When you start a blog, you tailor your content to meet SEO guidelines and bring in quality traffic through search engines. The logic is simple. Search engines are used by people to find the information they are looking for. By ranking high on search results, you can get more people yo your blog and read more content.
In time, as the traffic increases, you can link ad platforms like AdSense and deploy affiliate links on websites to earn money from incoming traffic. Eventually, with good enough traffic, you can make a sustainable living by a single website. If you’re committed to growing in the field, you can create many more such websites and establish multiple streams of income.
Sounds great?
This is the dream, right?
When you start blogging, this is the dream.
The only sad part is that it can all come grinding to a halt in a blink of an eye.
How?
Over-Dependence on Search Traffic
When you start a website, you need organic traffic from search engines. This is because people are not aware of your blog. Google is the only place where they can find your content.
After some time when your traffic grows, a large portion of your traffic comes from organic search results.
What if a big brand in the niche sees the traffic you’re getting and decides to outdo your blog content? The brand can hire an entire team of digital marketers and content writers to bulldoze websites like yours.
How will you get your traffic then?
This is the innate problem with an overdependence on search traffic. Anytime a competitor beats you to the top position or a jolting search engine update comes along, you come in danger of losing a chunk of your traffic (and by extension, a chunk of your income).
How To Find Other Sources of Traffic?
It is futile to look for a source of traffic as big as Google. As a blogger, you will have to constantly keep improving your content to make sure you retain high search rankings.
However, you can grow traffic from other sources in order to create a safe cushion in case organic search traffic falls.
Some ways of increasing traffic from other sources include-
- Invest time in email marketing – Email marketing really can save you big time. Email newsletters are a great source or getting loyal visitors to your website. As a practice, it is incredibly cheap and much less time consuming compared to other types of marketing. Email marketing also helps in building a loyal base of visitors, people who will visit your website irrespective of it falling in search ranking.
- Branding to Grow Direct Traffic – To stop depending on organic traffic, you have to create a brand around your website or yourself. For this, you will have to deploy a multi-channel marketing push, starting from social media to blogs and email marketing. You will have to make sure people remember your name or website when thinking of a niche.
In Conclusion
In conclusion, this article reasons why depending on organic traffic is not a wise choice.
About the Author – Gaurav Kumar Jha is a content marketing strategist and an SEO expert with a lot of experience in the field. He often writes guest posts for Eduburg India, known as affordable & top digital marketing institute in Delhi.
