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Those of us who make a living from our website face each dance with some trepidation. This months cutting edge SEO could be the target of tomorrows spam filter. We all live with it because we get terrific traffic from Google, when everything is working.
Surprise! that day we have been dreading happened. Things are changing and we must follow. We are powerless to stop or change progress. In fact, why would you want to?
This change or mistake or whatever you want to call Dominic has simply exposed the weakness in all of our web businesses. Some of us were smart from the beginning or maybe just lucky up to this point, but the day is coming when change will get them too.
I've heard people say "diversify! it's the only way!". Well, that is a good idea but what does it mean? How do you go about it? Can you do without Google traffic? Well, the answer for me now was "let's find out".
PPC: My experience with PPC shows that a profit can be made. I now get about 25% of my total traffic from PPC. However, It's not free, but still profitable. Also, anyone notice that Dominic seems to have increased Adwords costs? Looks like Google profits from situations like this one. Maybe they should do this once a year just to boost PPC profits.
PPI: By using PPI SE's I now get over 40% of all traffic from SE's other than Google. My converion is slightly better too. However, it's not free, but still profitable.
Other media: I've now started using other media to drive traffic as well. I'll let you know how it works out.
Dominic has made me seriously look at my business model. I was just in my blissful little world expecting each dance to bring me decent results. That worked for quite a while, until I came to depend on it. Now, after Dominic, I have started experimenting more, started using other search engines more, started looking at other advertising media and in short started considering ALL options available to me. That can't be a bad thing.
If you want to make good money off the web you need to do it all now. The day of the "free ride" is being quickly taken away. Even the guys making a 100k per month are looking to rely much less on Google's free traffic. Looks like we must diversify by using PPI, PPC, free listings, print ad's, etc.., most of it is not free, but can be profitable.
The difference is that the traffic you PAY for is more reliable and stable. This means that the income is much more stable. It's how "real world" business works. It takes money to make money.
Don't get me wrong. There is still lot's of money to be made using Google's free traffic. You just can't RELY on it. Remember Google owe's us nothing and they NEED to continue moving forward. It's up to US to make the most of what Google has to offer.
Google is still #1 and will remain so for some time to come.
So, when someone asks me "How do you like Google now?" I simply say "Google is great, they supply me with 35% of my traffic, it's free, and that works for me."
Yeah, crazy like a fox it sounds like. Good on ya and good luck! Me, I'm going camping. No hard news on the telly, none here, seems like a good week for it.
What should I tell our employees when they lose their jobs? Sorry, we had a bad month on Google?
Really, I don't mind paying, so long as I can always be there.
I'd be happy to get all of my traffic for free. It's just not good business sense at this point.
maybe, maybe not.
never bet against bill gates, i always say. if MSN wants in stand back and "behold is mighty hand... "
don't bet against a company imploding under it's own weight either. it's happened, many a time.
no complaints, at all. lets get to the last step of the GG 3(or was it 6?) step plan, and let the chips fall where they may.
I'm with you and that's why MSN has always been a part of my startegy. It's SE's like MSN that will eventually rise to the top. I'm not counting anyone out at this point. Be friends with them all. That's the winning strategy!
I just never realised just how much traffic you can get by using all of the other SE's. Strenth in numbers I guess.
I'm happy to pay for traffic that brings me a realistic positive return but I've found it almost as hard to get decent paid traffic as to get unpaid traffic. I've also found paid traffic no more reliable than the unpaid traffic. So there's still a lot of taming-down needed in the wild west of cyberspace before we can have stable online businesses.
E-commerce is far from a place for the bureacrats to hang their hats ...you've got to work all the angles.
some serious competition which will spawn serious new technological innovation, is really needed in this industry (no offense google) and the sooner the better.
i say again, let the games begin! yeehaw
very good points. well taken. we've experienced the same with online paid advertising. it to us has been very iffy, very dicey, and we've always come away feeling like online advertising rates are unreasonably high in general.. seems like everybody over pays, but than everybody would be wrong, and that means instead that we are probably wrong instead. haha
sumner redstone, no less, once said just a few short years ago.....
the internet[as an advertising medium] is hopelessly fragmented... the search engines deal with that problem, but at what cost to the advetiser?
but, i digress...
piece/out
PPI on the other hand has been a great traffic generator for me. I pay for my index page to be included and within a few months all my pages are spidered. Not a bad deal.
Yes, internet advertising, as a meduim, is fragmented at the micro level view. At a macro level though you really have only a few methodoligies to choose from.
1. unpaid traffic (Mayors choice of wording)
2. PPI
3. PPC
All have their place and must be used in concert to achieve maximum results. Let's face it, as long as content exists people will need to find it. How they find it is where the $ is. I want to span as many methodoligies as possible.
Google is still #1 and will remain so for some time to come
Nope, google owns 80% Currently will drop to 55% in a matter of weeks, and with any luck that will drop to 35% because of some idiot named Dominic.
Google is all ready history, none of you care to face the music though.........
I'm happy to pay for traffic that brings me a realistic positive return but I've found it almost as hard to get decent paid traffic as to get unpaid traffic.
And it takes two somewhat different skillsets to bring it quality traffic from either.
The one huge thing about paid traffic, if you can afford to experiment around, is that you can usually figure out the "secret sauce" to quality customer acquisition a bit faster than you can with unpaid optimization.
