google

As vast and far reaching as Google’s ad network is I’ve decided to commit more time and energy to learning the ins and outs of generating traffic beyond Google, and in large part beyond search engines in general.

Learning the ins and outs of Google’s content network and improving the results one can achieve with Adwords are still important. But my gut feeling is that advertisers and marketers who, in the coming years, learn to generate and profit from traffic outside of Google’s domain are going to be more successful than those who do not.

Just like Microsoft in its early days, Google has experienced tremendous growth over the past 10 years. However, there’s a growing discontent building, at least in the web marketing industry, with the power Google now wields and its ability to completely kill off, shut down and pretty much put out of business those marketers who it deems as not fitting its interests.

Any time a person, company or country rises to a place of dominance, detractors spring up; it’s a given. People have been crying foul for some time about Google’s business practices and its philosophy of doing no evil is admittedly suspect (I mean why not focus on “doing good” instead?). Detractors and the doubtful aside (of which I am one…I mean I use a lot of Google’s services and only recently realized that if they closed my account on a whim, it would be hugely detrimental to my business) it just makes sense to diversify your traffic sources if you have the means to do so.

So what does that look like?

For one, there are only three ways of getting traffic to a website that I know of:

1. Direct type ins, where people type in your domain name into their browsers. (Typically 10-15% of a sites traffic coming from direct type ins would not be uncommon. In special cases, where a marketer owns a domain such as fish.com or money.com, direct type ins might be the sole means of traffic. How powerful!)
2. Paid advertising: Pay-Per-Click is by and far the method of paid advertising most of us are familiar with. This includes banner advertising and the increasingly popular interactive ads we see on our favorite news sites.
3. Traffic from links: this includes links from Google. Yes, Google does link to your site remember? It links to you in its search results! We don’t tend to think of traffic from search engines like this, we tend to classify it as it’s own type of traffic: search traffic (and links from other websites are generally known as referrals). But really, traffic from search engines boils down to getting traffic from links.

To simplify things even further, I’ll go as far as saying there are only two ways to get people to a website:

You can pay for it or you can work (hard) for it. Plain and simple.

Search engines continue to play a major role in directing traffic to websites for the time being. Social media and social networks are also rapidly growing in their influence and ability to drive targeted traffic to sites. Then there’s the opportunity the mobile web presents.

For my purposes here though, my primary interest is in buying traffic.

Some things I will be looking at:

• Ad networks other than those offered by Google, Yahoo and Bing
• Link brokers
• Affiliate networks
• And others

Really I’m just getting started in my research and already I’ve been digging up all sorts of opportunities to drive traffic, leads and sales by other means than though Google.

The web is a big place. Moving ahead into 2010, keep your eyes open for new ways of bringing people to your site and generating the results you’re after. There’s a ton of opportunity out there.

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Google launched Google Social Search today as part of Google Labs.

Social search is an experiment whereby Google shows you relevant content from your social network(s) inside its search results. To sign up for this experiment, head over to Google Labs and click the “Join this experiment” button.

So what does this mean for you?

Well, for one, it’s another indication of the importance of real time search or our ability to do a search for something and come up with the latest, up to the second information on a given topic. No doubt services like Twitter and Facebook have convinced Google that more and more people want information that’s as timely as possible and this is an effort on their part to give this to people inside their search results.

The takeaway is that it’s going to become more and more important for your business to be active in social networks and in posting content to your company blog for example. The more content you produce, the more often you do it, the more likely your chances will be of showing up at the right time when someone’s looking for you.

Stay tuned for more updates on social search and real time search as this is a fascinating and relatively new area / concept that will likely have huge impacts on SEO and online marketing in general in the months to come.

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I just came across this post on the Inside Adwords blog on a new tutorial produced by the team at Google on how to increase your effectiveness and the profitability of your bidding process.

Check out the bidding tutorial here.

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Google announced this morning that they will be launching an operating system named Chrome that could potentially challenge Microsoft’s dominance of the PC operating system market.

Chrome may sound familiar to you as it’s the same name Google chose for its fast, easy to use web browser which I happen to be a big fan of.

This statement from Google’s blog hit a chord with me, no doubt because it’s based on customer feedback that Google has collected:

We hear a lot from our users and their message is clear — computers need to get better. People want to get to their email instantly, without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up. They want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought them. They want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files. Even more importantly, they don’t want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware, or have to worry about constant software updates. And any time our users have a better computing experience, Google benefits as well by having happier users who are more likely to spend time on the Internet.

Amen. All hail Chrome!

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