5 Ways to Get Lots of Non Google Traffic

Jason Katzenback — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 17:13:11 +0000

A lot of “us” focus on Google for traffic… which is smart, but is there a point in which it might be causing more harm then good?

I am not by any means suggesting that you do not focus on Google. There is no doubt that they provide massive amounts of traffic… but what would happen if suddenly Google decided to remove you from their rankings?

Would your site or blog be dead?

Over the past 30 days, the following non Google sources have provided traffic to JohnCow.com:

19% –> eMail – Mailing list & RSS
15% –> Affiliate Links promoting my free ebook
13% –> Stumbleupon – Was a few times but the biggest was to my free “Planning 2009 Guide”
12% –> Twitter – All over but two spikes are CPA Arbitrage post and “Planning 2009″ post.
7% –> Digitalpoint Forum – To the post about CPA Arbitrage
4% –> Digg – “2009 Planning Guide”
3% –> Tumblr – Consistent and mostly to the index page
3% –> Wikipedia – I owe Ranked Hard for this one… this is a link to a guest post they did

That is 76% of my traffic for the month of December!

In fact, Google only provided 14% of the traffic(the other 10% was a bunch of little things like yahoo, msn and so on).

So, whats my point of showing this?

If you want more traffic to your website or blog, do NOT put all your eggs in one basket, DO think outside of Google alone and DO get people talking!

Here are 5 things for you to think about:

Are you building a mailing list (You NEED to do this for long term sustainability)?
Are you building up a solid presense in different social media outlets (I have over 1600 followers on twitter now)?
Do you create controversial content that will cause people to act (share, comment and come back for more)?
Do you give away valuable free content that will cause people to act (share, comment and come back for more)?
Do you offer an affiliate program of some sort to “encourage” people who promote you?

Ok, I know there is nothing earth shattering here… but if anything I hope it makes you think a little about how you are currently doing things and how you may be able to do things better!

The bottom line is it comes down to balance. Do not focus everything on Google… but on the other hand, do NOT ignore them either.

What are your thoughts on this?

Skribit Social Suggestions – Might be cool

Jason Katzenback — Fri, 02 May 2008 02:59:28 +0000

Was Twittering and noticed a reference from “Problogger” about this new tool he was checking out called Skribit. The concept of the tool is to help bloggers (like us) figure out what to write about based on readers (like you) requests and votes.

Like any “Social / Web 2.0″ tool, the effectiveness of this will be directly related to the involvement from its users, but personally, we really like the idea!

No matter what your business is, it is always wise to listen to your readers, customers, listeners and so on. Now for bloggers, Skribit makes it very fast and easy…. or so it seems.

So is this tool worth while?

Dont know yet, we just installed it about 45 minutes ago and need to give it a bit to see if any of you actually send in suggestions

Check it out and let us know what you want us to moo about. To use the tool, simple locate the “Skribit” box in our sidebar, directly under the sponsor banners and click in the “What should we write about?” section. Next enter the topic you would like us to write about.

If you like a suggestion already there, then vote for it.

It looks like when a suggestion is answered it disappears… need to figure that out for sure though.

Thats pretty much all there is to it that we can see right now. We will update everyone on our opinion after a few days of use.

Interested to know if any of you have any previous experience with this and any feedback about it? Also, if you have not tried it, what is your initial opinion of it?

John Cow dot Com » social

5 Ways to Get Lots of Non Google Traffic

Skribit Social Suggestions – Might be cool