Perhaps, like a lot of bloggers, I rely heavily on search engines to bring me traffic. On my celebrity bog, for example, around 63% of my hits arrive this way and 87% of these are via Google.I've been thinking recently that this is a dangerous practice if I wish to continue making money - especially regarding the celebrity niche.
Supposing Google altered things dramatically and my standard practice for getting good positions on search pages stopped working. I'd end up only getting 37% of the traffic I now get.
The question I'm asking is: Should we start thinking slightly differently and maybe start heading more towards social networking, in it's various forms?
There's no doubt that if we can build a community centered on our blogs this should, in theory, bring regular traffic. As everything, though, it does have drawbacks.
Regular visitors, by whatever means they arrive, are less likely to click on adverts or things that you are promoting unless it is definitely to their advantage. They also spend less time on a blog - usually just reading the latest post. This means income generated could go decrease.
We actually need fresh blood coming to our blogs to make money, therefore we need a social networking program that will do this.
It's a difficult scenario but maybe we have to start concentrating on some form of building communities, that also introduce new people to our blogs.
Things are changing with Google. We've seen a lot of bloggers PageRanks being reduced with the inference being that this is because they might have been involved with either selling links or doing clearly indicated sponsored blogs.
These PR reductions are in fact a little hypocritical of Google.
Earlier this year Google purchased Double Click who also own Performics. And who are Performics? They are a search engine marketing company - that gets websites higher rankings on Google and other search engines.
Google appear to have no plans to dispose of Performics even though they write:
"While Google doesn't have relationships with any SEOs and doesn't offer recommendations, we do have a few tips that may help you distinguish between an SEO that will improve your site and one that will only improve your chances of being dropped from search engine results altogether."
They also say: "The only way to submit a site to Google directly is through our Add URL page or through the Google Sitemaps program, and you can do this yourself at no cost whatsoever."
Getting back to the point I started with. What I'm suggesting is that the status quo might change and we should, therefore, be researching various different ways to attract traffic without relying too heavily on search engines.
Food for thought.
Good luck,
Mike.
myLot. Make money commenting on and starting discussions.
