If You Lose Search Engine Traffic Will You Sink?

The recent anyresults.net hack to one of my blogs really made me evaluate a traffic strategy that does not include search engines, especially Google. Now honestly I NEVER want to be in that position. I get a TON of traffic from search engines but this experience has shown me exactly how crazy it would be to put all your eggs in a basket controlled by search engines like Google. Google can giveth and taketh away and what will you be left with?

After I was hacked and lost all search engine traffic I had a chance to evaluate how I was doing with traffic strategies that did not include SEs. Yes, I lost ALOT of traffic and I lost ALOT of money but I am encouraged nonetheless. Even without SE traffic I managed to bring in on average 550 people per day to that blog which is not to shabby if I do say so myself. If gave me ideas for the future too…I don’t want to sink if SE traffic were to go away tomorrow.

So what did I do to ensure a decent stream of blog traffic?

RSS Readers- Well, all the work I did to get RSS readers was helpful. With almost 1500 subsribers and 500 of those being kept on a list I can get in contact with my readers at any time. A do product reviews all the time so I still make a decent affiliate income.

Social Media – I am a big Stumbleupon user. I submit most of my posts to SU or I have someone do it for me. I also have accumulated quite a few SU friends and fans that are willing to help me stumble posts. In one day I can easily have 1 to 200 hits from Stumbleupon visitors and on REALLY good days it can be 5-600. I have a little SU symbol at the bottom of each post encouraging readers to use it.

I also submit to Digg and Kirtsy.

Another nice source of traffic is Twitter. I use Twitterfeed to automatically relay all my blog posts to Twitterville. I also post there regularly. Not only do I get Twitter visitors, I can also solicit Twitter friends for Stumbles and Diggs to help me move my way up the social media ladder. Twitter has been wonderful for traffic generation and for keeping up with trends in my niche as I follow the tweets of like minded bloggers.

Squidoo – This is old faithful here. I have only a few Squidoo lenses left after I sold several but those lenses are still bringing targeted traffic, they are a source of links, and I still make money off them every month via the Squidoo system and from independent affiliate links.

While evaluating my traffic stats I also found that Flickr was a decent source of traffic for me. I uploaded a series of pictures a few months back to use in the Flickr module on Squidoo and I put a link to my blog in the comments section. Those pictures have been bringing in consistent traffic. I am now going to be concentrating a lot more on what Flickr can do for traffic generation and so far I am really liking the results. There are MANY ways to take adavantage of Flickr that I was clueless about.

Incoming Links- This is my biggest source of traffic not dependent on search engines. I have lots of links from other web sites, blogs, forums, Flickr, Yahoo answers, etc. I put quite of bit of effort into building these links and that is not likely to stop. Here are some tips for getting incoming links:

1. Write reprint articles and submit to article directories.

2. Host contests on your web site or blog that require or encourage participants to link to you.

3. Participate in blog carnivals.

4. Create Squidoo lenses about topics related to your niche and link to various articles on your site using anchoring text and relevant keywords.

5. Comment on Yahoo Answers questions and leave links to places you discuss the “answer” on your web site or blog.

6. Write kick butt content that people will want to link to and tell their friends about.

So how would you fare if SE traffic stopped tomorrow?