OK, we don’t know if it was the chicken or the egg that came first.

And internet marketing is a lot the same.

There are so many things to do.

What to do first?

Most of the time, it’s not the things we think should happen first.

Take creating a website as an example.

Most people think along these lines:

• Install WordPress or similar .
• Install plugins to increase the functionality.
• Find a theme you like and spend the next few hours tweaking it until you’re happy with it.
• Spend hours om keyword research, checking and double checking the search volumes.
• Create a piece of content like a labour of love.
• Check and double check the content for grammar and spelling.
• Revise that piece of content so that it is devoid of any personality, as though it belonged in a faceless corporate brochure.
• Revise and revise and change and tweak that content until any remaining life and spark in it have finally disappeared.
• Worry whether or not it’s got the right keyword density to satisfy Google. Revise it again until it matches the criteria you’ve found.
• Find another contradictory piece of advice about keyword density or images or heading tags or some other techie stuff.
• Revise again.
• Worry whether your content is too short or too long and re-re-revise it to meet the new suggestion you’ve just read, hoping that you don’t read something else with a different article length before you finally publish.
• Keep repeating that process without actually daring to hit the “publish” button for as long as you can procrasinate for plus a bit extra “just in case”.
• If you’ve got this far, give up because your newly created page isn’t on page one of the search results for all those hyper-competitive terms you researched earlier.

OK.

That may be a slight exaggeration.

But for a lot of people it’s closer to the truth than they’d ever care to admit.

This is closer to what it should be like:

• Install WordPress or similar.
• Install plugins to increase the functionality.
• Use whatever default theme was chosen for you by WordPress.
• Do some very quick keyword research – no more than 5 minutes.
• Tweak one of the titles in the search results so it’s in your words (maximum 1 minute)
• Write between 3 and 7 sub-topic headings relating to your title (maximum 2 minutes)
• Write between one and three short paragraphs on each of those sub-topics plus maybe an intro paragraph (depends on how fast you type but should be around 15 to 60 minutes)
• Read it through once to check for obvious errors and add in one or two affiliate links if you haven’t already done so (maybe 5 minutes)
• Press the Publish button (seconds!)
• Tweet and Google+ and Facebook and (if you’ve added a photo), Pinterest it (one or two minutes)
• Start over again with the next keyword phrase

It’s about the same length list.

But notice the difference?

There are timings against each item that are mostly measured in minutes.

If you’re in the first category, it’s time to give yourself a wake-up call.

What needs to come first is content.

Lots of it – because that’s what Google uses to send you visitors.

It doesn’t care how pretty or how ugly your site is providing it doesn’t snarl up its robots (and any theme you can download in the WordPress dashboard will be fine in that respect).

It doesn’t care if you took minutes, hours, days, weeks, months or even years to write those 500 words that finally appear on screen.

In fact, because it’s a computer program, it doesn’t care at all in the sense that we’d recognise that word.

It just puts two and two together (or more correctly, lots of different figures, 200 or so of them) and decides what your score is for any particular search phrase.

Not just that one all-important phrase you originally decided was the main topic of the page and the only one that counted.

But any combination of the words used, giving preference to words closer together unless the algorithm is clutching at straws. And also factoring in the overall context of the page.

So this page could conceivably show for some obscure football term just because it mentions that word and quite a few other words. If I was in self-help mode and mentioning goal setting that would be a higher chance.

But it’s more likely to appear for something related to internet marketing or WordPress or content creation.

Who knows?

Because I certainly don’t and I’d challenge anyone else to give me a proper answer rather than one that’s based on conjecture without doing so much research that the algorithm would have changed anyway by the time the result of the research came out.

So the real trick is to create more, relevant, content and keep creating it.

You’ll probably never know which item really came first in terms of building up visitors to your site.

But so long as you’re getting visitors regularly – which will start to happen once you get your act together and start creating content on a regular basis – then it’s also a case of who cares?

And if you’d like to start to get focussed, join me here and I’ll help you keep on track and help you start earning some cash from your internet marketing.