How to Stop Google Killing Your Business

Before I jump right into this week’s online business tip about Google I have two words for you …

GLOBAL WARMING!

Seriously what else could be responsible for the absolute freakish weather last Sunday on the South Coast of England?

Thick snow on an April morning (the like of which I have NEVER seen in 10 years of living down here) that was almost completely gone by lunch time due to the excessive sun and heat that followed!

Strange stuff indeed, but possibly not as strange as one amazing “letter to the editor” in my local paper (The Portsmouth News) about global warming.

This obviously well-read respondent wrote in to say that he didn’t recycle as he felt that global warming was pretty much made up and asked the editor the following highly sophisticated question:

“how can me sorting my old tins and newspapers out possibly stop a polar bear from drowning?”

Well with people like that on the earth … quite frankly I’m scared!

Anyway global politics over … on to Google.

As you may well be aware Google has just begun to enforce its latest changes to Adwords Policy namely that:

“Display URLs for new ads will be required to match their Destination/landing page URLs, without exception.”

If this may affect you I would check out the full details at https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=91451&hl=en_GB

and if not then I wouldn’t worry about it!

But my point is not this individual issue but the tendency that Google has to be always updating its rules and the impact that this can have on your business.

Now at the start of April I am about 95% sure that some of my competitors in a particular niche that I work in were breaking these rules; as the number of competing ads in my niche almost halved on Google over night.

This meant some great returns for me in the short term but now these ads are coming back so it’s more like business as usual.

But Google can do this and disable your business for a few days or maybe for good if it brings in new changes that your site does not comply with.

And the tough thing is Google always make it so darned hard to ever know what it wants anyway!

So if all your eggs are in the Google Adwords basket you could be in trouble.

To ensure that Google doesn’t come along and wipe all your income in the flick of a keyboard you need to diversify and not be reliant on just 1 traffic stream.

Since suffering the first “Google Slap” one of my main goals has to been to widen my traffic sources much more and I am doing this every week.

I have used other ppc search engines (Yahoo and MSN), blogging and articles in the main.

And I am now experimenting more with social networking sites and forum marketing.

Because the more different streams of traffic you have the safer you are, and the more profitable you’ll be.

I recently invested in a great e-book entitled Free Traffic Voodoo by one of my favourite “underground marketers” from Greece called George Katsoudas.

George teaches you how to get loads of free traffic with some very crafty techniques.

I’ve written a brief review of this e-book which you can read at http://johnhillage.com/product-reviews/free-traffic-voodoo-by-george-katsoudas/

Check out if you’re interested and remember that whatever you do; it’s essential for you to start working on new traffic sources today.

Happy Marketing …

John Hillage