Business down from $50k to $10k per month. How do we recover?

Very interesting post for the forum. It would be hard to give you a good opinion without being able to see your offers or your starts but on the face of it can Google changes really have affected sales by 80%. I have seen clients hit but not to that extent. I would bet there are other factors in your business as well?

If you were too reliant on Google organic traffic before (you were certainly not alone from what I have seen with my clients!) then it doesn't make much sense to put all of your resources into getting rankings back as you're still reliant on Google and will have just temporarily saved your business.

You should look at:

- Cutting costs. I know laying off staff is hard, but if it's losing 1 or 2 to save the company, then do that. Also look at ways to optimise your processes - can you automate certain areas? Reduce shipping costs? Negotiate better terms with your supplier?

- PPC/paid traffic. If you were doing well with organic traffic in the past, then you'll have all the data you need when it comes to PPC. You already (assuming you tracked properly) know which keywords convert, so you'll know what you can afford to pay per click.

- Guest posts. Depending on your niche (I don't know too much about health) this can be an effective way to send traffic and build solid links at the same time.

- Social media. Do you have an established presence? If not, this is a quick win and very cost effective.

I have quite a few brokerage clients who were in a similar position to you. Lots of people rode the wave a few years back and since saw their business to decline as they relied too heavily on organic traffic. If you've got the business to $50k/month before, then you can do it again, just don't expect the recovery to be overnight, especially if you're diversifying traffic sources.

Paid advertising is defnitely a good idea, but you need to work out the value of each visitor you get. You can get that by dividing your revenue by the number of visitors you get over a period of time.

Once you have this value, you can start having a look at ppc campaigns with adwords or if your niche is suitable, facebook. As long as you don't exceed the value of each visitor then you should be making a profit. The trick is to only go with keywords that convert well.

Another option you should probably go for would be to buy banner ad space on the biggest sites in your niche to get traffic that way. In your circumstances, I really wouldn't suggest going with any SEO companies as you are putting too much at risk with that.

Are you selling your own products or are you just an affiliate? If you need some more (free) advice, just give me a buzz

All your eggs in one basket, never wise, heard this so many times,and have been a victim to it myself. I went ppc, facebook will give you a ton of targeted traffic, if you approach it correctly

Hey Joe,

Like mentioned above, you may need to give some more input before we can help.

If you were making $50k/month from organic searches alone, than I would expect you have a pretty decent converting sales funnel... if this is the case, then just switch your traffic source.

Yes, PPC or other paid options is probably your best option for getting it back to $50k as quick as possible.

You also say your business will have to be shut down in a few months at this rate... why is that..where are your costs coming from that will put you out of business? Do you have an inventory? Or do you have employees? Both of those can be dwindled down if you have to for now.

I would go with PPC. Adwords, YSM or microsoft adcenter.

Paid traffic is definitely your only sensible way out of this.

Look at what all the other big companies out there are doing. They are not sitting around trying to play Google's algorithm game, they instead just go and buy the traffic as it is a lot more reliable and a lot more scalable.

I would very worried if I had a business that relied solely or even heavily on SEO. it's far too unpredictable and dangerous these days.

If you can make paid traffic work for you then you have a much greater chance at success.

If you are considering on trying out PPC route, maybe it is easier to hire someone who knows what should be done rather than do it yourself. At least in the beginning...

Joe,

You probably need a professional to review what you are doing. With a company of your size, not knowing exactly what you are doing we are shooting in the wind here.

While this forum provides great strategies and resources, you are talking about a complete overhaul of an existing company from what I read.

It would be a bit of an injustice to give you a response based on a paragraph or two about your situation without even knowing all of the specifics.

It seems likely PPC is your ONLY option.

Time is running out fast. Focusing on SEO recovery at this point is too dangerous. At the least you should have built a whole new unpenalized site already to 'start over.' Starting now won't help I don't think.

If you sell your own products PPC can be the savior.

I would also consider laying off those employees pretty fast. They can't be doing much now that your business has been cut by 80%. Save that overhead. If you go much smaller than $10,000/month you won't be able to support one paycheck let alone multiple ones.

