Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I was wondering if you all would share your backup plans -- if you have them. Do you invest, just make more sites, have other non-internet based businesses?
I would probably try adwords though. Just to see if I could get some of the traffic back.
I will most likely go back to a nine to five job.
9-5 sounds like the best backup plan.
So, no Google, no traffic, no money :-)
Playing it hyper-clean: very straight SEO, only "organic links", PR5 in abt 2 years... I keep repeating myself there is no reason for me to drop in google :-)
Get some paid traffic going and negotiate links on high traffic sites in your industry. Build a mailing list too, so you can keep in touch with existing customers for that approaching rainy day.
Income from AdSense only represents about 1-2% of our income. If we got dumped for some reason, we'd certainly survive. Or probably join some other "inferior" program to recoup some of the revenue.
If we somehow got dropped from the Google index, that would certainly hurt, as we get a large part of our traffic from Google searches. But we also get traffic (and conversions) from AdWords and other PPC campaigns. We have some affiliates who send minor traffic and conversions- we can always expand that. We have thousands of inbound links from other sites and good inclusion on Yahoo and other directories, not to mention good placement on other search engines.
We've seen seasonal fluctuations (or due to other world events we can't control) in some of our other streams- such is the nature of the travel business. But we plan for the cycles, make sure we maintain adequate cash reserves, line up additional finacing options before we need them, and keep exploring additional revenue streams.
In fact, that's why we decided to try AdSense in the first place- as an additional revenue stream.
9-5 sounds like the best backup plan.
I am 47.
In Austria and Germany are extrem laws forbiding to employee persons over 50.
The politicans call it dmission protection for people over 50. The law makes it extrem difficult to dismiss people over 50.
But the truth is, the law is like lead for somebody who tries to swim. No reasonable company employees somebody over 50, because it's so difficult to fire them.
- As others have said, diverse revenue streams
- Also, as others have said, diverse websites (at least two or three) that have completly different revenue streams and rely on completly different topics, that wouldn't kill your business simply because Google penalized one of your sites.
- Again, as others have said, Run your sites "clean" - i.e. comply with Google guidelines.
Seriously, though, reinvest money back into your business to make it grow.
When we first started, we put no money into marketing/advertising. As a result, we grew very slowly. Once we got to the point where we had a little extra money, we used it for marketing/advertising. Our growth rate increased. So we increased our marketing budget a little more- growth increased even more. (Do you see a pattern here?)
Since we started AdSense, we have taken some of the AdSense revenue and increased our AdWords budget that amount.
But don't just blindly throw money into advertising/marketing- constantly test and tweak and re-examine your ROI to find what works best. Then continue to test and tweak for improvements.
