Are days of running successful sites by individuals over?

Don't you mean "Are the days of running successful sites by individuals dead?"

To answer your question, no, the game has simply evolved. Adapt or die, pretty much.

I get 5-7K uniques to my site daily and only about 50 come from google.

So the answer to your question is no

It's exactly the same in the real world.

Companies with larger market shares stifle competition as they grow, when they have advantages in supplying.

The only way is to compete is to fight for market share, break the Barriers to Entry, or simply enter a sub-niche and specialize. Slowly acquire similar resources, and then merge with the larger companies. Some try to move to other countries in search of less tapped markets, or to improve their production efficiency.

Obviously, you could try and strike a deal with the bigger companies, if you have something to exchange.

The answer is for the individual to build their own brand.

What Mike and Jason wrote.

Over the past several years I've been helping small to large companies plan their content strategy as part of their overall marketing plan. I routinely see individuals outrank many of these companies, some of which are fortune 500 companies.

While Google is still a giant in the search engine world, they aren't the only distribution channel in town. Many newbies (and some old timers) make the mistake of focusing all, if not most, of their traffic efforts on Google.

With the ever-increasing advertising inventory out there, the growth of social media, mobile devices, applications, etc. there are plenty of ways to create an authority website or blog without having to worry about what the big companies are doing. Sure, they might rank on certain keywords, but I've yet to find any company, large or small, that owns all the keywords, not just the main ones or the long-tail ones.

The online world is far more than Google or keywords; it's an important part of it, but Google should only be a small part of your traffic or marketing plan, if at all. I know plenty of marketers who get little or no traffic from Google. Their secret? Many of them either buy it and/or they create partnerships with others in their market.

Others know how to harness the power of free publicity; others create their own "tribes" so to speak (this forum is a good example of this).

RoD

What Mike and Jason and Rod and Meharis wrote.

Well, if so, that takes away only the worst kind of traffic you can ever get for affiliate marketing, it seems to me.

I agree with you that SEO traffic isn't worth chasing, really. Not only because it's difficult (in some niches, for "major keywords"), but because such traffic tends to be temporary and often not "buying traffic" anyway?

Again, I agree. I've never used any at all, to be honest.

I think that for affiliate marketing businesses, Google traffic and social media traffic are only afterthoughts, anyway? That's always been my experience, in all my different, unrelated niches, anyway.

In the case of social media, admittedly it's been my inevitable experience, since that's never appealed to me as a traffic source anyway. (I don't doubt you can generate tons of it, if you know how, but it isn't the traffic I want.)

But with Google traffic, as it happens I get floods of it (not really intentionally, but just because of all the high rankings I've got, incidentally, from article syndication to relevant sites, whose backlinks seem so valuable as far as SERP's are concerned), but it's always been uniformly the worst-converting traffic out of everything I've ever tried in 8 entirely different niches over the whole of the last 4 years: search engine visitors to all my websites typically stay the least time, view the fewest pages, opt in the least often (that fact tells almost the whole story, really, in terms of "income potential") and actually buy anything by far the least often. Google traffic - who needs it? I happen to have it, for now, in bulk, and even I don't really "need" it.

In a word, "no".

If they knew how to HARNESS (not manipulate) social media, they would spend much more time on it.

Facebook alone can send a ridiculous amount of highly targeted and engaged visitors to any site you wish.

And Pinterest is very good as well although I get gobs more from Facebook.

I believe that the key is now to stop trusting Google as your only source of traffic. Get social traffic, build a list and use paid traffic like media buys and solo ads.

My motorcycle blog made $1,200 in the first year after I monetized it.
That's nothing, but, it only took six months to make the next $1,200.

My costs are very low, I would say profits are 90%.

Did I notice a drop in traffic from Google after their update from hell a few months back? Yes. I also noticed a huge increase from Google in the past two days, and in between I was still managing to see some ok numbers because I had visitors coming from a lot of different places as my content spread virally.

The two are not mutually exclusive.

If you are still scrambling for Google crumbs, you have bigger problems.

Exactly!

There are so many other ways to make money online besides freakin Google traffic or SEs at all for that matter. And it's not like they are a secret.

I consider anything from Google to be an unexpected bonus. I'd be screwed if I still relied on them as heavily as I used to. It's nice when you can get traffic from Google instead of them sending it to Youtube, but it's unreliable and can change overnight.

Anton,

Recognizing that fact (that it's difficult to compete with well established sites) should give you a distinct advantage when positioning your business in a very targeted niche.

As they say, "pick your battles."

You can survive, and even thrive, if you choose to differentiate your business from your competitors and offer your prospects something original and unique that gives them benefit in some way.

The large, well-established juggernauts have claimed their territory. They throw millions at branding and protecting their turf. They go out of their way to devour or assimilate their business competition. Just stay out of their path and let them do their thing.

Position your business so that you don't have direct competition. It's not hard. Just be original. Do things your way. Offer solutions that others don't. Give your customers service that others won't. Pay individual attention to your clients/customers and treat them like others can't.

Don't lament that you can't compete with Amazon, or eBay, or Google, or Facebook.

Take joy in the fact that you can do what no one else can do if you position your business correctly. Do it by applying a little creativity, extra effort, and persistent quality to every thing you do.

