Mostly when non-designers want to over-ride conventions it is just from ignorance. Then again, you’re right that we do need to pay attention to their concerns. There are at least two relevant situations here:

One is that professionals get caught up in self-righteousness and the fad of the moment. We all do it. Stating that, “I’m the professional and I know best,” is at best problematic and at worst, plain wrong. It is so easy to get caught up in our little world that we lose site of the ordinary person, even while claiming that is who we are championing.

The other concern is with wisely choosing your battles. The client wants, “Click here.” Does click here really hurt the page if it is included in a longer text link like, “To learn more about our XYZ Neon Widget, click here?” Redundant? Arguably. Inelegant? Absolutely. Harmful? Not really. This is a small compromise that won’t harm a site, simply make it marginally less sweet.

These types of problems are seldom binary, this or that. Bending a little in non-crucial areas builds a relationship that will more likely survive a “No, I will not do that,” situation. Being flexible enough to both build quality sites and incorporate a client’s wishes is a far more important skill for the professional to learn than simple technical competence.

On the other hand, if there are truly major technical, accessibility, etc. concerns, it is also important to be able to say, “I don’t think that we are a good match.” I did that twice this year. The first time the client was shocked enough to actually listen to my position. We reach a compromise that we could both comfortably live with. The second time was simply a relief to me and most likely to our no-longer-client. My boss trusts me enough that I had her support in this.

There are situations that experience teaches will come back to haunt us. This is less a web design problem than a business one. A client who insists on building a dysfunctional web site will only blame the designer later, even if the problems are ones the client insisted on and signed off for. “I told you so,” never makes a client happy.

It is an interesting phenomenon that the less tightly one holds a position, the more ease there is in finding solutions.

These “countless niches” are market opportunities for those who cast a wide net and de-emphasize the search for blockbusters. The Long Tail promises us we won’t any longer need to “make do” with what retailers chose to make available on their limited shelf space; it means we can find music to listen to not limited to the CDs supposedly attractive to a particular much-sought-after demographic. However, it also means we have to take our consumption roles more seriously as well, making choices and following recommendations and imputing our likes and dislikes into computer data bases and delving below the seemingly familiar surface of “hits” shown us by mainstream media.

Give it a listen.

The first question was technical, about trackbacks and pings. Those are subjects that any blogger who wants to generate traffic will have to learn something about along the way. The second question was about reciprocal links. The third wasn’t a single question but a fairly involved conversation over coffee about traffic building in general. The individual had paid a consultant to offer marketing advice and paid me to go over it with her. A sort of second opinion. The advice was pretty generic but sound. She could have saved a lot of money reading Search Engine Optimization for Dummies. Yes, that’s a real title and an excellent primer on the subject. And, it explains everything this woman spent hundreds of dollars to find out.

It was during this conversation that my realization dawned. All three people were getting bogged down in technical details and were not actually blogging. It doesn’t matter how cleverly you incorporate targeted keywords into your text. It doesn’t matter how many reciprocal links you request. It doesn’t matter what blog aggregators or exchanges you join.

Well, it does matter, but only when you have content that people want to link to. Two or three pages of keyword rich copy won’t get you a great search engine ranking. This may seem obvious but is not mentioned in all those Increase Your Page Ranking in 7 Easy Steps articles. Search engines are in business to help people find stuff. That’s the actual technical term, stuff. I’m sure it’s used deep in the inner recesses of Google and Yahoo.

The operative word here is people. People want value for their time. If your blog or site provides it, people will link to you. If they link to you, search engines will know about it. If people link to you, your site traffic will increase.

Of course, there are repeatable strategies that will speed up the process of traffic building. And, you can certainly hurt your ranking by not following best practices. But, if you don’t have the content, all the strategizing in the world won’t do you a bit of good. Your blog won’t have value. Content is the engine that drives traffic to your site. Do you have stuff worth finding?

A blogger blogs. I write because I’m a writer. I post text. If you have a podcasting blog, publish podcasts. If you have a photo blog, post photos. This is not rocket science. A blog is a publication. Publish.

I published my last blog, Mystic Cowboy for about three years before I ran out of things to say on the subject of comparative religion. Now, that is a pretty specialized subject and I was delighted to read my logs and see my audience grow steadily over time. And grow it did. The last year I was getting about 600 unique visitors a day. As my interest waned and my posting became less regular that number went down. When I picked up the publishing again the traffic followed, with about a two month lag.

Now, 4000 visitors a week is not that many if you are looking to make money from your blog. But, I did zero, zip, zed, nada search engine optimization, other than using semantic markup. I didn’t research or deliberately use keywords. In fact, for the first year-and-a-half, I didn’t even have a post written to the most popular search phrase that brought people to my site. I didn’t play to a market. But I did post regularly. And, I attempted to post thoughtfully.

In that last year I had a couple of companies contact me about advertising on Mystic Cowboy. I even had some people approach me about partnering to start making money. Considering my subject matter and my personal feelings on spirituality, that wasn’t appropriate. But it did show that without really trying, I backed into at least minimal success by simply blogging.

A successful blogger blogs. Regularly. If you post daily, keep it up. If you post weekly, then post every week. If you want to only offer a few well crafted articles a month, great. Just be regular. What you want is a following. If people, there’s that word again, know what to expect and when to expect it, they will return for stuff they like.

Content is the key. The rest is either in support of the content or a gimick. Andrew Bourland puts it well:

You can SEO your site to death and load it up with AdSense and affiliate ads and still fail because for the most part, people aren’t idiots. They can smell it when they’re being exploited or taken for granted.

So to answer the original question: good advice is bad when it provides a distraction that keeps you from producing. Planning is essential. Marketing is essential. Research is essential, but only when they lead to, and support, an actual product. If you want to blog to make money, blog. Create “stuff”. Sure, continue to fine tune and market. But without content all the rest is wasted time, money and effort.