50,000 a month if you had organic then you're not spending on PPC or ads.

You should have tons of cash left over , unless you are over paying or living to high on the hog.

10,000 a month you can't do cut backs on something to save your business?
sometimes you have to let people go in business... I went broke 3 times with a off line business before I made it work.

You did not give enough info anyway to make reasonable suggestions

hope you get it fig out

Richard

Sorry to hear this. You are not the only business to get hit so hard. Just a warning - If you were hit by Penguin you will not be able to recover. Panda is different and can be recovered from much easier. Penguin is almost impossible though. In my opinion you are betting off making the changes you make and moving everything to another domain. Obviously doing this will take at least 3-6 months to get any sort of rankings though.

Don't believe in the SEO's that tell you they can help you recover from Penguin. They can't. You might need to lose the staff now and slowly build from the beginning again.

You need to do some testing with PPC. You should be able to get similar or better results using the same keywords you were making money with organically. Also some of what you may be blaming on Google could just be the result of a poor economy.

Try Bing and Yahoo traffic, traffic from these two search engines are little as compared to google but hey you can make some extra cash.
and 1 quest
Do you have an EMD??

Spend something on PPC both adword and adcentre, also try some backlinking services to recover fast...

Goodluck!

Everyone here has already touched on what needed to be done. Focus on being as efficient as possible, there can't be any leaks in ur cash flows. Maybe cutting staff is the way to go, or take a look at the marketing budget, the credit line can you get a lower Apr? Things like that can really save you a bunch.

Joe,

So sorry to hear that your income has went down a whole lot.

I would suggest that you start looking into pay per click because you can spend $10,000 per month on ads and get a return of $30,000+ in profits. Could be more or less. That is what I would do.

I would also take what ever you are selling right now and for future customers, ask them to pay a monthly membership fee. That way you have residual income coming in and your income will just go up and up as time goes by.

Sorry to hear about your loss, but time to put some of that money back into your business. Start building PPC campaigns with Bingads and Google, and keep working behind the scenes on recovering your organic results.

I've had this problem myself with customer sites but what I've done, is to either reload the site on a new but similar URL and build new backlinks to the site, and change the citations etc, or another method I use is to build feeder sites that are optimised for the keywords of the original site, and then pointing these sites to the affected site, but it does take a little time to do and I have found this to be beneficial in getting back lost traffic.

Hope this helps.

If you did it once you can do it again. Diversification is key in the long term, but take a look at the sites that took your place, find out what they have that you don't. I know it can get weary, after flying high and then getting slapped down, but there is no reason why you can't do it again and learn from your experience

Sounds like a way to get deeper in the s...... :rolleyes:

All this money came from Google alone? Ouch!

This might be one of the worst luck threads that I have read.

How old is this business? How many employees? You might try replying to some suggestions on here, I know you are rushing to fix everything, but we are here to help you.

Have you been collecting emails for a list? Is this a website that gets new content daily and what exactly do your employees do for you?

Truthfully... Nobody here can help you because you haven't given enough information. Obviously there is no trick where you can click a button and automatically be put back at the #1 spots... and if there is then I hope I find it before everyone else.

That is, quite possibly the worst advice I have ever heard in my life. And that's coming from someone who brokers sites like that for a living.

Don't panic, you don't have to go bankrupt. You know your site converts, you know people buy your products you need to focus on paid advertising, i.e. PPC, banner ads, direct mail, solo ads etc. You hopefully have all your buyers contact details contained within an email list, market to them for repeat custom.

Sorry for your plight.

Basic business - it sounds as though a large chunk of your income is being spent of staff salaries?
Can you image if you could reduce that salary output by 25% and get the other 75% of your employees to make up the work load?

You will immediately have residual income to spend of paid advertising.

Ideally you need to reduce your staff costs by a larger percentage. Your sentiment to keep your staff employed and happy is admirable but if you sink they all sink. It's more about "do I lose 25% of these guys or 100%."

It may feel like egg sucking now but your customer list (emails, postal addresses, phone numbers) is a valuable asset is it not?

Grow the business in the list building area on the back of paid advertising.

