Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Update On Web 2.0 Traffic

The internet world is full of surprises. If you are seriously into internet business there is no time to relax and wait for the money to come rolling into our coffer. All those are sale gimmick for the new guy who just wet their feet into this competitive business. Today when I open my mail I receive another interesting letter from Dr. Mike. I enclose his mail here for your consumption.

Dear Friend,

On Monday, your website is on page 1 for a high traffic search term. On Wednesday, you can't even find it on the first 30 pages.

On Tuesday, you're paying 10 cents a click for keywords and traffic is coming in hot and heavy. On Thursday, you get a little note from the search engines asking you to up your bid to $5 per click or they won't continue to show your ad.

Are they kidding? What the hell is going on?

The Search Engines Have You By The Balls And They Know It!

Traffic is getting harder and harder to come by nowadays. And the reasons are clear as day...

Reason #1: The search engines are getting greedier. Search terms that used to cost you 10 to 25 cents are now pushing a dollar and up. Yeah, I know there's more competition in the game now, but your talking about price increases of 1000% to 2000% and up. Gimme a break.

And as more and more people flood into the marketplace, the prices will continue to go up. The days of cheap search engine traffic are slowly, but surely, coming to an end.

Reason #2: Natural traffic does not last. Do you think that if you do everything right, create a content-rich, white hat website, the search engines will continually reward you with free traffic?

The answer is no.

Here's why: It makes no sense for them to keep the same websites on the top of the list. It's bad business. If you have all of the natural traffic you want, you have no need or desire to buy it from them.

But let's say you rank high for a lot of keywords. You get used to a certain amount of traffic coming your way. Life is good. Business is good. But then Google, Yahoo, or MSN (pick one) decides to shuffle the deck a little bit and pull the traffic rug right from under your feet.

Now your visitors are gone.

What do you do to get that traffic flowing again? You have to pay the piper. Time to start advertising in their pay per click program. They have you cornered. You either pay or watch your business shrivel up.

What Can You Do To Fight This Traffic Epidemic

Am I telling you to stop using pay-per-click search engines, stop worrying about natural search engine placement, stop all other advertising? No! Of course not. That would be foolish. It's all about ROI. If those things are making you money, you'd be crazy to stop doing them.

But I am telling you to stop relying on one source of traffic.

If you're getting free visitors from the search engines now and they change their rankings (like they always do), where is that going to leave you? I know companies that thought the free traffic gravy train would last forever and when the search engines did an update and dropped their rankings, the companies folded like a wet napkin because they had no plan B.

It's happening on the paid side too.

A few weeks ago, thousands of people logged into their Google Adwords account and did a double take as they discovered bid prices went through the roof. Keywords they could get for less than a quarter per click, now cost $10 per click. Many people thought the bid increase only happened to people who built 'made for adsense' sites or one page sales letter sites with 'squeeze pages'.

But they were wrong.

The now infamous 'Google Slap' took no prisoners. White hat sites full of content got hit with huge bid increases. Catalog sites got slaughtered. Many of the affiliate review sites also got assassinated. People who were spending $300,000 a month at Google, dropped down to only a couple of thousands per month in ad spend after the Google Slap.

It was brutal!

And if you were lucky enough not to get hit by the slap, congratulations. But don't get too comfortable. Another update is on the way and who knows what they'll come up with next.

The lesson in all of this is you must diversify your traffic. Even though the search engines are still a powerful way to drive visitors to your site, there are other ways to get your message out in front of millions of other potential customers without relying on the search engines at all. Not only that, you can get your message out to those people for free and very, very fast. You can literally have people flowing to your websites in less than an hour. How?

Welcome to Web 2.0 traffic.

How The Amazing Power Of Web 2.0 Can Get You An Unlimited Amount Of Visitors For Free

Did you know that MySpace gets TWICE the amount of traffic as Google and, if you know how, you can advertise there for free?

Yes, you read that right. MySpace doesn't get a little bit more traffic than Google, it gets twice as much traffic as Google. And if you think there are nothing but teens at MySpace, you'd be dead wrong. Over half of the members are 35 years and older. They have money. They are looking to buy. It's simply a great place to advertise for free and pick up customers and leads.

And it's not just MySpace. It's all of the Web 2.0 sites. You have social networking sites. Social bookmarking sites. Authority sites. I'm sure you've heard some of their names before...

Digg
Technorati
Squidoo
Wikipedia
Craigslist
Del.icio.us
Furl.net

Web 2.0 companies are still relatively new, but they've begun to overtake a huge majority of traffic online. It's something you can no longer ignore.

When you begin to realize how much traffic all of these new Web 2.0 websites receive, the numbers will scare you. These sites receive millions, upon millions of visitors every single day. These are the same people who look for stuff at the search engines. The same people who opt-in to newsletters. The same people who buy products. The same people who click on Adsense ads.

In other words, these are your potential customers.

About 18 months ago, my business partner Howie began experimenting with driving traffic through some of these Web 2.0 websites. What began as a little experiment soon took on a life of it's own and now a good majority of the traffic he receives are from these powerful Web 2.0 sites. It has become a huge part of my business too. I'm amazed at the amount of traffic and sales it's bringing me at no cost.

As we began talking to more and more of our internet marketing friends, we discovered that they had secretly been using these Web 2.0 websites to drive massive amounts of free visitors to their webpages too and they were doing it in unique and different ways that we had never even thought about.

Well that how the letter end. It is interesting to note that there are big players out there spending $30,000 per month on Google Adword. Imagine how much is the volume of their business each year.

1 comment:

keith said...
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