Every business, big or small, needs a healthy and regular revenue stream to maintain quality and continually improve what they do. Running a content website is no different. If you believe you can achieve your financial goals whilst giving your content away for free, then do it, but as Warren Buffet famously said “only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” As the recession bites, there will be a lot of website owners exposed to the harsh truth.
The good news is a lot of the rubbish on the web will disappear and the quality content will become more visible. The key to success is generating multiple revenue streams.
Every content website should provide free content. This will drive traffic, help build credibility and, of course, generate some advertising income.
Affiliate marketing will become more important in bad times as merchants try to get more bang for their marketing bucks. Online publishers need to hook into this lucrative market.
eBooks, research and other downloadable products should be sold.
Events, webinars and courses should be created and promoted via the site.
Every website owner should strive to find a way of getting monthly subscription income to give their site financial stability.
Ultimately, free content is good, but you need paid content to survive.
The recession will lead to thousands or maybe millions of free content websites closing down.
I think this is a good thing.
As Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, recently said the internet is a cesspool of false information. A major clearout will give oxygen to quality content and allow it to float to the surface.
If you are already an online publisher producing quality content for a niche target audience, keep going, your time has come.
If you are considering setting up a niche online publication, I would say there has never been a better time to get started, since the internet began …. provided that:
You focus on creating fantastic content
You know your audience
You plan on making multiple revenue stream(including, if possible, subscription revenues)
You understand that it will take hard work and persistence
During Tuesday’s major search event in San Francisco Google announced a new search feature called Google Instant which will significantly change the way users search for information on Google Search.
Google Instant - Live updating search result page
This new interface updates as a user types in the search query. Not only will the regular search results update as a user types in letters in the search field, but elements from Universal Search (maps, news, shopping, etc) as well as AdWords ads will also update in real time. This results in a user seeing a much larger set of search results as the query is being typed in and refined. In addition, the query suggestions (Google Suggest) play a more central role in discovering possible queries and relevant websites.
Why Google Instant is cool?
Dynamic ResultsGoogle dynamically displays relevant search results as you type so you can quickly interact and click through to the web content you need.
PredictionsOne of the key technologies in Google Instant is that we predict the rest of your query (in light gray text) before you finish typing. See what you need? Stop typing, look down and find what you’re looking for.
Scroll to searchScroll through predictions and see results instantly for each as you arrow down.
To the Webmaster, Google Instant is cool because as users are shown a much larger set of search results, there is a higher chance of your pages being displayed in the SERPs.In addition, users can now more easily modify their search which results in more specific query that will drive more relevant traffic to your website (See my post on The Importance of Longtail Keywords).And relevant traffic means conversion!
Impact of Google Instant Search on SEO
In general this new feature won’t change the basic rules of SEO since Google’s algorithms will continue evaluating webpages in the same way as before. Webmasters should hence continue focusing on their content, traffic, and conversions.
What will change, however, is the way users will go about finding information, how they interact with search results as they learn to use more specific search queries, and how they review the results before making a choice.
CTRis the new ranking. The click-through rate for organic listings becomes more important than pure rankings since users will see many more search results in each session.
Creating relevant content which better targets specific queries will drive more traffic as users learn to perform better searches.
Experimenting with page titles and snippets and tracking the changes in CTR becomes even more important.
Universal Search listings (images, video thumbnails, maps, shopping, etc) will attract more clicks since dense graphic elements will draw more attention in a fast updating interface.
The traditional Golden Triangle theory regarding the users’ eye movements on search result pages is no longer true. Earlier you performed a search, sat back and studied the results and the ads before either clicking on a listing, or modifying your query. This will now be substantially different as the users’ eyes will wander up and down between the query field, listings, Universal Search entries, and AdWords ads. I’m looking forward to the first eye tracking study for the new search page.
Searches with short queries will fall considerably since people usually come to Google with a very specific goal in mind. The now interactive search result page allows users to dig deeper into a subject until they’ve found a reasonable set of search results which better fits their intent.
For those proclaiming the death of SEO, I would actually argue the opposite.
This is definitely a game changer but it does not change the way serious SEOs have worked for a long period of time. That includes focusing on important Key Performance Indicator’s other than rankings. Instant Search is however a massive headache for those who still treat SEO as a magic formula and have been focusing on optimizing for mere nuances in Google’s search algorithm. They will continue wasting their time focusing on the petty details in the algorithms instead of working on improving the overall value of the sites they are promoting.
All in all, no matter what some people wrongly proclaim, SEO is certainly not dead - it just got more interesting.
How will you change your SEO strategy given Google Instant?