I ran an offline car dealership years ago that was successful and then failed. Running costs were the core reason the business could not sustain a recession.

Marcus Rockey

Joe,

AndyNathan is right: It's hard to know how to answer you since we don't have enough information.

What's your business model? You said you sell health products, but what kind of health products? For example, are you selling supplements or health information (books, CDs, DVDs, etc.)? Are you the manufacturer/publisher or just an affiliate/distributor?

Who's your ideal client? Have you built a list?

There are dozens of ways to promote any product or service. But your products and/or business model will determine what methods you can and can't use to market. For example, affiliates/distributors typically have restrictions that the owner/manufacturer/publisher doesn't.

(Per usual, a lot of Warriors have offered answers without having enough information to be truly helpful. :rolleyes: PPC, for example, may not be a viable option for you depending on your economics. Only YOU can know that. Building "feeder sites" is a ridiculous suggestion. It's not very efficient (if it's at all effective) and one of the longest ways to a direct sale.)

If you know who your ideal customer is, you can go find other people/organizations (associations, etc.) already serving those types of customers and do a JV with them. You can also buy commercially available lists and do a direct mail campaign to likely buyers.

Again, it depends on who your ideal client is and what type of restrictions (if any) you have on how you market.

I don't know a lot about SEO (just the very basics) but don't have a lot of interest in learning all the ins and outs of SEO for the very reason you're suffering right now. Relying solely on one method of lead generation isn't smart business. I want to be smart about my SEO so I've learned the basics (and am still learning), but there's no way I'm giving as much control over my business to Google as you unwittingly gave them over yours.

However, I DO agree with the Warrior who said don't spend one minute trying to rebuild a business primarily based on SEO. It's a waste of time and not a smart business decision. Focus on "REAL" lead generation and sales methods used by "real" businesses. JVs. Direct mail. Video. E-mail marketing. Social media marketing. Etc.

So sorry! Good luck!

Michelle

I am sorry to hear about your sites getting hit!

I would defiantly consider the social media area! This is very targeted and can help you to generate more traffic.

I would also consider forum marketing and Adwords

Hello everyone,

I have just logged on before calling it a day to see if anyone replied and I am humbled to say the least.

To be honest I didn't know what to expect and I am honestly humbled by the sincerity of the replies. I guess I thought there would be folk kicking me whilst I am down and rubbing salt in my wounds. That hasn't happened and I guess getting kicked in the teeth over the last few months had left me a little jaded.

Anyway, for now I just wanted to say many thanks indeed to all who have replied.

Incidentally, we sell mainly health supplements and health information products. All our own brand. Our main success came about because we managed to rank very well for a few dozen decent traffic keyword phrases for a few years.

We have never engaged in black hat or generated artificial link building etc. We believe it has been mainly a panda penalty.

Now following this, our rankings have been hit badly and traffic is down 80% and has been for a few months. This pretty much equates to the same ratio of lost income.

It really strikes home the difference high rankings can make compared to mediocre ones.

A few have commented on the fact that I should consider staff cuts anyway. This will have to be done further if necessary. We have already cut a few.

It is a great shame if I have to do it further, especially as some are well trained in our field now and some skills take time to learn etc.

I will read through this thread more carefully tomorrow and give thanks properly.

There is no magic pill but the words of encouragement have certainly helped lift my spirits and made me realise that all is certainly NOT lost.

In the meantime, thank you. I appreciate the help.


Kind regards,
JoeJ

Hi Joe,

Short answer: You can recover your SEO traffic. It takes some time and it takes some smart investing in traffic. Google is working on eliminating all the sites that are getting free rides. For the future you need to invest in paid traffic too. When done correctly you should be able to not only get back to the $50k sales per month but way beyond that. Send me a PM if you need more help.


HP

Joe,

Good luck with the future. With only $300 or so coming in per day, decreasing the staff of the company has to be your first priority.

Since it's your own product you also have plenty of other costs besides employees. (The cost of your product, etc etc).

Trim back as fast as you can and then work on a traffic recovery strategy. Act fast or you'll end up regretting it. That's too severe of a decline to sit around hoping for recovery

Sorry to hear Joel.

