Have you ever seen the bit in the world’s strongest man contest, where the guys have to pull a truck? They get down low, take up the slack on the rope, lean forward and start to pull.
Nothing happens at first and then slowly, slowly the truck starts to move and build up speed as they overcome the inertia and gain momentum.

SEO is like that: Your early efforts are incredibly difficult.
Earning those first few links, getting those first few rankings, getting your first email subscribers, getting your first followers on twitter and facebook – is hard, hard, hard!

But one day you publish a post and straight away you’re ranking on page two. You check out your twitter account and you have five new followers. You take a look at your list of email subscribers and you’ve got ten new names.

So what’s happened?
How come you’re putting in the same amount of effort, or less, and getting much better results?

Watch Rand Fishkin’s video to find out…

There you go, the flywheel effect… all those posts you published, all those tweets and retweets, setting up your email subscription, all those page and post titles that you crafted and meta tags that you filled in… all combine to start your flywheel moving and give you that “natural multiplying effect”.

I’m all for anything that makes life easy so let’s take a look at Rand’s “three critical rules if you want to have success with flywheel kinds of marketing”.

Rule #1 Be willing to work harder and for longer

Flywheel marketing is no quick fix solution. It’s about investing for the long haul rather than the short term.
Organic search is a perfect example.

Organic search results are listings on search engine results pages that appear because of their relevance to the search terms, as opposed to their being advertisements. In contrast, non-organic search results may include pay per click advertising.
Wikipedia

When you first start to compete with the established players you are way behind.
You have a lot of catching up to do so you have to:

• Build up your domain name authority.
• Build up your page authority.
• Build up your links and anchor text.

That takes time, effort and a whole lot of staying power and if you’re in a highly competetive niche, it’s going to take even longer.

You have to commit to the long haul rather than the short term and slowly, slowly as that flywheel begins to turn, you start to appear in the organic search results.

Rule #2 Be willing to experiment and accept failure

When you first setup your website or blog you have to experiment to see what gets the best results.

You have to play around with:

• Content – short posts, long posts, graphics, no graphics.
• Social media – twitter, facebook, linkedin, pinterest.
• Email subscribers – optin email form, popup form, Feedburner, Mailchimp, Aweber.
• Titles and other meta tags – keyword rich title, catchy title, use an SEO plugin to allow two titles.

And if an experiment appears to be a failure, you have to accept that failure and still stay with it for long enough to get a meaningful result.

Okay, it didn’t work. Let’s try something new. We’re not investing in this channel anymore. Looks like Twitter is not the place to sell T-shirts.
Are you sure about that? Are you totally sure? Did you accept failure? If you didn’t accept failure and be willing to continue that experiment, I guarantee someone who is willing to accept failure, they’re going to win in that channel.
Rand Fishkin

Remember that flywheel marketing is no quick fix solution: It’s about trying new things, accepting that they may not work and planning for the long haul rather than the short term.

Rule #3 Learn to find the flywheel in everything – SEO, Social Media, Community Building

Once you start to understand the idea of the flywheel effect, you’ll begin to notice it in just about everything.

We’ve looked at the effect in organic search and here are a few other areas where you’ll find it:

Social media – social media is a great example of the flywheel effect. WM Web Design started on twitter about two years ago. We tweeted regularly, retweeted interesting tweets, followed people and got involved in conversations. We also followed a couple of hashtags we were particularly interested in.
It was hard going initially but today we have nearly three thousand followers and we get ten to fifteen new followers a day… and that figure is accelerating!

Community building – there are lots of ways to start building a community and one of the easiest is to leave comments on sites in your niche. Make those comments interesting, informative and relevant and people will visit your site and leave their own comments. Replying to comments on your own site will encourage further comments and so the process of building a community gets started. This is one slow process when you start, but post regularly and keep commenting on other sites and watch that community grow.

Learn to find the flywheel in everything. As you find it in these channels, you’re going to notice it more and more in all sorts of channels.
Rand Fishkin

To be truthful, it’s hard to find an area where the flywheel effect doesn’t operate.
Once again it’s about thinking long term – what can I do now in this area to get ongoing and increasing results for the future?

Search Engine Optimisation – good news / bad news…

In many respects this is a good news / bad news post.

The bad news is that in order to get your SEO moving you have to invest considerable time and effort and be willing to stick at it.
And if you’re competing in a highly competitive area, it can take a long time before you start to see results.

The good news is that things get easier and over time you’ll start to see more successful results for less effort.
And if you stay with it for the long haul you’ll slowly catch up and move ahead of the short term guys.

Most people have the will to win, few have the will to prepare to win.
Bobby Knight

Now it’s your turn.
Have you experienced the flywheel effect, have you noticed any sudden improvements in your SERPS, social media followers or community engagement?
We’d love to have your thoughts on anything and everything SEO, social media and flywheel related in the comments below.