This is a post from Eric at Narrow Bridge Finance. He is author of the Personal Finance Arsenal, an eBook designed to help people save time, money, and headaches when dealing with their finances.
Not long ago, I was hit by the recent Google Panda update. I was incredibly frustrated. I didn’t know what to do with myself or my blog. I considered a lot of reactions, some of them extreme, to cope with the situation. In the end, I decided to press forward and continue creating quality content. However, the situation did make me think about how you could plan for the unexpected impacting your blog.
Diversify Your Traffic Sources
If you are a Yakezie blogger, you have a natural flow of readers from this wonderful community. However, we all need more than that to survive. Traffic can come from many sources and it is important to spread your focus so you are not too reliant on any one source.
Search Engines – The Big G
Google was sending me about 60% of my traffic before the Panda update. I relied too heavily on search engines for my site’s livelihood. However, it is an important factor for sites that earn money through AdSense, affiliate programs, or other traffic based revenue.
To build search engine traffic, look at your blog’s analytics and see what search terms are bringing in the most traffic and where the readers are ending up. If it works well, repeat. My top posts are all (even post-Panda) fed by Google traffic. Optimize those posts to make your site sticky and build your community.
Referrals – Your Friends
Traffic that comes from another site that is not a search engine is referral traffic. Building referral traffic is more of an art than a science, but there are certainly ways to build and grow referrals.
Guest posting, commenting, and interacting with personal finance, lifestyle, and other communities will be your best use of time to build referral traffic. I have to admit, I can do more work here to keep my traffic balanced. If I had more referrals coming in, the Panda update would not have been so devastating.
Email and RSS – Your Loyal Subjects
Your subscribers are people that trust and like you and your site and want to come back again and again. That is the best kind of traffic! But, to make sure your only subscriber isn’t your mom, make sure you create quality content that people will want to read and interact with.
To build followers, write posts that solve problems, answer questions, and drive action.
Social Media – Did Someone Say Attention Deficit Disorder?
I like to call Twitter A.D.D. central. If you can’t say it to me in one sentence with 140 characters, I am not interested. However, if you can make me interested with that 140 characters, I will click on your link and read the post. I am not alone.
Facebook and Twiter users are digesting a fire-hose of information. Make your headlines and posts catchy to rope in the curious. Don’t believe that social media works? Here is a story that proves how effective it really is.
Strategy is Important
None of these alone will make you a success. None of these alone can make you rich. You need to find a balanced approach that works for you to make sure you can survive whatever the internet throws at you.
What has worked for you in the past? What has not? What are your plans for the future and how do you work to ensure you have traffic coming in from multiple sources? Please share your thoughts in the comments.
For my site, I have been focusing on subscribers, and I’m glad I have. I can definitely see the impact of visitors on the days when a new post goes live. Plus, I didn’t seem to get hit by Panda quite a hard (or at all). :)
That is a great place to focus. Subscribers are the valuable repeat visitors that help your community grow. Each active subscriber is worth at least a hundred Google visits in my opinion.
I’ve also been focusing more on newsletter subscribers. Not only is it a smaller community that you can interact with, but they are your most loyal readers and that’s something Google can’t take away.
As the blogger messiah (Darren Rowse) always points out, newsletters are hugely valuable. I am working on getting an auto-responder built to support a new project and hopefully drive eBook conversions.
I’ve honestly tried to focus less on the numbers and just writing what I enjoy. And, honestly, for me most of my highest search engine hits are from articles that I never would have predicted would get results. You simply can’t predict Google and what they’re going to do to/for you.
Those are wise words. If you focus on quality content and less on metrics, you will grow more naturally. I am one of those “repeat what works” folks. When I noticed a certain article did well, I tried to write more like that. Those were driving most of my traffic from Google and overall.
My focus for the next year is my newsletter subscribers. I’m interested in building a community so I’m working hard at rewarding long time readers. With the Tablet giveaway, long term subscribers (before the contest was announced) were automatically entered in a second, bonus giveaway.
Great idea Elle. I think you are doing a lot of the right things to build loyalty and a stronger base.
From what I’ve been reading, I must be living on the edge with 80% – 90% of my traffic coming from Google, Bing, and Yahoo!, haha. Definitely something I am working on before Panda’s little brother eats me.
I was at about 60% from Google. Other search engines were negligible. Good idea to spread the love before you experience what I did.
Google visitors don’t usually converse well. They read and run. You have a great site and a good focus. Having all the Yakezie folks around helps build that interest even more.
