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One_of_the_Golden_Rules_of_Internet_marketing
| One of the Golden Rules of Internet marketing....
Copyright 2005 Richard Grady
In my opinion, one of the 'Golden Rules' of Internet marketing
has to be the following:
'Once you have uploaded a website, you should leave it online
forever - even if it is only making you a couple of dollars a
month.'
As long as you are covering the hosting and domain registration
fees each year (maximum of a couple of dollars a month), then
why take the site offline? Admittedly if the site is causing you
hours of work every week and still only making you a couple of
dollars income each month, then yes, remove it. But if the site
involves you in no work (for example if it sells an eBook or you
generate Adsense income etc from it, then why remove it?)
The point is that whilst the site in question may only be
generating a small amount today, you never know what might
happen tomorrow
..
This principle has been illustrated to me in a pretty big way
during the past week and this is the sole reason that it is
fresh in my mind and I want to share the experience with you so
that you don't make the mistake that I very nearly made.
I have a site which I built about three years ago. It was a bit
of an experiment and not connected to my main income-earning
sites in any way. The site covered a topic that was pretty
competitive online - an industry for which top search engine
rankings were exceptionally hard to get. As I say, it was an
experiment and I didn't really expect the site to make me much
money - which was a good thing as it meant that I wasn't too
disappointed when it didn't! :-)
After a few months of receiving no traffic, the site was
eventually picked up by a couple of the major search engines and
it started to receive a handful of visitors each day. I guess on
a very good day I would get 45 referrals. Needless to say, the
site wasn't making a fortune in income but something is always
better than nothing.
Anyway at the beginning of this year I undertook a review of all
of my websites and made the decision to ditch a few of the
under-performing sites. This is where I nearly made a big
mistake by deleting my little site but for whatever reason, the
site in question managed to survive my 'cull'. It was a close
call but in the end I decided that even though the site was only
making $20 or $30 a month, it wasn't involving me in any work so
it would be stupid to turn it off just for the sake of it.
So the site remained online and up until last week, it continued
to tick over as it has done for the past three years, earning a
minimal income every month from the few visitors that manage to
find it.
That all changed last Thursday however when Google suddenly
decided that my little experiment site was far more valuable
than it had previously thought. Yup, Google decided that instead
of listing my site way down the rankings for one or two
low-level keywords, it would index the site at the top of the
rankings (quite literally in first place in many instances) for
numerous high-level keywords! :-)
Result? The site has gone from receiving an average of 35
visitors a day from Google to receiving over 500 visitors per
day. On the busiest day this week, Google kindly sent the site
just under 800 visitors.
Of course, this is great news and the site is already making
considerably more profit than it has ever done but just look at
how I would have missed out if I had taken the site offline.
Remember, this is a site that I have barely touched in three
years and I certainly haven't spent any time optimizing the site
for the search engines. It is just a simple case of Google
changing their algorithm in a way that favours my site
considerably. This is one of those situations which could happen
to any website at any time and this is the main reason why I
say, once you have a site online, leave it there.
Clearly there is no guarantee that my site is going to stay at
the top of Google for any length of time and given my experience
of how search engines work, I am prepared for it to drop back
down the index at any time but I am certainly enjoying the extra
traffic while it lasts.
The above situation also illustrates how fickle search engines
can be. Longer term readers will remember that I took the
decision not to bother chasing search engine rankings some time
ago. This decision was taken after Google decided to move one of
my highly optimized sites from top position for countless
keywords to about 20th position. This was a site which I had
spent weeks optimizing and a site which had held top positions
for over two years. Traffic to this site dropped away in hours
and that was the point at which I vowed not to waste my time
chasing search engine rankings and instead, would just let the
search engines sort themselves out and rank my sites as they saw
fit.
Sometimes this approach works and sometimes it doesn't - I try
not to let it worry me either way.....
About the author:
Richard Grady has been helping ordinary people earn online since
1998. He writes a free newsletter which is published every two
weeks. To subscribe (and claim your free gifts), visit:
http://www.thetraderonline.com/newsletter.html
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