One
of the 'Golden Rules' of Internet marketing....
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Copyright
© Richard Grady
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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