Being hit by the first wave of the Panda (back in April) was the best thing that ever happened to me. It has forced me to diversify my sources of traffic as you mentioned. I have focused on increasing my number of newsletter subscribers (whow are your most loyal readers) and I can see a huge impact on my blog when I send a newsletter now.
Our blogs have grown stronger over summer time and we were able to maintain a good level of traffic. With the second wave, we got all our previous ranking back! So now we have a lot more traffic than we used to!
I had increased traffic with the first waves of Panda updates, so I thought I was doing everything right. It was crazy to me that a later update would hurt my site so much. I am going to follow your example, though.
My biggest sources of traffic always were refferals and my subscribers. It is more important to me to build a community with a loayl base of followers than just rely on Google. I’d rather be relying on my content. :)
If you have great content, you would hopefully have traffic from Google convert at a high rate.
funny you write about this because i just submitted a similar post to the Yakezie. Panda has been a killer indeed. to answer you, the resources one must focus should be based on objectives, if your objective is to churn micro niche sites out then building a readership doesn’t do you any good as it is purely a kw reseach/seo game. on the other hand, an authority blog should rely less on seo traffic and instead a followership base / recurring readership
I know that I am not alone in this. You make a great point. Pat Flynn niche sites are almost 100% built on generating revenue from Google referrals. Sites like most of ours should be more focused on regular visits and loyalty.
Hi Sunil, I saw your post too. I’ll still publish if you want. I’ll just tweak it a little.
Like Aloysa, I’ve not spent much time on Google other than a minimal effort at SEO. Of course my referral traffic confirms this. I actually had a spike after Panda.
But the word “Nurse” in my blog title runs people off, and I know I’m niche. But growing slowly with newsletter subscribers is my goal.
The only real effort I make for Google is entering meta information and writing on topics that work. Most of it came naturally, and left seemingly unnaturally. You have a good niche and good content, so I am sure your email strategy will work well for you.
We are only in our second month so we are hitting from every place- subscribers, social networks, guest posts, comments, forum,….
Mike: I signed us up for Digg and Stumble Upon today
Molly: AH! No more! No more!!
How are the social media sites working for you? What portion of your traffic has come from Diggs and Stumbles?
We have been doing Diggit and Stumble Upon for one day!
Facebook has worked out great for us. We post our links and have short conversations with our readers and it feels very interactive. Twitter has not been so great. We are going to continue but we get about 2 referrers a day from Twitter.
I haven’t been paying enough attention to my stats lately. I don’t want to become obsessed with checking them, but I think I should be more familiar with G analytics and set some goals to keep my site on the right track.
Obsessing over stats causes way to much stress. I glance every day to see if anything is out of the ordinary, like a big jump (could mean a Digg or Reddit success) or drop (like Panda). Other than that, I just look to make sure the trend keeps going up.
I haven’t spend a lot of effort on SEO either. I wonder if this effect the Panda impact. Our traffic is about 40/40/20 – SE/referrals/direct. I think that is a good balance.
40% referrals and 20% direct is great. You are doing something right.
Or maybe I’m doing something wrong – not enough effort at SEO. :(
Thank you for a great informative piece. I am much in the same boat as you. Prior to the Panda update, Google was bringing in about 65% if not more than that. But, I have found that search engines are not the only good source for FREE quality visitors. I still have not had the same amount of traffic coming from Google, but my traffic has increased from other sources from which you mentioned in this article. This was a good read and would definitely help any advanced or amateur webmaster!
Glad you enjoyed it. Outside of search engines, where is most of your traffic coming from?
Although I see some differences, my overall traffic is actually increasing over the last few months. I think it is due to an additional/extra effort to improve my content, SEO and social media.
Great to hear. You are obviously doing the right things. Don’t fix what’s not broken.
Good post! I would say 80% of my traffic is referral traffic. I need to some how improve my google page rank
To increase your search engine traffic, make sure you are using a good SEO plugin for WordPress that fills in your post meta information. Also, network network network!
Lot’s to think about Eric. I liked the link to the problogger article. I agree that this is a bit of an art and a bit of a science.
It is tricky to know where to focus. Now I know, but it was a tough way to find out.
I can’t agree more that you need to diversify. You never know when the Google smackdown is going to come. It could be with traffic, it could be with AdSense…who really knows what the Big G will do!
That is a big argument to get off of blogger and onto WordPress too. Thinking about the big picture is important.
I drafted a similar post for Yakezie too. I followed a similar course too. Last panda update was good for my traffic but this one crushed it. I had close to 90% SE traffic so it was a big hit for me. This has highlighted (yet again) the need to diversify. Hopefully I can be successful at that in the coming months. But I never had success with loyal readers, so it is going to be very challenging for me.
