I used to think that advertising was only for people who didn’t know how to engage their audience and for hardcore Internet marketers. I thought that if you needed to advertise, it meant that you were a failure. Here are a couple of the ideas I’ve heard over the years:

• The more you give away, the more people will come to you.
• If you provide what people need, they’ll flock to you.

I discovered from my own experience that although those ideas are true, they don’t make me money.

Why is that?

I’ve built up my website’s traffic at www.ellenfinkelstein.com to a pretty high level by providing free content. In the last 30 days, I got almost 200,000 page views according to my Google Analytics account. In the middle of the week, I get almost 10,000 page views per day. (It’s much less on the weekends.) Also, 81% of my traffic is from new visitors. Here you can see the stats for the last 30 days. Read More