Defensible Traffic & Reliable Income Streams

It wasn't me being overly cautious then. A while back I had a meeting with my boss about search marketing and tried to convince him that it's no silver bullett and that it's supposed to augment our offline marketing not replace it.

Along with this, something I'm sure I picked up from your book where it was mentioned that you never know when google or whoever will pull the rug from under your feet with an algo' change or something just as nasty. It totaly reinforces the need to have a balanced approach to your marketing online or offline.

Dude, where's my meme!?!

Hagans is like my Newman from Seinfeld.

D-i-v-e-r-s-i-t-y!

In particulary if you rely on third parties, you need to make sure that you haven't put all your eggs in one basket.

It all may seem to easy making bucket loads of money online through contextual advertising combined with superior SEO and high quality traffic, but what if those wheels fall off one day.. then what?

I can't really talk as I am bad for it.

This year in my case in particular I can finally diversify my earnings as I have freed up 8 hrs of my day by taking the leap of faith and quiting my full time SEO job, so depending on what business venture your working on.. I think a good mixture of advertisers paying monthly (if you work for yourself) along with Adsense etc, has always been the way to go!

I think far too many independent search marketers and affiliate/content publishers have too narrow conceptions about revenue protection and diversity. As you have the availability, move some of your online investments offline into stocks, real estate, etc. Offline income is diversification.

That's if you don't blow it all at once. ;)

Once you obtain rankings, and traffic then diversify your approach to internet marketing and leverage the power of your brand and website traffic to negotiate strategic partnerships with other websites.

You can go a lot father then just link trades, but I'll save those examples for a later blog post of my own.
This step requires out of the box thinking and where most internet marketers fail.

As always, good posts Aaron, you're extremely prolific!

Google has commented many times that no one should rely on Google traffic or rankings as their source for income.

I see todays market driving more traffic from other sources besides Google.

Of course, many companies still rely solely on Google as their sole source of traffic, others are smarter and go into offline advertising and strategic internet advertising to drive in targeted traffic.