IMO give paid advertising a go, you never know, it might just turn out to be the catalyst for your business and work out better than organic traffic.

There are plenty of SEO vendors on the WF who can provide sound SEO services to repair panda/penguin sites, that's worth a shot.

I would sit down and create a strategic marketing plan before anything and the best way to do that is talking with a marketing consultant.

Letting go of staff and throwing money at paid advertising can make things even worse.

Plus, some of your staff could be what's keeping you in business. If you let them go you lose their expertise and skills.

Instead of laying off all your staff, I would ask everyone to take a pay cut or work fewer hours.

Find out what you can afford to pay your staff on an hourly basis based on the income you have coming in. This will give you your break even point.

This is why you really need help from a consultant. A marketing consultant will look at every part of your business and find ways you can make money without having to invest in advertising.

1. Reactivating past customers
2. Improving an existing referral program
3. Price positioning
4. Strategic alliances
5. Joint ventures
6. One time offers
7. Expanding product line
8. Optimizing sales funnel

These are just a few things a consultant can help you with. I read a case study from a consultant where one of his clients grew his business by 300% in one year just from joint ventures.

Joe,

Thank you for the honest post and taking the "I have problems to solve" approach.

Also, I am sorry to hear about the change in your business.

Of course I don't know the details of your operations, but going from what you have posted here are my brainstorms, some of which may be totally unworkable:

- review your company reputation to see if something is going on there

- review your competition to see if they are doing somethings which have taken from you

- rework your existing customer base and marketing channels (distributors, people, stores...) and see if you can get new, repeat and referral business

- rework your website so the most popular and profitable items can be ordered in two clicks (I know of a website which was reworked from the pretty, traditional "Home" "About"... site to a site that looked like an order sheet. Sales increased 10 fold. It was for new and used auto parts and he already had loyal customers who just wanted to order and get back to installing parts.)

- get cooperation from your suppliers on pricing and/or terms and other ways to sell more of their product through other channels such as retail, or by sposoring relevant radio shows

- sponsor relevant events, athletics, and non-profits

- seek free publicity in the traditional media - there is a current WSO for this

- regain the organic traffic, but find tens or twenties of other ways to get traffic, such as banner ads on the right websites, ads/referrals on the right email lists or via people in your niche with a strong social media presence, use the ad networks on the non-google search engines and active radio or televison station websites

- use PPC/media buys via a Perry Marshall level person

- besides cutting staff, look for other ways to reduce overhead such as buying older office or warehouse space as opposed to leasing newer, cutting transportation/shipping costs, charging for shipping...

- get on store shelves (my local Walgreens put up a display for a local herbal supplement company - cold remedy and they are in Vitamin Cottage.)

Good luck. Feel free to PM for any clarification.

Dan

Joe, I am so sorry to hear of your plight. This hit a number of businesses.

Just a couple ideas while you are figuring things out.

I sure hope you had built a mailing list or have records and that you have someone who can pick up the phone and contact people or start making regular emails with info and offers. It is far easier to work your current customers than to go out and get new ones.

You will usually have your top selling products, mid selling products and ones that did not sell very well. Drop the low selling products as they sell out, so that you don't have to put money out on getting them manufactured for now and concentrate on getting re orders of your top selling products. Try a buy two, get one free or something similar.

Could you talk to your manufacturer or shop around on manufacturing pricing? (You want to make sure they keep quality high. As you know, there are several grades of the nutrition ingredients that goes into vitamins. The higher grades costing more money). But even a 5% difference in costs can help right now.

Pretty good ideas in #41 I see.

Again this is a perfect example of why not to rely on just one traffic source.

My biggest question is ...Where are all your previous customers?????

Are you, or have you been building a list?

There's a smart marketing strategy published by Joe Polish and Dean Jackson that touches on the ...

1. Before
2. During
3. After

....sales strategy.

I get the impression, you've been focusing on just the 'during', and to what extent, probably minimal.

The first thing you need to do is get HELP. Talk with someone that is willing to guide you not only OUT of this mess, but KEEP you out. PPC is just a temporary band aid. It might fix your crap now, but its only temporary, and you wont LEARN anything.