The running joke around our office is, "Well, yeah, we could drive traffic in droves if we wrote stuff on the site like, 'Free Monkeys! Free Money! Free Adult Entertainment!' but those aren't the people we ultimately need to attract to the site."
We pay for our traffic in lots of time spent tinkering around, and we pay for our traffic in dollars. And both activities can be made worthwhile.
But really, the effect on overall traffic is very small, I still get loads of SE traffic for more specific queries.
But it certainly got alot harder to outrank the spammers now without breaking the rules. I suppose the real annoying part is that you don't know what went wrong. If it was just that some competitor happened to file a complaint against us for something and google penalized those keywords or if its something else.
The spammers rule the SERPs for now, i bet they'll be take care of eventually.
Branching into PPC and PPI is really beginning to make sense now. Before Dominic there was really no need to, but i think Google showed us why it might be, and why we perhaps actually should support the other SEs as much as we can.
Google having all the power certainly has downsides.
And tell us how will you measure it? Turnover?/ profit?/ market share?/your wheel & tyre logfiles referrals?/ a 3rd party measurement company (like hitwise)?
Got any facts? Anything to support your claim that
Google is all ready history
Lots of opinion.
Actually the market share will be distributed pretty good. I just hope people wake up and realize this, or we will see a lot of people in the poor house.
If you dont rank good on Inkomi now, figure out what you need to do and start ranking good, if you dont rank in Fast same thing. Currently I rank bad in Fast, where as 2 weeks ago I ranked great. Definate algo change over there, so I need to concentrate on Fast for now.
Proof no just read alot....... time will tell of course, but it looks bleak for google at this point.
You cant serve up 404's for too long before people say wtf?
You cant expect your partners to sit back and actually believe whatever lamo excuse you drum up for any period of time. You cant piss off the people who make the sites, after all they are users too. You cant quadroople your income in one month and force people into adwords and say "we are updating".
Think what you want, I cant convince any one of anything, I can only predict. I predict google will lose half its business with in 6 weeks time. Google will not be dead, but it will never hold 80% again. That is how it should be in the first place. After this long month, its well deserving as well.
Its always a 2 way street, google could care about the webmasters, and when google loses its grip the webmasters could care about google. Live by the sword die by the sword. Google preached relivantcy, now google is not relevant, how Ironic.
Using PPI, PPC, etc.. is inevitable. It's better to learn these skills now before your business is irreparably damaged.
I see Yahoo! as the "Elvis", always a contender, even from the grave.
Altavista was the "Vanilla Ice"
Google is somewhere between "Milli Vanilli" and the "Beatles", too early to tell where it will settle.
Gigablast is that hard working, garage band that hasn't been discovered yet.
*hint to gigablast: promote the scientist like a "marcus welby" type of personna (you can trust your search to me).
Teoma who?
Overture/AV/FAST could be the hottest "manufactured" band, like the spice girls, if they figure out how to place the pieces in a complimentary fashion.
Google is somewhere between "Milli Vanilli" and the "Beatles", too early to tell where it will settle.
You are comparing THE Beatles with Milli what?!?!
The comparison became too vague. Like: "your lucky number is somewhere between 0 and 9.434.224.334.644.234". ;)
Not sure if it shows, but I am a Beatles fan. ;)
How do you work that out? Given the latest figures if Yahoo replaced Google 100% with Ink (still debateable how they will actually implement ink technology), Y! will still not have close to the market share of Google and other partners. That's not counting those Y! users who may move to using G! for search.
You may also care to remember that Y! itself was "the absolute pits" with a group of very vocal webmasters here and elsewhere when they changed the way they dispayed paid directory listings a year or so back. So was OV the subject of much abuse when they raised their prices. They seem to have survived the ire of webmasters, and that may well be the case with google too.
You are comparing THE Beatles with Milli what?!?!The comparison became too vague. Like: "your lucky number is somewhere between 0 and 9.434.224.334.644.234". ;)
I think that was exactly the point he was trying to make!
TJ
This is not an argument about Google or what role they play or will play in the future.
I feel bad for those budding webmasters who started with a free host, an HTML book, a few bucks in thier pocket and a dream to become financially independent by using Google's unpaid traffic. For many of those people, the end may be near.
Re: Milli Vanilli
<sarcasm> if it weren't for those phony lip synching allegations, Rob and Fave would still have a poster on my wall!</sarcasm>
What if Sergey pulls a John Lennon and leaves muttering something like, "my work should be taken seriously and they have turned it into the worlds largest flea market..I'm going solo with my own creation, back to my roots without all this commercialism..."
Is the correct answer.
I am now at:
35% unpaid
25% PPC
40% PPI
This mix is cost effective and fairly stable at the moment.
What would you consider to be a realistic mix of methodologies for getting traffic?
It all depends on your type of site. Are you running an e-commerce site? If so, AdWords and other PPC programs may be a viable option. If not, you'll need to focus on content, since your RPM (revenue per pageview) isn't likely to be high enough to justify paying for clickthroughs.
Not everyone here is running or consulting for an e-commerce site, so what's right for you may not be right for me (or vice versa).
superstar: What do you mean "when all parameters are set"?
now if you think of google has been just an affiliate can you still sleep at night.
Too many people are relying on one source of income which at best is unstable.
Dave
