Building a Good Authority Site

There is always lots of people talking about backlinks and SEO, which are important, however there has always been a lot of talk about how to do that. The discussion I want to open to the forum today is about websites that do great without worrying about these things in the beginning. Personally I have known of two people this has happened to.

In both cases the people started sites about their niche, which they both worked in, and they were so passionate about it that the site grew from word of mouth and what they were doing in their niche community. Content was added all the time and it was fresh, good content that people were hungry to hear and learn about. One person even said a couple of years after the fact that in the beginning they never worried about SEO, they just wanted to help people and make money.

So my question to put forward to you today is this. Have you known anyone that built a site that became successful without jumping through Google hoops like we do today? Sometimes I wonder if we just focus on helping others more and tricks less if this would be helpful. What do you all think?

Content by Rhonda said:

So my question to put forward to you today is this. Have you known anyone that built a site that became successful without jumping through Google hoops like we do today?

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I knew some sites that become popular/famous without Google, it was successful by social networks, tons of traffic from social networks to it.

These two people I'm talking about may have been doing some of those things in the beginning without knowing it was helping them, lol. Thanks for your input, Redspan.

Yes I know someone and that someone is ME hehe

OK jokes aside, but that person is me. I found this internet marketing stuff by accident. I was just shopping with a friend and we bought a couple of magazines and inside the mags there was an ad about starting a home business using internet so we decided to try it out since I already had internet access.

To cut the long story short, I saw a couple of strategies outlined in the guides I bought from the advert I saw on the magazine but blogging caught my attention. It was simple, all he taught me was that you blog and place adsense ads all over the site.

I did that and 2 months time I got a $100 cheque from Google. To promote the site I created a facebook profile and created an event for each blog post. I would also create facebook notes and tag all the friends on my profile. In just 4 months I no longer had to tag people or create events, my posts were getting tons of engagement and other people would share my blog posts as well.

I was teaching something that I'm passionate about so there was no stopping or writers block, I did this because it helped me do research about the topic, which was growing my skills as a music producer. So while helping other musicians I was also helping myself.

Then one day I got an email from one popular school in London and they wanted to place ads on my site and I said yes, they paid me well. Then I started getting messages from other marketers as well. One of them said, "where did you learn SEO you are really good with this?"

I said, SEO? What are you talking about? He explained and I wasn't even checking any stats, when I checked my stats I was blown away to see traffic from Google, twitter, forums and websites I didn't even know. That's when I started to do some research about SEO, affiliate marketing and email marketing. I wasn't even collecting emails I was using RSS.

So I was crushing my competition, including big schools and websites without even focusing on SEO. The sad thing is that they paid people to do their SEO and when they contact me to help them with SEO they found out I don't know anything about it. I guess they must have got really pissed at the SEO guys they were paying haha D:

And I was using Facebook only, even today I still do the same thing but I now use different social media networks. I don't do any backlinking even today. The most powerful thing about social media marketing that people don't realize is that people will share your content and create organic backlinks and Google loves that so that's why my website ranks high even today.

Great discussion Rhonda

That is exactly the types of stories I want to hear. I think many times people lose focus on getting good content out there that really helps people. When things go viral you get all the SEO you need in most cases. Thanks so much for sharing. My goal is to think more about what kind of things I'd like to know more about in my niche and share with my readers.