PM me, Id be happy to talk on Skype if you're interested.

Here's a tip.

Treat your online business, as you would an OFFLINE business.

When you promote your offline business, you do it via multiple channels.

You might...

1. Have a website
2. Advertise in the newspaper
3. Do radio advertisements
4. Leaflet drops
5. Hand out business cards
6. Do roadside signage and billboards
7. Promote at events.

These are essentially ALL different channels.

Apply the same thinking ONLINE.

1. Videos
2. Podcasts
3. Articles
4. Guest blogging
5. Email marketing

...and so on.

Relying just on Google, (then getting penalised) is like having one a-frame sign outside your shop that the council takes away, leaving you with nothing.

I'll give one more suggestion that I haven't seen above:

Build another website. If you have your own products, you can either list them with the same brand name or else pick another name for the same product and list it as something new. Become your own competitor, in other words.

I had a site that making a little money and then got hit by Google. I put up another site for the same products, re-wrote the content, and deleted some of the stuff that made it a target for Google (mainly I took off the adsense stuff, which I had admittedly overdone) and in a couple of weeks it had the same ranking that the old site did. The old site never came back, but the new site has been doing pretty well instead. So I'm a believer in cloning your sites if they get hit, only with the new algorithm factors in mind.

Best of luck.

It's always a good idea to reinvest some profits into paid advertising. Before the Google updates, most people were making fairly good profits but unfortunately the updates have affected most of us. Just a small example, I used to make $50 per day from a one page blogger blog with some banners and affiliate links without doing any work whatsoever then the updates destroyed that blog which is now worthless. So I diversified and was determined to raise my game. Diversify, learn the new rules (updates) and get into paid advertising. We all have to change like a Chameleon and adapting to all those dam updates.

Hey Joe,

I would seriously consider going to the top websites in the health niche, specifically ones that have an opt-in page, and see whether you can buy some solo ads off them.

You'll get targeted true traffic to your site at around $0.50 - $1 per click which is well below regular PPC (adwords, msn etc), and the traffic will be coming from a trusted authority site.

Assuming that you have a cracking funnel, which, if you were earning $50K per month, i'm assuming you do, you'll be able to build up a great list in no time.

Sorry to hear you got hit, we did too, and it completely changed our sales model!

Don't rely too much on organic traffic.
You should try paid traffic like media buying.
The result might be shocking you.

It's possible to recover those rankings, but I want to suggest an alternative road.

Have you ever thought of selling the business?

I see two possible outcomes from your current situation based on what you told us:

1. You recover your rankings and everything returns back to normal.

2. You never recover and have to close the business.

Or

You can sell your company now for $xxx,xxx and move on to something else.

It seems like your burned out. Do you see yourself doing this for the next 10-20 years? If not, it's probably best to sell it and start working on something new that you can be passionate about. You might want to consider it before another update comes along and destroys your business entirely.

While you were earning $50k a month, did you also build a list of the people who subscribed/purchased from you?

If you built a list from day 1, then you could have easily marketed to your list without worrying about SEO and the google zoo.

First, before we jump into the short term solution, I would be concern more about your current situation.

Your sale dropped from $50 to $10k but you still relay on your organic search, I would suggest by looking an expert company in SEO (make sure they using white SEO methods) and let them show you prove cases.

I would also try to target advertise at related websites (buy ad space might be more helpful that going for a PPC)

Best of luck

if i faced this situation, the correct answer for me would be I'd work with prior customers w/customer reactivation campaign, limited-time launches and the rest of it -- "The Money Is In Your LIST", not google/seo, it's in re-selling to customers who you've already earned the trust of, for short term cash flow.

I'd do a 2-step postcard campaign w/time-limited offer to prior customers, in addition to emails, possibly outbound telemarketing to prior customers, in my business if it faced a similar situation, personally.

I've been threw that too. The thing you don't understand and you might not ever be able to is that you're in this thing most likely which is known as "icarus sydrom". So what's happening is you've been flying hi so long that you have absolutely no concept of failure or of poverty or having no income. Often what happens to people that go threw these crashes is that they don't know how good they go it, even with say 10k you're talking about, until they hit bottom. At that point they sometimes wake up. But ya I'm not sure what to tell you as far as getting things back on track. But I'm just saying it's partly a phychological issue that a lot of business owners go threw. You might just need to recalibrate your expectations. Realize that 10k per month is a lot of coin. Read the 4 hr work week. Goodluck.

