Mamas On The Web

Don’t put all your traffic eggs in one basket

May 15th, 2007

One of the first things I learned when I started working online was that you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket. Basically, you should have more than one source of income and one source of traffic. If you only rely on one, it could turn around and bite you in the ass in the long run.

Case in point: One of my blogs was receiving quite a bit of traffic and leads from forums. It wasn’t one of my favorite blogs to write for, so I didn’t do much of anything else to promote it. Now that I’m not posting as regularly in forums, I’ve noticed my traffic on that blog has dipped down next to nothing.

It’s a shame because I have spent a lot of time on that blog and I feel it would greatly benefit a lot of readers, but I didn’t heed my own advice and I just settled for one source of traffic. I still get the occasional visitor from search engines who type in very strange keywords and phrases, but it’s obviously nothing to call home about.

On the other hand, I have other sites that receive traffic from all over the place; articles, forums, search engines, newsletters, ebook and reports, etc. Lots of times my traffic will fluctuate but the important thing is that the numbers grow every month. I feel safe knowing that if one source dies out, I still have plenty of other sources to rely on.

I know plenty of people who’ve spent hours upon hours tweaking their search engine optimization and receive gobs of traffic, only to crash and burn when their site is dropped from the search engines or their rankings plummet once the algorithms change. Or how about all those people who were affected by the “Google Slap”…

If you’re posting in forums today to get traffic to your website, spend tomorrow writing articles to submit to article directories. Next week maybe you could write an email mini-course and promote that. Or create a free viral report and watch it spread throughout the internet. The important thing is to diversify. Without diversification, your traffic could be heading for an inevitable disappearance.

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Entry Filed under: General