What Are You Dependent On & How Are You Changing It?
My e-commerce business was literally built on free search traffic. That's one of the things you don't hear about when you read sob stories of Google destroying small businesses. Ever since the first time my site disappeared out of the search engines for a day or two, I've been working on building additional "non google" traffic sources. Of course, it's not really all that easy to do with the volume of traffic that Google can send you. I went from $0 in sales in 2005 to $175K in 2006 all through organic traffic.
Since then, I've started a wholesale section of the site and sell quite a bit offline, started an affiliate program, created some nice relationships with partner sites, working all the social media angles, branded my products to create a lot of word of mouth sales, built up a pretty large email list, and refined my paid ads.
As a result, in 2009 50% my traffic was coming from Google. Today, 25% of my traffic comes from Google. And Google traffic is on the rise, so it's not like I'm just getting less of it now.
Still though, I've heard people say that they aren't dependent on Google, then they get hit by them and things get a little shaky. A guy I know was pretty successful at SEO, built a business off that traffic, diversified out of the traffic (so he thought), built an SEO company off the back of that success, got hit by Penguin, and then his "real" business and SEO business took an incredible hit. Long story short, I don't want to be that guy!
So what I'm doing is more of what I have been doing, but I'm putting it into high-gear.
--I used to look for that one traffic source that could match Google. When I was reviewing my stats, I realized that I might not be able to replace it, but I'm able to get a little traffic from a lot of places. And that works for me. So that's what I'm doing.
--Realizing that its' worth the effort to go offline and local, rather than continue to try and get more traffic from the same sources. At this point, it's easiest to use my existing data on where my visitors are from, and then using that to make smarter offline decisions....like where are the "hot spots" where I can do local advertising or find a partner in that area to do the selling on the street.
Those are a couple ways that I'm trying to get away from the one thing that I feel could disrupt my business. How bout you?
Since then, I've started a wholesale section of the site and sell quite a bit offline, started an affiliate program, created some nice relationships with partner sites, working all the social media angles, branded my products to create a lot of word of mouth sales, built up a pretty large email list, and refined my paid ads.
As a result, in 2009 50% my traffic was coming from Google. Today, 25% of my traffic comes from Google. And Google traffic is on the rise, so it's not like I'm just getting less of it now.
Still though, I've heard people say that they aren't dependent on Google, then they get hit by them and things get a little shaky. A guy I know was pretty successful at SEO, built a business off that traffic, diversified out of the traffic (so he thought), built an SEO company off the back of that success, got hit by Penguin, and then his "real" business and SEO business took an incredible hit. Long story short, I don't want to be that guy!
So what I'm doing is more of what I have been doing, but I'm putting it into high-gear.
--I used to look for that one traffic source that could match Google. When I was reviewing my stats, I realized that I might not be able to replace it, but I'm able to get a little traffic from a lot of places. And that works for me. So that's what I'm doing.
--Realizing that its' worth the effort to go offline and local, rather than continue to try and get more traffic from the same sources. At this point, it's easiest to use my existing data on where my visitors are from, and then using that to make smarter offline decisions....like where are the "hot spots" where I can do local advertising or find a partner in that area to do the selling on the street.
Those are a couple ways that I'm trying to get away from the one thing that I feel could disrupt my business. How bout you?