That Uncomfortable Point: keeping traffic to existing website whilst transitioning to a new website

In working on building our new website, we've been working 12 - 16 hour days, 6-7 days per week. That's 2 of us. Full disclosure: I tend to take care of the content creation side and my partner in crime takes care of the tech/affiliate integration side. There is some overlap in what we do (of course) especially around promotion, but at this early stage of developing our affiliate website, we try and split responsibilities this way.

I thought I knew a lot about how websites work as I've written copy for lots of different companies' websites and conceptualised wireframes for websites and Apps. What I didn't realise is how lucky I had been to already be working on high profile brands (some of them with internationally recognised unique selling points) that already had such a high degree of visibility and decent rankings buttressed by consistently high numbers of direct web searches. I am also surprised that the type of advice I get through the WA community has never been offered to me by any web design firm I have ever contracted for a job.

Its almost like I have been walking around in some sort of parallel universe. Gone are the days when I can report 000's of Likes, Shares, Comments and other important metrics in my monthly reports to a client with the absolute confidence that I've hit target. Whilst I know that well-targeted advertising campaigns work having done many for different brands across different channels, I had a lot of content to work with! Also, big budgets!! I wish I had $210K to develop an App like the last company I worked for could dole out to an App developer after I developed the wireframe and issued the Request for Quote, let me tell you!

What I did not realise is what sort of effort a totally new website-based business goes through in order to achieve visibility and ranking. Because building a totally new website presence with minimal content and minimal budget from scratch is harder work. Every single like and share feels like a victory. Finding affiliate links that work for our brand - and not getting too many affiliate partners on board at once so we're not run ragged trying to get sales up on all of them so that they don't toss us an affiliate partner - is hard work. We've settled on just working with one affiliate partner at a time until we reach budget goals.

Now, as we're fairly ambitious, the website architecture needed to be able to cope with the complexities we'd throw at it. We knew it had to be robust in order to cope with the scope of blogposts we'd be covering on our niche that we have planned to roll out over the next 2-3 years before we could contemplate another major website overhaul. To his absolute credit, no matter how complex the website specification in service of our objectives, my partner in crime has so far worked out how to make the new website work.At the same time, we've still got to keep and grow traffic to our existing website. Double the work! I do wish we could just let the existing website fade into insignificance and have the new beaut, all bells and whistles website just up and running and retain all our lovely traffic and traction. Whilst I've been building and maintaining traffic on our existing website by adding new, quality content, he's still doing the tech side of that (making it look as good as it can within its own limited framework) AND been plugging away at building a totally new website and working out how to transfer ranking status, traffic and all that stuff. Let alone how to work with plug-in's and how they conflict with one another (groan).I cannot believe that I now know what a 'Slug' is (not the ones in the garden) and that I now have a laminated 25 point checklist adjacent to my workspace to mark before publishing a post to ensure that I have covered off all the websearch/techy/keyphrase repeating/crawler-friendly palaver you have to cover off if you want your blogposts and therefore your website to rank well.

Can I say that as a writer, I am NOT A FAN of the 'repeat a key phrase at least 8 times in a 1000 word post including within subheadings' admonition. It just seems like uninteresting writing to me. Nevertheless, I am applying these and a myriad other rules I find very tiresome (at this stage). But our traffic has improved! About 150 - 200 hits a day! Always good to listen to people with experience whose views disagree with your own - especially if their way gets results!

So all power to us who continue to persist and try and fail and win and take 3 steps forward and 2 steps back.