A lot of internet marketers who’ve had a Google slap due to a policy change find themselves in a precarious position. It’s not easy when you’re comfortably earning from a site and suddenly your Website Profitability plummets.
If you’ve recently been hit with your product review site and can no longer do Adwords campaigns for it, you know just how rough it can be. If you’ve lost your page ranking and aren’t getting as much organic traffic, you can also relate. If you can’t relate due to lack of experience, learn now before you do suffer a big setback.
What do you do with a site that’s optimised for a particular affiliate marketing program that suddenly no longer works? There are a few options for you:
Find Other Advertisers
While your Website Profitability might not totally recover with a smaller search engine, you can save your highly optimised site with a PPC campaign with another search engine. And, on the plus side the clicks will more than likely be cheaper.
More Organic Optimisation
Now that pay per click from Google Adwords isn’t an option for you, more organic SEO might be in order. It takes more time and effort but can convert higher numbers of visitors and increases your profit margin. Focus on long tail keywords, content creation, and link building. Also, do plenty of split testing and deep linking on your site as well as ensuring you optimise areas such as meta tags and image alt tags, too.
More Social Marketing
Doing networking on social sites can drive traffic to your website as well. Become known as a subject matter expert and your target market will visit your site. Promotions and contests can also help you drive more traffic in.
More Email Marketing
When you have Google sending you less traffic, a nice list of potential buyers can be well-utilised.
Flip The Website
You might decide to flip your website and sell it. Sites filled with plenty of optimised content can fetch decent money.
Prepare In Advance
Has this not happened to you? Diversify now. Don’t put all your eggs into one basket. While your Website Profitability can be great one day, it could seem to fall off the face of the internet the next day. Try to be one step ahead of search engines by staying knowledgeable and have more than one way to make money online.
About Sean Rasmussen
I can see that social media will probably work pretty well for me. There are so many options
This is exactly why a balanced mix of all IM strategies are so important. Sure, you might be on front page google one day, but if the algorithms change (and they do without notice), you’d be pretty screwed if that was your only source of leads.
I have a friend who’s a small business owner and she gets almost all her work from front page google – which she relies totally on some web developer to handle. She’s even locked into some arrangement where they own the URL! She’s so dependent on this one strategy, that she feels she can’t survive with these people… Now, that’s not a situation you’d want to be in.
Hi Sean,
I guess it makes sense to have many diverse strategies to keep your website profitable. We do this in the real world when we’re trying to make money. So, it’s just a matter of treating our online business the same way.
I definitely haven’t given this enough attention. I really need to see what I can do to try to protect my business from sudden changes. I saw this recently when Google shut down some music sites very quickly. There was no notice for the site owners. If that was your only source of income, your stress levels would have gone through the roof.
Hi Sean,
I’m glad to be aware this happens before it has happened and not after. I’ve heard that Google slaps but not know the reason for this.
The article here highlights that it’s not wise to rely on one source of income from the Internet. Google can call the shots because they are the biggest search engine however they are not the only one and it’s still possible to earn an online income even without Google.
Like most things Jill, it’s never a great idea to have all your eggs in one basket