Organic vs Paid Traffic

I tend to want everything when it comes to my online efforts. My first affiliate site was all about getting top rankings in Google for my list of keywords. I diligently checked off all the required steps (the ones touted at the the time).

In no particular order this included:

• On-page SEO optimization
• Lots of article marketing
• Reciprocal link exchanges
• Continuously adding my own content
• Rinsing and repeating

It took about 5 months from the launch to making my first commission. From there things took off rather nicely. Both Adsense and affiliate commissions came in regularly. I assumed that I had a winning formula for finding profitable niches and building sites that would eventually achieve high rankings in the search engines.

I then built out another site using the same methods, but this one was much slower to take off. In fact, more than 2 years later it still doesn’t rank very highly in the SE’s.

This turned out to be an early lesson in the numbers game that IM is. I can probably look back and do a post mortem and identify why this second site didn’t do nearly as well as my first, and I have some general ideas, but overall it’s really not worth the time.

The reality is that getting organic traffic is a time-consuming affair and the payoff may never come.

I’ve built other sites and then migrated to WordPress blogs. I’ve managed to get top-10 rankings for some longtail keywords that get very little search volume. That’s not hard to pull off obviously, but the resulting traffic amounts to very little revenue if any.

An aspect of organic traffic generation is social media and social bookmarking.

This wasn’t on my radar 3 years ago when I built my first site for organic traffic. I must confess that I have yet to build my first Squidoo lens or even sign up for a Hub Pages account.

Though I’m not all that ashamed about it.

The time and effort to sign up for all these accounts and then go around the horn adding bookmarks and posting content doesn’t appeal to me at all. And when I see the massive scale that a lot of people undertake, which in some cases turns into spamming, I get even more turned off about the whole thing.

Sure, there’s always outsourcing for this stuff and it’s something I’ll probably test out on a trial basis just so long as it doesn’t turn into spamming of the social bookmarking sites, but I do need to experience for myself the effects of these methods.

Just like everything begins and ends with traffic, organic or paid, things also divide across leveraging either time or money.

At the moment, I see my time being worth more than my money. As usual, I’m spread way too thin across way too many projects and at the end of the day I still need traffic and I need to get it quickly. That’s way I put the emphasis on paid search for this.

The downside of paid search (PPC), is the amount of wastage that’s always involved when testing new campaigns.

Though my success rate for test campaigns is much higher than when I first started out, I still burn up some serious cash each month. I’m only able to keep a roof over my head because at the end of each month I still show a profit. Most of which is from campaigns set up months ago that were nurtured into profit centers.

I would love to have the best of both worlds and have sites/blogs that were profitable from both paid and organic traffic sources. This hasn’t happened for me yet, so that’s why I continue to reinvest my profits back into paid search.

I do very little direct-linking with PPC and instead choose to build “mini-blogs” for my landing pages. My hope from doing it this way is to get the benefit of an improved Quality Score from Google Adwords and at the same time have a site that is SEO-optimized so over time, it may start ranking for at least a few longtail keywords.

Right now I’m working out a system to quickly put these blogs together. As this system takes shape, I’d like to share it here and hopefully get some thoughts about it. I’d also love to get set straight about the benefits of social media and bookmarking.

Should I dust off my Canon Elura 100 and put some videos up on YouTube?