Long ago, in the way-back time, the great internet marketing guru and witch doctor Kevin Costner chanted hosannas and built a baseball diamond in his cornfield and proclaimed to the gods of Twitter and Facebook, “If you build it, they will come.” But then he directed Waterworld and The Postman, and the greater online nerd consortium realized that Costner didn’t know what he was talking about. Disillusioned, the masses turned instead to the teachings of that lady who played Danny DeVito’s mother in Throw Mama From the Train. And so it was done, a cane non magno saepe tenetur aper, Amen.

Here’s my point: Websites don’t draw traffic simply by existing. I’ve built websites for clients, and I’ll ask them, “How are you going to publicize the site?” When they tell me that they’ll just sort of play it by ear, I know they’re still following Costner’s strategy, hoping that now that it’s built, visitors will come as if by magic. And guess what? Only their current customers, who already know them by name, will find that website. For some businesses, that’s okay. For others, it’s deadly.

For both of the sites I’ve been working on in this project, I’ve done most of the hard work of setting things up. I need to write for both sites, and I need to plan and conduct the webinars for the VA site (doing one today at 4pm Eastern on email marketing, BTW), and I need to finish my Diabetic Weightlifter e-book, but mostly, they’re set up. Now I have to get people to use them. And I don’t want to count on magic — but I’ve never been an expert at drawing traffic. Or even good at it. Or even mildly competent at it.

So that’s been my preoccupation — How do I get more people to these sites? Especially when I’m traffic retarded?

Luckily, I have a good advisor, and here’s what she has me trying along those lines:

1. My BIG PROMOTION for the VA site

The short version is this: I’m going to set up blogs for 10 people for free in exchange for them telling their readers how fantastic I am.

Rather than explaining it all here, I’ll ask you to hop over to the free blog setup promotion page and check it out. Please spread the word on Twitter or wherever you can. (And if you’re a Blogger.com-type blogger yourself — the target market — then YOU may want to join up… and also, tell your Blogger friends!)

(In fact, you can just click this link to Tweet the exact message I have in mind. See how easy I make things?)

With this “free stuff” promo, I’m again operating under the idea that “You can have everything in life that you want, if you’ll just help enough other people get what they want.” So said Zig Ziglar. And nobody fucks with Zig Ziglar.

(Props to my guinea pig in this little experiment, Mike from BotanicaPhotographic.us. This is his new blog that I launched yesterday.)

2. Article marketing for both sites, and finding out it works better for one

This is the part of the post where I try to cut down on written words by speaking some of those words. So just watch this.

WARNING: It’s 10 minutes long. There. No bitching. You’ve been warned. You can skip it if you want. (Oh, but if you do watch it, you should probably hit the FULL SCREEN thing in the lower right corner of the video.)

3. Google AdWords

You know those little Google text ads you see on websites? And you know how when you search on Google, your search results include “Sponsored Listings” at the right? Well, advertisers place those ads, and pay they Google anywhere from a few cents to over ten dollars every time a visitor clicks on one of them.

The good news is that you only pay when the ads draw traffic. But the bad news is that there’s no guarantee what that traffic will do once it arrives. This is why so-called “pay per click” (or “PPC”) advertising has a reputation for being a huge black hole for a lot of marketers: You may pay through the nose, and you may get a shitload of visitors. But, those visitors may turn out to be tire-kickers who don’t actually buy anything.

Also, I understand that it’s an art more than a science. Certain ads apparently draw good traffic and others don’t, and there’s not always a clear reason why. So there’s a lot of trial and error. Naomi told me that when you start on AdWords, “You have to be prepared to burn money in front of your eyes.” Which is really encouraging.

I’m not really big on burning money. However, Google gave me $75 in AdWords credits for a reason I don’t understand, so I’m willing to burn that. For now, I won’t spend more than those credits. Consider it an investment in learning.

I’m going to try a bit of AdWords on both sites. Since I don’t have anything for sale on either, this is purely a traffic-draw strategy. I’m going to define “success” in terms of people signing up for RSS feeds, joining mailing lists, and just sort of sticking around. When I have something for sale, I may need to tweak things to see if people convert to buyers.

Those are my plans. Hopefully next week, I can report some great traffic.

Right now, I’m most excited about the free-blog-setup promotion. If you fit my criteria, email me or contact me on Twitter or leave a comment here or on the VA blog. If you don’t fit this criteria but may know people who do, it would be super-awesome if you could tell them.

If you want to be a super badass cool person and Tweet about it, this would be what I’d recommend using:

FOLKS ON BLOGGER,etc.- @johnnybtruant will set up your blog for free, first 10 takers only. http://is.gd/tkkG (Please RT)

In the meantime, be sure to check out my upcoming webinars. They’re in the sidebar of my Learn To Be Your Own VA site, and there’s one today at 4pm Eastern time on using aWeber and iContact for email marketing. (If you can’t make it live, I’m recording them. So be sure to check back.)

By the way, is it getting awesome in here? Feels like it to me.