The best to you,

Steve

What are the best ways to utilise FB or/and other soial media outlets? Do I need to create FB accounts and then engage. Thus far, for the last year, I have simply had the social media buttons at the bottom of the articles. I have some likes on FB, Google+, etc but I can't say enough to make non Google a serious avenue of traffic. I do get quite a lot from Sumbleupon to one of my sites. However, I don't feel it is quality traffic.

If I need to employ someone to work on the social side of things I am prepared set aside a monthly budget of around $200. I will probably outsource to some country where I can get reasonable amount done for that.

It's not over or dead. We just need to adapt to the changes. It's unfortunate but that is the truth, especially when you really want to get traffic from Google.

Successful website on your own still works.

However, if you plan to build a big website and make money tomorrow then forget it. You can't make money with that strategy over night. Or at least not more than a few cents.

If I told you a plan that would allow you to make $10000 per month in 10 years, you would follow that? remember my plan could not fail. (No i don't have a 100% bulletproof plan.

If you want to make money with one or a few websites then it takes some time. Especially with adsense. But if you work 3-5 hours per day writing one or two articles and, do a little social marketing. Build a couple of links, you will have a very good chance to make a living in 10 years.

With the content website strategy you have to make a commitment, and dont give up after 3 month.

Successful website on your own still works.

However, if you plan to build a big website and make money tomorrow then forget it. You can't make money with that strategy over night. Or at least not more than a few cents.

If I told you a plan that would allow you to make $10000 per month in 10 years, you would follow that? remember my plan could not fail. (No i don't have a 100% bulletproof plan.

If you want to make money with one or a few websites then it takes some time. Especially with adsense. But if you work 3-5 hours per day writing one or two articles and, do a little social marketing. Build a couple of links, you will have a very good chance to make a living in 10 years.

With the content website strategy you have to make a commitment, and dont give up after 3 month.

I know someone who within 3 months of starting a site was getting 600 uniques a day and 60 signups to their email list daily and Google, Bing, and Yahoo, WERE IN NO WAY a traffic source, and he wasn't spending all of his time on Twitter, YouTube, or Facebook. He was producing new content daily and getting a ton of traffic. Within 6 months he was making $13K a month.

So Nope, not dead, just evolving.

Exactly that is my point,

Only for people who give up too easily!

It's a level playing field for the most part.

It's just that there's a large majority of idiots building out thin crappy affiliate sites based around ridiculous subject matters like "how to cure hemorrhoids by eating salad sandwiches twice a day" that can't compete with brands that actually have a clue.

While you're blasting out crummy fiverr gigs, brands are thinking long term.

The window of opportunity is definitely closing for the one man show. It's impossible to put a timeline on it though.

The golden period for the one man show was 2005ish when the initial group that started in the 90s was at this ideal junction of having refined technical skills and very little competition from corporate America. Projects launched during that brief period of ebiz history had the highest likelihood of financial success compared to any other period prior to or since then.

Nowadays the competition has been altered in such a way that you've got to operate on a very high level. "Work smarter not harder" has turned into "work smarter and harder". That isn't necessarily concerning in itself. There is just a lot of wondering about how nasty the competition is going to get. We don't want to be the roadside farm stand across the street from WalMart.

It was always going to happen. The self appointed gurus could game the system for only so long. WebMD, MayoClinic and CDC.gov deserve to have their content above health-topicsAAA.info.

The days of running successful sites by individuals are far from over. The bottom line is marketing. Google isn't the only why to get traffic and build a successful business with. If they were, i can't imagine why so many other marketing strategies would even exist.

I wondered that myself today when I read about a company called Internet Brands, Inc. I wondered if the net was going to go the way of corporate world, where there are very few successful "mom and pop" shops. If that is the way it is headed, with just a few internet giants running the show, I suppose the best think you can do is make your site as successful as possible with a loyal following so you can hope to get bought out one day

For affiliates it is getting harder and I think the days of of spammy websites promising untold fortunes are over too. Google is slowly killing off affiliate sites both in mainstream and adult. Over the past year and months there have been some very old well known sites which had a lot of SE traffic killed. One was a very well know adult site which has a lot of affiliate content and which used to do very well.
One thing with sites and google now which is very important is your bounce rate. (The amount of time a person spends on your website)
In the past I had decent affilliate blogs which I updated almost every day with not just links but my own exclusive written content, those too have seen a huge fall in traffic from SE. If you talk to a lot of webmasters who promote affilates they to have seen a huge drop in SE traffic.

If there is one thing which you should never do when running websites is put all your eggs in one basket by trying to get high ranking positions on one search engine, specially Google.

There are so many other ways to get traffic now compared to 5 years ago, twitter, facebook, youtube, tumblr, pinterest, reddit and so many other social networks.

The key now is to have updated fresh and unique content which keep people on your site. Take for example Youtube, the users stay on the site for hours watching movies., why? because they are watching something they enjoy or they are learning something they wanted to know or other reasons. Tube sites both adult and mainstream have a lot of traffic because they offer something which people want, now do something similar to your sites and your on the winning side.

Simply put, YES, i do think so.

Google is tired of the scams and now giving guidelines that help promote the corporate company that hires qualified people to work within long-term business guidelines.

Will all solo bloggers go out? Definitely not. set up a schedule. blog 20x a day though.. it won't be 5 blogs a week that get it done imo