TheRandomForest.com

Full Title: Increase Your WEB TRAFFIC in a weekend, Fifth Edition
Authors: Jerry Lee Ford, Jr. and William R. Stanek
Genre: Web tutorials, / web promotion techniques

Welcome to the first extended review here at The Random Forest. The idea of this weekly series is to find a book, product, scheme or technique and put it to the test over a suitable time period so that I can gather my honest results and publish the findings here.

Over the next few weeks I hope to use and weekly review the book Increase Your WEB TRAFFIC in a weekend and give you an ongoing commentary as to the usefulness of it’s contents and also study it’s ease of use and originality.

I picked this book for the first extended review series as it was number one a Christmas present and number two, increasing traffic to all my projects is one of my main objectives.

First Impressions:

Immediately this book greets you with it’s nice rounded bouncy text and simple use of colors based around a well known good size format for this type of book. It seems well bound and printed and the pages are a nice thickness making for easy turning and a sturdy overall feel.

I picked it up and thought to myself, something along the lines of:

“I’m a bit of a dummy when it comes to all these technical ways of driving traffic, so this book may just be a help”.

Maybe I am being a little harsh on myself!

The book is laid out in a mixture of easy on the eye grays and clear neat large print black text with clear concise imagery and diagrams. Having a browse through it was immediately apparent that this book was focusing slightly more on businesses and that as I use it I will have to adapt some of the techniques to suit my blogs.

The books chapters are laid out in a very interesting way. Each section is labeled with a part of the weekend to dedicate to it. I really like the simple use of this idea and it gives you the impression that this can be done and can help you very quickly.

So today I am going to take a look at the first section:

Friday Evening, Promoting Your Web Site To The World.

The first thing that feels good about reading this is the fact the writing sounds human. A person has actually sat down and written this with other people in mind rather than just listing everything you should do in a technical completely boring format. Admittedly though as you reason the humanness becomes slightly too simplistic for my liking and some of the funny little comments are a little condescending. However I must remember this is aimed at complete amateurs.

Easy explanation of the major search engines and why it’s important to be included is the main focus here but then they move on to speak about analyzing your stats and creating a campaign to get your site out into the world. Positive reinforcement makes you believe you can do it easily and at zero or a very low cost. I learned a little from here and have gathered a bit of motivation and am looking forward to continuing this review and harvesting it’s results.

Nothing practical was really done here but the next chapter: Saturday Morning, Putting The Motion In Promotion, is where you start to get your hands dirty. I will be looking into this over the next week and shall look forward to letting you know how it is going.

Overall first impressions are, it’s OK. Nothing here so far has been that new and it’s all information readily available on the internet.

Maybe this book will prove a little simple for me but maybe it will drive thousands of new visitors here like a flock of terrified sheep being chased by wild geese! Maybe here in the open fields of the Random Forest they will find their sanctuary! We can all but dream…….