- If you're not already, start blogging and build a following. Incorporate social media and stay active in it.
- It's been mentioned a million times, but market to your list. Since you were selling your own products, you must have a customer list.
- Find or create something newsworthy about your brand and/or product(s) and send out some press releases.
- Start an affiliate program. Done correctly, that can bring in sales very rapidly.
- Co-brand a product or product line with a popular website or blog, then do a revenue share arrangement. Very rapid revenue growth, because you're leveragng their user base and popularity.
- Start selling your products on Amazon. I have not done this, but know people who have, and it is a relatively easy and more to the point fast, way to increase revenue.

I hope these strategies help you recover some of your lost steam.

Nah. I wouldn't pay Google one red cent if they cost me 40k a month revenue. Forget Adwords and dump Google just like they dumped you.

Hit it hard with Bing and Yahoo ads (Adcenter) instead (cheaper also) and develop a strong social media presence, and the likely result will be that Google ends up ranking your pages higher again by default of their love for social media mentions, etc..,

Please PM me for a short discussion--I think I may have a solution for you.

Properly done article syndication marketing, too.

How about an update from the OP?

Dan

* Simultaneously test as many viable traffic sources that you can afford. (Don't wait to see how one pans out.)

* Track the performance of every traffic source so you'll know what's working and what's not. Focus and expand on what works, and improve, reduce, or eliminate what's not.

* Apparently you've got a decent converting sales funnel already. But there's likely room for improvement, so do some conversion optimization of the highest leverage pages of your site(s).

* Analyze your business to find which areas are wasting/losing revenue, then apply the 80/20 Rule in prioritizing in which area of the business to stop the bleeding next.

~ Marty Foley

Focus on CRO - to convert traffic better.
Start pouring in some content.
try ppc and optimize all the time to see conversions.

You could also try an affiliate program.

Good luck.

For beginning, it is a normal situation to rely on free traffic from Google.
But when you have $50k business per month, it's a huge risk.

The solution is a win-win situation.
Till now, if I understood well, you won and google received nothing.
Google helped you to grow your business. Now it's your turn.
Use google paid advertising.

Companies from stock brokers, dentists, doctors, accountants and INTERNET MARKETERS collect contact details of people they have dealt with in the past and contact them when ever they feel they should..

For example:

My dentist sends me a postcard every 6 months to remind me to come back in for a clean and a check up..

If you have collected addresses, email addresses of your buyers or prospects you should be providing value and sending them promos too..

If you were making 50k per month like you say you were you should probably have over 1,000,000 contact details from both buyers and prospects.. If you didn't collect them you have made a fatal error

I think the people who are saying that he should be happy he still has $10K a month are missing the point.

The dude sells a physical product and has employees. He isn't getting a check from ClickBank for $10K without expenses. He's finished at $10K/month for the simple reason that his expenses are set for 5 times as much.

Truth is, there is NO RECOVERY plan for this situation. Either he gets lucky and gets his organic ranking restored -right away - or he's doomed.

You have something very few people have, a working business model.

You had profitable sites at one point.
You know how much they earned.
You (hopefully) know your customer lifetime value.
And more important than ANYTHING else...

You KNOW what keywords were earning you money.

All you lost was a traffic source.
That's it.

There are many, many more traffic sources outside of Google.

All you need to do is replace your traffic source.

PPC is the most obvious option, but depending on your content and business model, it may not be viable (affiliate marketing).

It sounds like you own your own products. If that's the case, get on Google Adwords now. Because you're in a perfect opportunity to not only get your earnings back but scale them higher than ever.

Get on the phone with a Google Adwords rep today. Tell them what you're trying to do. If you need a $100 Google Adwords coupon to get started, PM me. I have several as a Google Engage Agency.

The Google Rep will even build your campaigns for you.

Get back the traffic. Forget SEO.