Somebody arrived on my site with a broken SSD and left with a game about running an AI lab. Twenty somebodies, actually. That was not a funnel I built.
In July and June I wrote 23 troubleshooting guides. 46 pages, English and Polish, 53,700 words, free, no signup, no email wall. Answers to what people type at two in the morning. Why is my disk at 100 per cent when nothing is moving. Is my SSD dying.
I said at the time they would not be read for months, because pages do not rank for being good. They rank for surviving long enough to be trusted. I said the payoff would land in autumn.
It is autumn. Google now shows the site about 200 times a day, up from four or five in June. Still on page two, which is why the clicks are small and why I am not celebrating yet.
The part I did not plan
Those guides are for a Windows monitoring tool. Last week I released a game, which has nothing to do with hard drives at all. In five days 87 people downloaded it, and more than twenty of them walked in through a page about a failing disk.
Somebody had a problem at two in the morning, found an answer, and then looked around.
For a year I believed distribution was something you go out and get. Some of it is a house you leave the light on in.
Taxi by day. Writing manuals nobody paid me for by night, apparently for reasons I did not understand at the time.
:)