I spent a good period of time this week talking about traffic. Not only did one of my sites take a traffic hit from Google Penguin, but a few of our Mastermind Group members got hit and one lost almost all his traffic.I’d like to contrast that with a new client we started working with this week. He’s only been online for 5 months now and is making more than $12,000/month. And almost none of his traffic is from Google.
Yep, it seems a bit crazy but it’s 100% true. And everything he’s doing is a little bit by accident. I don’t want to diminish what they’ve done because they’ve gone on instinct and their natural smarts. But as far as “scientific” approaches to list building and online income creation – nada.
So he got his start in forums. He started talking about what he knows best in forums where that subject was being discussed and the people in those forums liked what he had to say so much, they started coming to his site and populating his forum.
And then they followed him to Facebook and started interacting with him there as well.
AND he did this in more than one forum.
So his traffic is a really good mix of forums, other sites that his forum members are on, Facebook, and people Googling his name (which is somewhat unique). But to this point, he is completely insulated from Google algorithm changes.
So I would urge you to take a look at your traffic. If it’s all coming from one source, then you need to make diversification a top priority for the next six months.
That means work. SEO might seem like work to some people but I don’t think it’s nearly as hard as driving traffic other ways.
So get out there and start spreading the word about your niche. That’s Slideshare, Youtube, Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, niche forums, guest blog posts, blog commenting, LinkedIn groups, Flickr groups. . . and that’s just the start.
And vice-versa if you don’t have much Google traffic at all, then you’re missing some folks. The great thing about SEO is you end up standing in front of people who are looking for you at that exact moment. That’s pretty powerful.
If you don’t know how to do that, I’d be happy to help you put together a keyword theme map. We do them all the time for our clients. Just let me know. Otherwise, get out there and diversify!
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