A Good Month
Posted On: 2014-07-31
Ok so it's the last day of the month and that's always a good time to take a few moments out of your busy work schedule to look back over the last 30 days and see how your business has fared.
Has your traffic increased but your signups remained the same? Perhaps there should be a warning buzzer going off in your head to encourage you to see why more traffic hasn't resulted in more signups.
Has your traffic dropped? You really should spend some time looking at what has caused that drop in your traffic because you need that traffic coming in to your sites to keep the sales happening.
Are the link lists and TGPs have stopped sending you as much traffic? Are you still getting the good listings that they have given you for months but people just aren't clicking through to your sites?
Have you changed the way you write your descriptions for those traffic sources or is it something that they've done that has made a difference. It's always easy to blame others for drops in traffic so consider what you might have done to cause that drop before you blame others.
Of course your traffic might have increased along with your sales and if that's the case then, as soon as you've finished celebrating, it's important that you identify why that happened to bring about that increase in traffic and sales and perhaps throw more of your resources at whatever caused that increase.
And if things have stayed the same throughout the month then perhaps it's time to look at ways of doing more with what you already have. I know that so many people in this industry think that it's all just a numbers game and the only way to increase sales is to get more traffic but that's just crazy.
Over in mainstream big businesses understand that it's cheaper to market to the customers they already have than it is to attract new customers and that principle is the same here. Once you have someone on your site why let them go without trying to sell them something else or something more?
Why not invite them back to see more so that you can encourage them to trust you and the recommendations you make? Why put all that effort into taking just one shot at getting them to buy something when the cost of bringing them back ... or offering them more while you've got them on your site ... is so much less than going looking for another visitor?
It's not who you know anymore.
There's an old saying that success isn't based on what you know but who you know and I guess that many of us would think that if we were on very friendly first-name terms with the head of Google's web spam team then we might be a little more trusted by Google than the average webmaster.
That thought would only strengthened if we knew that our hat was so perfectly white that thousands of others looked up to us as a beacon of purity in the sordid world of search engine optimisation. And of course we are pure ... we do nothing wrong ... not even in the privacy of our own secret little world ... so why wouldn't Google trust us?
That's undoubtedly what the people behind one very public online business that spends of a lot of time talking about search engine optimisation are probably asking themselves right now because this month has not been so good for them.
This is a business that is more than happy to link to the websites of the people who write for them because they know that those links fall within Google's guidelines and Google would never say one thing and do something else now would it?
Perhaps they believed Google but now they must be wondering because one of their writers received a warning, via Webmaster Tools, that inbound links coming to his site were not in compliance with Google's guidelines and the author's site would be penalised for those links.
And where did those links come from? They came from the website of the whiter than white white-hat website that is an SEO reference site for so many. They came from the site that was totally in compliance with Google's guidelines and would never even think of doing anything wrong.
Of course the owner of the website that was being penalised complained to Google and submitted a re-inclusion request. It was denied because the web spam team at Google was still sure that those offending links were not in compliance with Google's guidelines.
So perhaps this month has taught some people that success ... at least when measured in Google rankings ... doesn't depend on what you know or who you know ... it just depends on whether the Internet gods smile on you or not.