can be, especially when there isn't fierce competition.
- do things right the first time. There aren't many shortcuts, but if you do things right, the payout is huge down the road.
- Be patient. I've found that it takes about a year from when you start working on a site, to when you start to see some results. Some people can see results sooner, but on average, it really takes about a year to come out of the Google sandbox and see some serious traffic. I always tell people, "never fear, wait a year"
- work hard in the beginning. When I'm adding content, I'm writing about 10 400-word articles a day. i can do twice that, when I'm really cranking it out.
- outsource as soon as you can, as much as you can. Outsourcing is really the key to succeeding long term, so you can continue to grow your business and take yourself out of the day-to-day operations.

Anyway, I'm glad to join the forum, and I'm always happy to help answer questions about search engine optimization, Internet marketing and running a large website.