2 things you're not trying to do in order to get income and traffic from search engines

Two things you actually don't want to spend all your time doing with online marketing:

1. Getting top position in the search standings - or trying to "dominate" anything.
   
2. Working to get "flooded" with traffic.

Now you do work at these, but you don't spend all your time on either one or split your time between just these two.

Reasons? The most income to be made is not in the highest traffic positions for the top search terms. This is where every product is a commodity. The high income areas are in serving the "early adopters" and the "late adopters.

And that is why you aren't working to get all the traffic for a given area. It will just crash your servers and cause your ISP to send you bills for bandwidth overages. There are "big boys" which traffic in just handling the massively hitting traffic and work to get income off these. These are like Amazon, CNET, Yahoo, Google - any major online retailer.

But these big boys deal in commodity materials, and make great use of discounts to squeeze more income out of every possible online visitor.

Where do you NOT have to give discounts? Where you have the only product like it - or where you are servicing someone who has to have a specific product (both early and late adopters).

Now you do create mini-webs which make use of keywords, themes, and optimized pages. You do work to create and tweak sales pages which have the best possible conversion ratios. You do social bookmark every page you create. You blog, you create Squidoo lenses, you comment, and you definately, definately capture email addresses at every turn. And every link on your page is monetized. (Not every single, but the vast majority - the more the better.)

But you don't spend your whole day or any large amount of time specifically on just getting top positions or just making sure you get tons of visitors.

You want to rank in the top ten of Google and others for your specific niche. You want traffic that converts to buyers.

If you are only selling advertizing, you want as much clicking traffic as you can get.

But again, you are in a very "competitive" area, where you can be unthroned more easily than the effort it took you to get into a top position.

Look: the simple principles at work -

• The Internet is built on fresh, original content.
• You only get return for provided service that is valuable.
• Real word of mouth gets you the most valuable viewers - and the highest conversion rates (as they are pre-sold on you and your product).

So what should you be working on?

• Fresh, original content
• Valuable service
• Enabling people to tell a friend

Yes, there are tons of tools which allow you do to this effectively - article marketing, comment marketing, blog marketing, Squidoo marketing, press releases, podcasting, viral marketing, etc. etc.

But you concentrate these on your specific niche - what is it that you love to do and do better than anything else (I didn't say better than anyone else, but that is also possible). And then you serve that niche like your life depended on it. Bend over backwards to give the best possible service, the best possible product - and always, always work to improve every aspect of it.

And then you will find plenty of income coming your way. As you continue to tweak and come out with more, bettter products, you'll continue to increase your income.

You'll get plenty of the traffic you want - visitors who buy regularly.

But if you only work on getting traffic and "dominating Google", you will wind up with a very harried, poor existence - unless you get very good at selling advertizing at discount rates.

Your choice.