I have had some trouble with that as well. I do better with self help posts that Google likes historically. Time to change my strategy a bit.
I think diversifying your traffic sources is a good idea, but like Suba I’ve found that the visitors that convert best for Adsense and ad income tend to be the search engine visitors. Before I got hit by Panda I was somewhere in the range of 70-80% search engine visitors, mostly from Google. Afterwords my traffic is still highly weighted to search visitors, but I’ve been trying to diversify things a bit focusing more on my newsletter, social media, ebooks and other avenues. I still think, however that those search visitors are still valuable, and worth it to focus on. It’s just going to be a bit harder to get that traffic – and we’ll all need to do a better job of getting backlinks and making sure our content is high quality.
Good point. Depending on your goal, they are incredibly valuable. All visitors are worth something. They key is having a balance so you do not rely too much on one source.
Great advice eric – I really need to diversify my traffic as I get about 70+% from the big G
Let me know if I can ever help
I haven’t told my Mom about my site yet. Ha, at least I know she isn’t the only one looking at it.
Your Mom might be your most loyal fan! You should tell her right away.
I was initially slammed and then organic search traffic slowly started to trickle back. It’s weird, it was kind of refreshing. This sounds cliche, but what ended up happening was I went from over 1000 views a day to a few hundred overnight and I was no less excited about blogging. I was making less money but it reinforced that I just… like blogging! So, it’ll come back, and I have a couple income streams, but I’m not making what I used to and it doesn’t bother me that much.
That’s an awesome attitude Darwin! I am always the last to know about any of this stuff. I enjoy blogging the same now with 7,000 visitors vs. 70 visitors a day. I haven’t seen my comments go up 100 fold. It’s all pretty steady.
I agree 100%. Awesome. It reminds us why we started doing this. Kind of humbling.
Eric is 100% right about traffic diversification. It’s just as important as income diversification. After Panda I went from about 28% search engine traffic to around 45% which scares me a little. I don’t want search engines to be my bread and butter traffic source. No smack down here, but the reverse (gaining too much search engine traffic) is just as scary.
What if you have 75% search engine traffic………………………
I wonder what everyone’s is?
Capitalize it when you have it. Every pair of eyes has potential to become a loyal reader.
My post Panda google traffic doubled. I have been blogging for three months now so I am really working on getting my content out to as many sites as possible. My biggest traffic so far was from a giveaway I recently hosted. Twitter was key in bringing in traffic.
Keep at it and it will keep growing. It sounds like you are already working on multiple sources for bringing in new readers.
These are some good tips and advice. I’m having some trouble getting regular subscribers to my blog as well. I need to read up on strategies to fix this. Currently have only 44 rss subs after almost 2 years. ouch.
If you keep up the good content and point people to subscribe, you will see it keep growing. I might move the RSS stuff toward the header more and invite people to subscribe in popular posts.
I also noticed post Panda my traffic grew. Wonder what’s the exact algorithm change. I do get 50% search traffic now and this is increasing constantly as my content is growing.
Do you think there is a level of search traffic which starts becoming worrisome?
You can never have too much traffic (other than DDOS traffic) from any source. The worry is how much would be left over if search engines went away completely.
I have not even started to optimize posts to make my site sticky. I need to start analyzing key words that bring to my site. Thanks for the advice.
Look at your best performing posts. Repeat!
I don’t know how or why it happened, but Search Engine is over 70 percent of my traffic, and the update actually helped me. However, I know what giveth can also taketh away.
I would love to diversity my traffic and I have got to do something to get more subscribers. I have been trying out Mail Chimp for a newsletter and the post that gets created from my feed has funky characters and nobody can figure it out. So I am hesitant to send out a newsletter with strange characters. I could go Aweber, but I really like Mail Chimp’s price (free). Plus it is easy to use.
I do know I better figure something out to diversify my traffic though.
The earlier updates did help me, but the new one hurt. I have options to do a signup for “newsletter only” or “newsletter + rss.” I subscribe to it myself so I know if it is working right.
I have about 80% search engine traffic, which is a bit worrying since I don’t like having too many eggs in one basket, but also good because more traffic is always a good thing. I need to work on diversifying a bit more though.
Any specific plans for what you are going to do?
My organic search dropped by about 20%, but my referral traffic increased by over 120%, so technically I’m significantly up since Panda has taken effect. However, I don’t like seeing the SE traffic go down.
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